Labour MP Jared O’mara quits equalities committee in shame over sexist remarks

A LABOUR MP who posted a series of sexist, homophobic and derogatory comments on the internet has resigned from the Commons women and equalities select committee.

Jared O’mara said he was “deeply ashamed” of the posts which included a suggestion that it would be “quite funny” if the pop star Jamie Cullum died after being sodomised.

He also said he would like an orgy with members of the pop group Girls Aloud and posted another message in which he claimed a winner on TV’S Pop Idol “only won because she was fat”. The MP for Sheffield Hallam, who was 26 at the time, also criticised “the prevailing Western tendency to deify fatties” and said that fat people did not “deserve our respect”.

Mr O’mara said: “I am deeply ashamed of the comments I made online, which have emerged today.

“I was wrong to make them; I understand why they are offensive and sincerely apologise for my use of such unacceptable language.”

“I made the comments as a young man, at a particularly difficult time in my life, but that is no excuse. Misogyny is a deep problem in our society. Since making those comments 15 years ago, I have learned about inequalities of power and how violent language per- petuates them.”

Female politicians have spoken out about the sexual harassment and abuse they have received. Baroness Jenkin, a Tory peer, revealed that an MP stroked her neck while she drove her car when she was a 22-year-old secretary. She said that “men used to hit on you all the time” when she arrived in the almost all-male Parliament in the Seventies.

Theresa Villiers, a former Cabinet minister, disclosed that she had been groped by the organiser of a Conservative event when she was standing as an MP in the Nineties. Mary Creagh, a Labour MP, said that she was sexually abused as a child in the playground.