Tweeting has made politicians such twits
FRIENDS from my old workplace keep in touch and two pieces of news from Westminster have caused me to laugh into my cornflakes over the past week.
The first was that the Tory high command are fizzing with exasperation over the twittering of Nadine Dorries, the MP who has announced an affair with another woman’s husband and added some startling detail about the failings of her lover’s deserted wife.
I laughed not because I find marriage break-up remotely funny nor because I find the public parade of alleged violent alcoholism amusing but because this episode is the inevitable result of the Conservatives’ “modernisation” programme and it is no good the powers that be advising a modern woman to “keep her head down”.
I was born in the age of stiff upper lip reticence when it comes to private matters and David Cameron was born in the class that favours it too. We were taught that it is not only undignified but positively vulgar to air family matters or to wash one’s dirty linen in public. Nadine, who is not the fool some try to suggest, has simply embraced the values of an entirely different age.
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In 21st-century Britain people go on daytime television to discuss the most intimate matters. They twitter and tweet details of new loves and new break-ups. They take pictures of private moments and post them on YouTube.
No behaviour, no matter how excessive, is considered beyond reproducing in memoirs. I hate it but it is as much a fact of modern life as is the mobile phone.
David Cameron went out of his way to “broaden” his party in Parliament and particularly to woo young women and fill the benches with single mothers, chick-lit writers and media types rather than with sobersides bankers and lawyers.
Well you’ve got ’em, Mr Prime Minister and you should hardly expect them to behave like Jill Knight, Gillian Shephard or Virginia Bottomley.
The second piece of news was that IPSA, that body set up to preserve the taxpayers’ interest by keeping a grip on MPs’ expenses, in addition to having already taken on a PR expert at a cost of £84,000 a year, is now spending your money and mine in conducting a survey of the impact of its work on the “equality and diversity” of MPs and their staff. It has issued a questionnaire to every member looking at the effects of the new rules on “race and ethnicity, age, gender, marital status, pregnancy, caring responsibilities, religion or beliefs and disability”. And the biggest joke of all? The survey is anonymous so MPs can write down any old thing without ever being found out.
The moral of both these stories is to be careful what you wish for. It may turn round and bite you.