Poison in UK politics has reduced the discourse to a toilet wall’s filthy scrawl

ALABOUR MP was too terrified to attend her own party’s conference. Her crime? She had dared to agree with Jeremy Clarkson (and reality itself) that only women have a cervix, and has since at every turn been menaced, threatened; abused with words one cannot repeat in a family paper.

Tories last weekend arrived at conference to be greeted by screaming pickets, marauding mobs and a crude banner on a bridge: REMEMBER – WE ONLY HAVE TO BE LUCKY ONCE.

A direct lift from the IRA press release hours after their attempt, in October 1984, to kill the Prime Minister and, indeed, most of her Cabinet. Five people died.

The casualties included a gentle Scotswoman, Muriel Maclean, in whose hotel suite the bomb was planted. Her husband, Sir Donald, president of the Scottish Conservatives, a West Highland steamers enthusiast, somehow survived, but she was decapitated.

Five people were arrested after Iain Duncan Smith, on Monday, was allegedly assaulted with a traffic cone.

Years back, Neil Kinnock ‘bantered’ that portly Tory Eric Pickles should be encouraged to run the London Marathon, as he might die.

People in 2013 made the foulest jokes – indeed, in some quarters, there were even parties – when Baroness Thatcher passed away.

And, of course, two weekends ago we had Angela Rayner’s extraordinary tirade at Labour conference, her voice shrill and near-demented as – to rapturous applause – she damned the Conservatives as ‘a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile… banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian… piece of scum’.

Diatribe

And, by implication, anyone who voted for them. The Tories now need do little more to win the next election than tour the Red Wall with loudspeaker vans, replaying Rayner’s diatribe on loop.

The irrationality of her rant should be evident to anyone in the whole of their wits.

Whatever you might think of the reform, a homophobic government would never have legislated for same-sex marriage – nor would the Tories today boast more openly ‘out’ gay MPs than the Labour Party.

Racists would scarcely applaud a Chancellor of the Exchequer, a Home Secretary and a Secretary of State for Health of Indian and Pakistani heritage.

Nor would misogynists exult that two of the four great offices of state are now in the hands of women.

Oh, and – so far – the Tories have twice been led by a woman. None has ever come close to commanding the Labour Party.

Rayner’s screech is without reason, without logic, without merit. This is not discourse; this is the scrawl of the toilet wall.

Her leader’s withering rebuke? ‘It’s not language I would have used,’ said Sir Keir Starmer. ‘I talked to Angela, yes. I’m not going to disclose to you our private conversation.’ That’ll learn her, eh?

Such rhetoric – such violence – is, of course, not new in British politics. Elections in Victorian times often saw widespread bloodshed.

People have been throwing stuff at politicians for as long as anyone can remember. Heath was red-inked, Heseltine slathered in paint, and Peter Mandelson doused in custard.

With the odd milkshake, Nigel Farage got off lightly.

During the 1992 general election campaign, John Major stopped several eggs and a lady tried to beat Margaret Thatcher to death with a bunch of daffodils. Weeks after VE Day, Churchill – no less – was fortunate to escape injury when a daft lad threw a live firework at his face.

But it all seems much less funny when you recall that, in the past half-century, four Members of Parliament have been murdered – three of them at the hands of the IRA and the still more psychotic INLA; two of them, Airey Neave and Ian Gow, close friends of Mrs Thatcher.

Anthony Berry died at Brighton and Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen, was slain by a far-Right fanatic before the EU referendum.

And it could have been six, had not Labour’s Stephen Timms survived his 2010 stabbing by an Islamist, or Liberal Democrat Nigel Jones a samurai sword attack a decade earlier. (His aide, Andrew Pennington, did not.)

Politics will never be for the faint-hearted and the rites of a general election night are daunting in themselves: being an MP is surely the only job where you can be sacked, live on television, with at least half the people in the room cheering.

But email, social media, assorted echo-chamber groups of nutters and the sustained, high-doh hysteria of the public square since we voted for Brexit have made it an increasingly scary line of work.

And let us be candid here: this is now a problem almost exclusively of the Left. Zoe Williams, the sort of Guardian commentator who can be relied upon to be wrong about any given subject, berated the Tories shortly after Angela Rayner’s eruption for cynically deploying ‘the language of vague hurt and victimhood’.

Vilified

Starmer, as we have noted, could not bring himself to condemn it; John McDonnell purred: ‘She might have gone over the top with the language and all the rest of it, but she was expressing real emotion… she is showing deep-down humanity.’

And, in like manner, many others – who of late have been calling for greater civility in public life and, a couple of years back, vilified Boris Johnson for a newspaper column in which he did not actually demand the banning of the burka.

We can only imagine the reaction of Rayner, Williams, McDonnell and the rest if they in turn were traduced, reviled and spat upon. It is unlikely in the extreme they would excuse it as but a display of deep-down humanity.

There is, of course, a fundamental asymmetry. Tories – and, one might playfully add, Unionists – merely think their opponents a bit wrongheaded. Naïve, lacking in realism, unacquainted with the hard lessons of post-war economic mismanagements.

The Left, though – and, one might playfully add, Nationalists – think their opponents are existentially evil. And so try to ignore any evidence of irrationality and hate on their own side. Or, if pushed, say that people are really angry about what the Government is doing – for instance, the ‘cuts’ to Universal Credit.

As one commentator last week pointed out, you have only to turn this on its head to see its absurdity.

Can you seriously imagine a mob of foam-flecked Tory screamers outside a Labour conference who, on being challenged, would say, ‘Well, they keep arguing for increased levels of borrowing’?

Nor do Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch and the rest go about looking for sympathy, nor do they throw a whole oh-how-I-pity-me Meghan Markle when someone says anything the least bit mean about them.

And, of course, we still have all those Remainiacs, half a decade on still refusing to accept the unambiguous result of the EU referendum, endorsed once and twice in subsequent general elections.

And who never miss an opportunity to do down their own country – now, you would think, such a benighted realm of rubble that one marvels why some 18,000 people, this year alone, have bobbed illegally across the Channel to put themselves into our misery.

If the lights do go out, there will be one delicious consolation. Amidst silent smartphones and the dead computers, all the unlovely hate-spewing Lefties will be reduced to semaphore.