MPs are Having Opinions about Will Smith’s Oscars slap – and absolutely no one cares

Maybe Will is relieved to know that Simon Hoare, MP for West Dorset, has got his back, even if Iain Duncan Smith reckons he wouldn’t be much help

Iain Duncan Smith thinks it wrong to lamp anyone (AFP/Getty)

Well here is something the world didn’t know 24 hours ago. If Simon Hoare, the 52-year-old MP for West Dorset, had been nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, and then during the ceremony comedian Chris Rock had made a tasteless joke about Simon Hoare’s wife, Mrs Hoare, then Simon Hoare would “get up and lamp him”.

Well, he said he would anyway. Not everyone’s convinced. Iain Duncan Smith reckons Simon Hoare is “not much of a pugilist” and probably wouldn’t actually have lamped anyone, in this entirely hypothetical world where MPs for West Dorset are winning Best Actor Oscars and lamping comedians making jokes in poor taste about their wives called Mrs Hoare.

Iain Duncan Smith thinks it wrong to lamp anyone. “I wouldn’t recommend anyone taking action into their own hands,” he told GB News. And he would know. He was there in 2017, when an edgy comedian by the name of Simon Brodkin started making trouble at the Conservative Party conference.

Luckily for everyone concerned, Brodkin managed to hand that P45 to Theresa May without going anywhere near the then Brexit secretary David Davis. If he had come anywhere near Davis, Davis said at the time, “he’d have been down for a very long time”. And it’s very important, when remembering these remarks, that you also forget the almost 75 seconds worth of footage, broadcast live on TV, in which Brodkin is lurking directly at Davis’s feet, and Davis sits there with his arms folded doing precisely nothing.

Nadhim Zahawi doesn’t want to dwell too long on the act of violence at the Oscars, and is instead more interested in the journey of improvement on which King Richard star Will Smith went in the roughly three to four minutes between slapping Chris Rock and winning the 94th Academy Award for Best Actor.

“I saw the video and I saw the tearful apology,” he told LBC, where he had gone to try and launch some sort of white paper about levelling up in schools. “Will Smith made a tearful, heartfelt apology. Even a joke can be below the belt, a joke about his wife and her illness is wrong. Chris Rock made a mistake. I wish Will Smith and his family well because he apologised and violence is never the answer.”

That’ll be the education secretary then, in charge of the nation’s schools, mainly wanting to stress that there’s two sides to every story, and if someone says something nasty and then that person gets up and slaps them, then it’s very important they apologise and that everyone can learn from this.

The prime minister agrees with Zahawi as well. “Striking someone is never the answer,” he’s had his spokesperson announce, though without backing it up with any clarity about why it was that he once agreed to get hold of a fellow journalist’s phone number, so an old friend of his from Eton could get him beaten up.

Keir Starmer was shocked as well, but prior to his turn on LBC, he’d clearly been really analysing the nitty gritty. “It didn’t appear to be completely spontaneous,” he said. “He walked on quite calmly and hit someone. I’m sorry, for me, that’s the wrong side of the line.”

And that, at time of typing, is most of the reaction in Westminster from the morning’s viral news, to which the only appropriate response is: who cares?

One’s mind is cast back to the year 1999, and an occasionally maligned front page of the Daily Mirror, in which a mad array of People of Note gave their strongly worded opinions on the outrageous fact that Manchester United were not competing in that year’s FA Cup.

“We must sort it out and United can sort it,” said Tony Blair.

“It’s terrible,” said Tamara Beckwith.

“My mates are United fans and they are gutted,” said You Bet! presenter and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat star Darren Day.

It seemed odd at the time. It seemed even odder to look back on about 10 years later.

Now, it’s just life as we know it. An endless scroll of bite-sized opinions on the red hot topic of the hour, bringing together everyone from the actual prime minister, to a moderately well known lottery winner and – just for lols – Ian Botham.

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Remarkably, only one of The Mirror’s FA Cup 14 from 23 years ago has so far expressed a view on Will Smith. Botham’s too busy playing the Ryder Cup course at Celtic Manor, and Darren Day’s been maintaining a dignified silence since wishing Happy Mother’s Day “to all the mums out there”, using a stock photo of a purple ribbon and some orchids.

But former swimmer Sharron Davies, for whom United’s FA Cup absence was “a great shame”, reckons that Will Smith has ruined his special night with “one mad emotional moment”.

Is anyone’s day improved by living beneath the crushing weight of all this Opinion? Who knows. Maybe Will Smith really is relieved to know that Simon Hoare MP has got his back, even if Iain Duncan Smith reckons he wouldn’t be much help. Maybe his agent has already told him that his tearful apology really did the job, just look at this clip of someone called Nadhim Zahawi on LBC (but look away before Keir Starmer gets on. He thinks the rehabilitation is far from complete).

Probably not. The chances are that, before last night, Will Smith probably thought that Will Smith was a pretty great guy, and what with it being 2022 and all, it’s highly unlikely that anything could ever possibly happen, or anyone could ever say a word, to change his mind about absolutely anything at all.