THE F**K-IT LIST

You may recall a post on here last year titled ‘Tumbleweed Injunction’, all about a story involving a certain Grande Dame of British pop music who couldn’t be named by the mainstream media on account of a super-injunction and accompanying threat of legal proceedings should a TV programme or newspaper dare to say his moniker out loud when reporting his alleged threesome. This particular case was as good an example as any of how the senior mediums have been rendered redundant by cyberspace when it comes to free speech. Although my piece didn’t once say the stage name said musician adopted almost fifty years ago, one would have to be a bit dim not to guess to whom I was referring. Besides, everybody bloody knew who it was, with or without the trademark platform boot I illustrated the article with.

We now have one more example of how the info is out there and the MSM is powerless to use it whilst the rest of us can choose to access it if we want, finally liberated from having that choice dictated to us by the press or TV. Westminster’s uncut ‘dodgy dossier’ is available via Twitter and the version I’ve seen is a straightforward photocopy sourced from God-knows-where, with the contents laid bare and not needing a running commentary. My job today is not to repeat that list verbatim; for one thing, there’s no point, what with it already having been seen by a potential audience of thousands; for another, it’s not my role to be a ‘rogue journalist’. A bit of rogue I might be, but I’d never presume to label myself a journalist. Besides, if I were, I’d be even more restricted in what I can or can’t say re the names on the list.

It’s an odd combination of personal kinkiness, innocuous (and hardly illegal) activities between consenting adults, and genuinely unpleasant lechery. Whoever compiled it clearly collected every snippet of gossip from the frivolous to the serious that had been overheard in the corridors of power and cobbled the lot together in one unsavoury package – not unlike the way in which such behaviour outside of Parliament has been cobbled together in law by a poisonous moral crusade that politicians have endorsed in the belief it would never pierce their sanctimonious bubble. Now it has belatedly encroached upon their own sexual misadventures they’re suddenly screaming ‘Witch Hunt’! Tough Titty – or should that be Sugar Titty?

Like most, I should imagine, there are a great deal of names on the list I’ve never heard of, but that’s no surprise when one considers the sheer volume of parasites sucking on the breast of our democracy. It’s a bit like whenever I casually switch on BBC Parliament and catch some moribund late afternoon debate as opposed to the all-star parade that is PMQs. I struggle to recognise the majority of MPs lounging around on the half-empty benches as some anonymous nonentity drones on, and many of them could well be included on this list for all I know. It goes without saying that my eyes took note of names I did recognise when perusing it, and there are around a dozen of them. Some have already been safely ‘outed’, whilst others raised the odd eyebrow. Good Lord, there are even some women on there! And here’s me thinking this sexual predator thing was a purely male pastime.

One of the women on the list has a very high-profile post indeed, though her crime was having had ‘a workplace relationship’; that hardly makes her Rose West. Another female member of the Government with an important day-job is accused of fornicating with a male researcher while a backbench MP – and, yes, fornicating is the somewhat quaint word the compiler of the list uses. One of the mostly male MPs listed is described as being ‘handy at parties’; another is ‘handy in taxis’. One ‘asked a female researcher to do odd things’, but we’re not told what they were (or what constitutes ‘odd’ in this context); another ‘likes to have intercourse with men who are wearing women’s perfume’. One has ‘odd sexual penchants’ (again – how odd?) and is also ‘sexual with a fellow MP’, who happens to be described as ‘a drunk’; another takes the starring role in a video that features him being urinated on by not one, not two, but ‘three males’! Whatever turns you on, eh?

However, also included are the likes of one male MP who allegedly impregnated a former researcher and made her have an abortion; another ‘paid a female to be quiet’ – a right pair of charmers by the sounds of it. At the same time, one MP is damned for taking his personal trainer to the cinema and then to ‘private rooms at the Carlton’! I’m sure the personal trainer appreciated the gesture more than the researcher who was cajoled into having an abortion, which makes one wonder why the two actions share the same list. I suppose both are demonstrations of how politicians exercise power over those that work for them – benignly and malignantly; and isn’t that what this hoo-hah is really about?

As we have seen, some of the descriptions of behaviour read like stage directions from a sketch on ‘The Benny Hill Show’, which again underlines the error in throwing the trivial in with the far more worrying allegations; it elevates one to a level it doesn’t warrant and diminishes the seriousness of the other. But, as the minor incidents outnumber the major ones on the list, maybe jumbling them all up was the idea; maybe this is a means of enabling those under threat from the list to dismiss it and survive the scandal because the entire dodgy dossier could be discredited as having blown everything out of all proportion. In fact, the leaking of the list could even be viewed as a pre-emptive red herring to derail a proper investigation into the few allegations present that are a bit extreme for your average ‘Carry On’ movie. But it might just be too late now.

© The Editor