[Andy McDandy]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-56757772

Welsh pervert Rob Roberts suspended from parliament for 6 weeks for being a lecherous pervert.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Sounds like the Tories can avoid a by-election if they want to, but they might not like the chance to find someone else.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Labour won the Assembly Seat by 14.1% this year, Roberts won by 2.3% in 2019.

I think they'd have a decent chance of winning this (Westminster) seat back.

[Youngian]

He didn't campaign as Bob Roberts. I doubt many will remember Tim Robbins's satire of the same name about an oily dishonest neoliberal chancer. But best not to invite comparison.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I remember that.

"Some people will work, some simply will not, but they'l complain and complain and complain".

[mattomac]

Yeah they won’t want to risk that as a by election.

[Tubby Isaacs]

They might as well. Lose a "loose cannon", bit of moral high ground which they don't have much of.

[Tubby Isaacs]

What a moron Oliver Dowden is.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politic ... 37081.html

Asked if departures of arts trustees reflected an anti-woke agenda, Dowden says: “I want to make sure that a granny in Middlesbrough or a middle-aged man in Wolverhampton feels as represented as an Islington millennial.”

He launches into a passionate soliloquy about the dangers of big institutions being swept up by statue-topplers and history-rewriters.

“What I’m saying is, let’s make sure we have a longer term perspective on all of this. You just have to look at what happened to our urban landscape after the Second World War. More damage was done by the misplaced idealism of socialist planners than by the Luftwaffe.

“I just want to make sure that the innate conservative-with-a-small-C traditions of this nation, which I very much subscribe to, don’t get carried away in the moment. Eighty-four per cent of black Britons support retaining statues, not removing them. That is where the majority opinion is in this country.”

[Boiler]

...and the MP for an area that is big on film-making, with 14 sound stages in the process of building by Sky and rumours of another 21 by a company called Hertswood Studios...

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Dowden has been dealt a full hand, stupid, vile and ugly all at once.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Don't take any statues down ever, as 84% of Black Britons didn't say.

[Youngian]

Probably gulping at the incomprehensible shite he’s talking. WTF are unique impartial British values? What values are the BBC not projecting that he wishes them to? The Tories used to be able to find someone who could converse with the culture vultures like Mellor or the coke spoon libel case bloke whose name escapes me

Mr Dowden also wrote this week that the BBC should “project British values” in future. This has alarmed some BBC supporters who fear the Government might impose its own definition of those values.

“It’s curious that that made people gulp, in the sense that the BBC projects British values now,” he responds. “The point I was making was to say that it should be projecting us on the global stage and as a champion of the UK.”

He stresses his support for BBC editorial independence, saying his remarks have been misinterpreted. His real point was that the BBC’s reputation for impartiality is a unique selling point in a world where trusted media are rare. “There is a real space globally to have that really trusted broadcaster. Those are British values: values of trust, impartiality, and in a world where democratic values are increasingly under threat I certainly think the BBC should be out there, standing for those values.”

[Samanfur]

Lord Gowrie?

(It was one of the defamation examples on my NCTJ law course.)

[Andy McDandy]

He's softening his approach. Eyes on the future, perhaps?

[Youngian]

Lord Gowrie?

(It was one of the defamation examples on my NCTJ law course.)

That’s him. Wasn’t it something along the lines of ‘what sort of habits does a man born with a silver spoon around his neck have that he can’t live off £50K?’ Lol

[Samanfur]

It was The Star, who said:

There's been much excited chatter as to why dashing poetry-scribbling Minister Lord Gowrie left the Cabinet so suddenly. What expensive habits can he not support on an income of £33,000 ? I'm sure Gowrie himself would snort with disgust at suggestions that he was born with a silver spoon round his neck.

Subtle, ain't it?

[Youngian]

A very odd one in NCTJ list was Liberace suing the Mirror in the 1950s for calling his performance ‘pansy like’. The flamboyant pianist was appalled the paper was suggesting he was a homosexual.

[Samanfur]

And never played in the UK again after the case, as I recall.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I'd never heard this Gowrie story before.

I bet a few people at the World Service were gulping at Dowden there. They might as well go and work for Russia Today.

[Youngian]

And never played in the UK again after the case, as I recall.

The lesson of this case is that you don’t get your money back in libel when new irrefutable evidence emerges.