A hunched ball of scowling red crossness, comrade Jim wants to ban us press parasites
THE House of Commons should keep out ‘parasitical’ members of the Press, a Labour MP said yesterday.
Jim Sheridan’s attack came just a day after cross-party proposals were agreed for a royal charter enshrining strict rules on newspapers.
The Mail’s Quentin Letts witnessed the extraordinary outburst in a parliamentary committee room:
FIRST they came for the parliamentary sketchwriters. Twelve hours after the Commons voted to kill the ancient freedoms of the Press, Scots-socialist lovely Jim Sheridan (Lab, Paisley) suggested that journalists who show insufficient respect to MPs should be booted off the premises.
Calling such scribes ‘a parasitical element’, he growled: ‘ They abuse their position, hiding behind their pens and calling people names. I don’t know why they’re allowed here.’
Mr Sheridan has long been one of the sketchwriting guild’s best clients. He is just such fun to describe, a hunched ball of scowling, scarlet crossness, steaming like a Chinaman’s laundry.
Not for Comrade Jim those cheap narcotics of optimism and New Testament pleasantry. Nae! This one broods, crabbit and bealin’, a boiling walloper, kicker of cans, forever talking mince. I love him to bits but fear the fondness is not always reciprocated. He once accused us of ‘abusing the premises’. All we had done was take the rise out of his mate Michael Martin, ex-speaker.
Normally one would ignore the old booby but the context of his remark yesterday and its tone makes it instructive. It illustrates wider reasons for the leftist elite’s antipathy to Fleet Street.
He made it at a culture select committee (yes! knuckle-chewer Jim is on the culture committee – isn’t it a hoot?) and they were discussing Press regulation.
Before him sat three critics of the Press, among them the champion orgy-goer and bottom-spanker Max Mosley. Such, readers, are the leagues to which your legislature has sunk.
Until Mr Sheridan’s little soliloquy I had been gripped by the verbal tics and fingertips of Thrasher Mosley. He kept prefacing interventions with the words ‘If I may’, uttered in a posh- tortoise drawl straight from Downton Abbey.
Such daintiness from one so nakedly authoritarian. Do you think he says ‘If I may’ to the popsies at his ‘parties’?
The ends of Mr Mosley’s fingers bent inwards. In a better life he might have made a leg-spinner. Instead he has chosen the path of immoral rectitude.
He flared indignant, when challenged by splendid Philip Davies ( Con, Shipley). Mr Davies thought any claim of the Mosleyites, if we may call them that, to be acting on the side of the angels in this Press row was ‘quite disingenuous, quite laughable’. He reckoned they were more concerned in helping rich celebrities to gag the media.
Mr Mosley with clipped irritation said: ‘Don’t say I’m not straight!’ Straight, eh?
Alongside Mr Mosley sat Brian Cathcart, minor academic, and Hugh Tomlinson, barrister, from the Hacked Off group. They were delighted with the new antipress legislation, Mr Tomlinson licking his Robert Morley lips and spreading his chubby fingers flat on the desk before him. Under brisk questioning from Conor Burns ( Con, Bournemouth W) about their involvement in Sunday night’s secretive talks with Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, the Hacked Off men wobbled.
MR Burns wanted to know where t he pressure group’s money came from. Should we not be told? After all, they were now mixing in the highest counsels of the kingdom. It is the modern version of beer and sandwiches.
Full details of Hacked Off ’s donors were not furnished.
Ben Bradshaw (Lab, Exeter, once content to serve in the Murdoch- consorting government of Tony Blair) kept laughing theatrically, hoping to belittle the questioning. And then came Mr Sheridan’s tour de farce.
The words rose from the murky depths, down in the tripe linings of Vesuvius’s belly. Glurp! Out they shot, purple-hot projectiles of bile, their master sitting there with chin to chest, balefulness in an off-the-peg suit.
Why should j ournalists be allowed to watch MPs at Westminster? Why should their impertinence to parliamentarians be tolerated? Kick ’em out!
He has a point in some ways. You do not have to be there in the flesh to see what a donkey Jim Sheridan is. Via the electric television set, it is just as obvious from a distance of many a country mile.