Intervention overnight
The Conservative MP Crispin Blunt has resigned as chair of the LGBTQ+ parliamentary group and withdrawn comments that a fellow MP found guilty of sexual assault was a victim of a “miscarriage of justice”.
After an outcry from MPs across the political spectrum, Blunt deleted the tweet defending convicted MP Imran Ahmad Khan and removed the comment from his website after an intervention from Tory whips overnight.
I’m picturing them taking turns to scold him all night long. No sleep for him!
His retraction tweet says, idiotically:
I am sorry that my defence of him has been a cause of significant upset and concern not least to victims of sexual offences.
Like saying “I’m sorry my punching you in the face has been a cause of significant bruising, not least a broken nose.”
So the three MPs who resigned can return.
Blunt’s comments triggered the resignation of three MPs from the APPG that he chaired – the Scottish National party MPs Stewart McDonald and Joanna Cherry, and Labour’s Chris Bryant….Bryant had earlier told Sky News he had called for Blunt’s resignation. “It is completely inappropriate for a member of parliament to start attacking the judicial process like this,’” he said.
Well he’s sorry you’re upset.
I bet that an awful lot of people are wondering, as am I, why he was so shocked at the guilty verdict that he made such a statement. I’m wondering, and I expect I’m far from the only one, if he thought that the behaviour of his fellow M.P. was perfectly acceptable, so the case would be thrown out. I’m also wondering what he has in his past which he is now worried will come out, and that the conviction means that he thinks that he’s at risk of conviction, too. Some men are so good at convincing themselves that they have done, or are doing, absolutely nothing wrong, that it comes as quite a shock to find out that wider society doesn’t share their views. Upper-class men in particular, who had an experience of schooling which wasn’t very different to that described in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, can probably easily convince themselves that the law still isn’t interested in grown men abusing boys.
It’s also possible that he’s one of those people who simply refuses to believe that any friend of his could be guilty of wrongdoing.
The basic impulse is understandable; we tend to think that we know our friends well, and that they are good people. Giving a friend who’s been accused of something the benefit of the doubt is reasonable, even laudable. But when you’re deliberately refusing to hear the evidence against them, while loudly insisting that they’re innocent, you’ve taken that principle too far.