Andy McSmith's Diary: Tory MP 'invented death threat' before being sent real one
Lucy Allan has admitted that she added the words 'until you die' to the end of an email she posted on Facebook
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Your support makes all the difference.Lucy Allan, the Tory MP for Telford, is not enjoying the festive season.
With a petition going around her constituency calling on her to resign, a furious message appeared on her Facebook page very late on Monday evening, only to be deleted in the morning. The full text was preserved and posted on Twitter by the journalist Abi Wilkinson, and on the Guido Fawkes website. It was a tirade against “a small group of bully boy councillors, thugs and henchman [sic]” whose names were listed, and one of whom was described as a “creepy stalker”.
They, she claimed, “invented a disgusting slur that somehow I invented a death threat”.
The gaping hole in her argument is that the “disgusting slur” was not invented; it was an inference drawn from fact. She has admitted that she added the words “until you die” to the end of an email she posted on Facebook, claiming that the whole thing was sent to her by the “creepy stalker”.
When challenged about the fact that she had doctored the message before posting it, she claimed that she had extracted the disputed words from a different email, but no details of that mystery email have been forthcoming, leaving a strong suspicion that she has, in fact, “invented a death threat”. She also received a genuine death threat, but that came later.
“There is no requirement for any MP to explain or provide running commentary on every Facebook posting,” her spokeswoman told the Shropshire Star.
Trotskyists outraged by Corbyn’s first three months
Jeremy Corbyn has completed three months as leader of the Labour Party. With the mass media pouring invective over his head for being too far to the left, no one, surely, could accuse him of selling out to a right-wing Establishment, could they? Actually, yes, there is a tiny Trotskyist grouplet which styles itself the International Committee of the Fourth International, on whose website there is a critical assessment of his first 13 weeks.
The verdict: “Within days of becoming leader, Corbyn set out on a course that has seen him utterly betray the very anti-war sentiment and hostility to the ruling elite that his election as party leader reflected.”
Peter Taaffe, founder and leader of the not quite so peripheral Socialist Party, has also provided a summary, which does not attack Corbyn in person, but does warn that “some of the Corbynistas – for instance in the misnamed ‘Momentum’ leadership, which is threatening to become ‘Stagnation’ – have a completely false perspective.”
It must be exhausting trying to lead the Labour Party from the left.
Born-again Blairite quits Labour Party – again
Michael Meacher, that long-serving pillar of the Labour left who died in October, was taking soundings in July 2006 to see whether he could challenge Tony Blair for the Labour leadership, aided and encouraged by a backstage left-wing fixer named Dan Hodges.
Nowadays, Dan Hodges is very much front of stage, a born-again Blairite who is so important that each time he resigns from the Labour Party, he publishes his reasons in The Daily Telegraph.
In 2013, he resigned because Ed Miliband opposed bombing Damascus. He must have rejoined in the interim, because today he re-resigned, this time as a protest against Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to bombing Isis.
Old comrades in the Lewisham East Labour Party are, I am sure, inconsolable that they have loved, lost, recovered and lost again.
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