Oh dear. Just as the Tories were trying oh so hard to win back the right by presenting themselves as a serious party, Edwina Currie opened her mouth. The veteran Conservative was opining on the impending dumping of more than 1,000 illegal migrants in Piddington, Oxfordshire, when she dropped an absolute clanger. She told Times Radio:
The obvious thing that 1,200 young men are going to need in the middle of a village like little Piddington is a brothel – I don’t think they’re going to provide that.
The comments sparked fury on social media, with Zia Yusuf branding them particularly ‘sick’. The Reform home affairs spokesman fumed: ‘This former Tory Minister joking about brothels being made available to the military aged men they allowed to break into Britain illegally. Just sick. Never forget what the Tories did to this country.’
Journalist Allison Pearson suggested Currie had in fact ‘owned up here to the ugly and dangerous truth’ ignored by successive governments. She wrote: ‘If you allow tens of thousands of young men to illegally enter your country they will want sex. How are they going to get it? Check the rape statistics.’
Currie later clarified that her remarks had always been intended as ‘tongue-in-cheek’, but said she was glad they had ‘managed to annoy both Reform and some radial feminists’. She added: ‘I’m making a point which is that if we keep holding people here in idleness for a very long period of time then we are going to have problems wherever we put them. That is so not the answer. The answer is make sure people don’t arrive in the first place.’
A serious point, perhaps – but for a Tory party attempting to seduce the right, Currie’s intervention was hardly a happy ending.
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