Yesterday for the first time I trended on Twitter. Apparently I had been busted registering as a ‘supporter of the Labour Party.’
It seems one of the many people I had told over the previous week had ratted to the Guardian that I had paid my £3 and signed up online entitling me to vote in the forthcoming election for the leader of HM Opposition. This was despite the fact that I had applied on my Tory MP email address and given my reasons for doing so in the helpful, if not hopeful, online box asking why I had taken such a step as ‘to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in order to consign the Labour Party to oblivion for a generation.’
I thought this was sufficiently honest and quite a good wheeze for an otherwise quiet night two days into the Parliamentary recess. It was worth stumping up £3 just to see if the impregnable fortress that is the British Labour Party really was all it was cracked up to be. I received a nice instant auto-response from Labour General Secretary Iain McNicol acknowledging my registration and promising to get back as soon as my application had been processed. Surely I would get a curt follow-up telling me to jog on, Tory scumbag, with the £3 thrown unceremoniously back in my face?
Six days later an email pinged into my Tim Loughton, Conservative MP for East Worthing & Shoreham email box. It was from that pleasant sounding Mr McNicol:
‘Welcome to the Labour Party; it’s brilliant to have you on our team. The strength of our party is, and always has been, the hundreds of thousands of people across Britain, like you, who are standing up for Labour values.’
Blimey: I was in. Even my auto response from Tim Loughton Conservative MP for East Worthing & Shoreham didn’t raise an eyebrow. I wasn’t just in but I was about to be feted by the great and the good of the Left. Two days later I was welcomed by none other than Harriet Harman:
‘As one of our registered supporters, we want you to help decide the future of our party.’
I felt my £3 was well spent just for that and for all the dining out I have enjoyed as a result of the whole farce subsequently. I was a registered supporter of the Labour Party, though that even friendlier Mr McNicol refers to me as a ‘member’ which most certainly had not been my intention. Could this go all the way with voting papers due to be sent out to people like me, and me, in just a couple of weeks’ time? In the surely unlikely event that I was given the opportunity to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, who I like and admire and first met over breakfast in a two bit hotel in Tegucigalpa when I was an impecunious student studying Mayan pyramids (long story), I would of course rip up my ballot paper and tweet all about it. Actually voting would be taking things too far.
But before it got that far I was busted, not by the Labour Party but by the Guardian. They recounted my story with characteristic distance from the facts on their website.
Twitter went mad. All of a sudden television vans appeared outside my Sussex home for an interview on this new breaking story. Far from ‘being busted’ though I had made every attempt to bust myself and expose the serious lack of attention to security that the Labour Party appears to exercise on its most important leadership election since the last one.
It wasn’t until later that day that I received any communication from the Labour Party. This time it wasn’t from that nice Mr McNicol and I am still awaiting a formal email response from the Labour Party confirming I have been dumped. Instead I received a much less comradely missive from the Labour Press Team in my Twitter box:
Thanks for your donation to the Labour Party @timloughton. However as a Tory MP you will not get a vote in our leadership election.
It has been retweeted hundreds of times so far by my irritated now ex-comrades. Many of them have added some distinctly uncomradely comments, some of which are far too racy, and in one case racist, to recall here. Amidst the references to various parts of the anatomy the most perplexing one remains:
Apparently I have broken all sorts of rules and should be kicked out of the Party (which one?) My actions are an affront to democracy despite the fact that I have actually done the Labour Party a service in revealing how their sloppiness means that even a Tory MP could vote for the leader of their party. Hopefully they will now take this seriously and do something. It would be terrible if JC were to be elected and then his democratic election be called into question due to bogus voters.
A particularly vociferous faction have reveled in the fact that I will not get my £3 back. I would happily have paid double (perhaps not treble.) Predictably the smartarse faction claimed I would somehow be claiming it back on expenses. I am particularly grateful for the alternative view put forward by a retired trading standards officer who insisted I should receive a refund as the goods and services I had contracted for had been withheld.
Bizarrely the Labour Party tried spinning the line that it was their own scrutiny processes that had weeded me out and I would never have got within ten yards of putting an X next to Jeremy Corbyn’ s name. As the above chronology shows, I self-outed. It was the Guardian that told them.
The furious tweets continue. It was odd, as I have had a pretty high profile couple of days in the media being interviewed about the demise of Kids Company and the latest increasingly implausible allegations against Ted Heath. But apparently the Twitterati on the Left have nothing to say to me when it comes to one of Britain’s’ highest profile charities going bust and what will happen to its children. Or indeed the latest allegations on child sexual abuse. But when it comes to encroaching on the flawed electoral processes of the Labour Party, then there are not enough terms of abuse around to satisfy their craving for toxins to spew out against another wicked Tory. It is telling too that the online application forms requests you to confirm that you:
Support the aims and values of the Labour Party, and I am not a supporter of any organisation opposed to it.
It is of course difficult to work out what those aims and values actually are these days but I have not been a member of the Conservative Party for 38 years simply to oppose another party. I am a Conservative because I positively support Conservative policies and want my country to enjoy the positive benefits of them, regardless of what Labour or any other party may be up to. As this Twitter fest has demonstrated the Left gets most agitated by its political competitors even more than by its own political ideals. Too often achieving social justice takes second place when there is an opportunity to hate the Tories.
The whole experience has been enlightening. The next leader of the Labour Party should be elected by members and genuine supporters of the Labour Party. That is the way we do it in the Conservative Party. This is an important contest and Labour’ s security processes have been found lacking.
If they can’t even secure their own election process how on earth can they be trusted to look after the security of our nation? Oh, I forgot: Jeremy doesn’t really do defence.
Tim Loughton is the CONSERVATIVE MP for East Worthing & Shoreham
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