Best to keep mum on family matters
YOU can choose your friends but not your family. If your friends betray you therefore you might blame, at least to some extent, your own lack of judgment in trusting them in the first place but if families start blabbing you are helpless. We have an excess of family secrets this week. The first was Charlie Elphicke’s mother- in- law telling the world how she had never liked him and how she had always known he was a sexual predator. Elphicke is the MP who was convicted and jailed for sexually assaulting young women and there may be precious little sympathy for him but what about his poor wife?
Natalie Elphicke stood by her husband throughout the trial, arriving hand- in- hand with him, right, then announced that she was divorcing him and now says she supports him and his appeal. She is obviously deeply hurt and confused and Mum should have been quietly supporting and advising her and being a tower of strength not adding to her problems with a blaze of adverse publicity, which at best looks like revenge and at worst like an attempt to prejudice an appeal.
IF NATALIE Elphicke is under pressure, it is nothing to that which Boris Johnson is facing. He is a Prime Minister coping with a nationwide plague, an economic meltdown and a new baby to boot and is still obviously affected by the disease itself. Is this really the right moment for his mother to allege that his father once broke her nose, along with making other derogatory comments on Stanley Johnson’s general behaviour?
To be fair to the first Mrs Johnson, her comments appear in a biography of her son written by a third party and she probably made them before the outbreak of his present problems but whenever she made them she would have known that it could do him nothing but harm and cause nothing but distress. These two women are hurting their own children and that makes Sasha Swire’s wounding betrayal of David Cameron look almost trivial by comparison.
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THE seven months I spent in the EU parliament seem a thousand light years away as do the fire and fury of the rallies and campaign which preceded them and the triumphant celebration on January 31 in Parliament Square, when at 11pm Greenwich Mean Time we formally ceased belonging to the sprawling superstate of the EU.
So I was delighted to read the entertaining memoir written by one of my Brexit Party MEP colleagues, John Tennant, and called Rebooting Brexit.
It eschews dry analysis in favour of recapturing the spirit of the times and as many readers of this column share my views on the EU, I recommend it. It can be obtained from Steel City Press.