Today’s papers are dominated by two surprising stories of political naivete.
I have no ‘inside track’; I’m just an ordinary guy who reads the newspapers. I thought the question of Simon Hughes’s sexuality was common knowledge. Like Charles Kennedy’s drink problem, there were plenty of nudges and winks about it in the Westminster sketch columns. I found it really odd when he came out (pardon the pun) with such a categoric denial in last week’s papers. Today comes the U-turn.
I genuinely don’t care if he’s gay or not. (Incidentally, I have yet to see the words ‘I am gay’ appearing between inverted commas.) But I do feel uneasy about him fibbing – or maybe even worse, playing with semantics – in the Independent last week, saying: ‘The answer is no, as it happens. But if it was the case, which it isn’t, I hope that would not become an issue.’ Of course he was going to get caught out. In a ‘Big Brother’ world of search engines and cameraphones, you have to assume that everything you do or say will be captured and can be easily retrieved. And rightly or wrongly, politics does not forgive those who U-turn.
I suspect George Galloway gets this concept, but took it a step too far. I can understand why he went on Big Brother: round-the-clock filming, live streaming, and unlimited opportunity to describe his political philosophy. He’s a lone voice among 646 MPs; he needs ‘the oxygen of publicity’. But if he thought Channel 4 was ever going to give large amounts of peak airtime to his considered opinions, he was very much mistaken. Miaow.