Who would doubt that tractors and naked women make an odd combination, especially in terms of their domestic relevance. Not to make a mistake: Member of Parliament Neil Parish spoke of “tractors”, which he “funnily” searched for on his cell phone before he “accidentally” landed on a porn site while sitting in the British Parliament, and its content he then “looked a bit”. But investigations of Times and other British media revealed that he was actually looking for a combine harvester, a model called the “Dominator”. A joke? No, no joke.
Neil Parish, 65, former farmer and Tory MP since 2010, head of the Agriculture Committee, married with two children, resigned over the weekend. Shortly before that, he was suspended from the party after it became known that female colleagues observed him watching porn on his mobile phone in parliament. Accidentally the first time, as Parish said in a BBC studio TV interview. But the second time it wasn’t an accident, “that was my real crime,” Parish said, eyes closed, on the verge of tears. “So it was on purpose?” The moderator probed. “Yes, on purpose,” Parish said. The interview lasted a good four minutes, four tormenting, not at all funny minutes of foreign shame.
His opponents unashamedly refer to the prime minister as a “clown”
Politics isn’t there to be funny, something that’s sometimes forgotten in Britain since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, whose opponents unabashedly dubbed him a “clown”. Boris Johnson is not a clown, but an elitist and educated man who knows exactly what he is doing and what he is saying. And: how it works. Especially the latter is important now, how he works, because that’s what this week is about again. On Thursday there are elections in the United Kingdom, the so-called “Council elections”. Boris Johnson is not on the ballot, but his political future is.
Neil Parish and “Pornogate”, which is now associated with him forever, come at a particularly bad time – from Johnson’s point of view. The last few weeks at Westminster have been so wild that the British media, which is always creative in such matters, likes to call the parliament quarter “Pestminster”. Partygate is still there, and then there are a few other -gates lately. For example Raynergate, which deals with the egregious allegation made by an anonymous Tory MP via party battle paper Daily Mail Angela Rayner, the Labor deputy leader, would happily cross her legs in the House of Commons like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, just to irritate Johnson across from her. There have been several statements and turns in this crazy story in the past few days, for the time being it culminated in Rayner Johnson writing a letter on Monday. She wanted to know what was behind the revelation by the Times stuck that the “sexist of the year” was said to have been chosen at one of the many illegal lockdown parties in Downing Street.
Tory MP Caroline Nokes, chair of the Women’s and Equality Committee, even told the newspaper that there was a fundamental problem in her party, institutional sexism.
Beergate, on the other hand, is about the Daily Mail Extremely pointed allegations against Labor leader Keir Starmer that he too had a lockdown party. The protestations of the responsible police authority that no rules were broken at all have been bent over the past few days with the Tory-affiliated tabloid hammer in such a way that they do not damage the beautiful anti-Labour headlines.
Party gate, porn gate, sexism? If the voters are not interested in anything, that has been Boris Johnson’s number one defense argument for weeks. In fact, what worries many Britons at the moment is how they are going to pay the ever-rising energy bills. In many households, the costs have tripled in the past few months.
“The local elections are like a weather report,” as John Curtice put it on the phone. Curtice is a professor at Glasgow University and has been the UK’s number one for many years, as well as an expert on polls and political weather forecasting. From the results of the local elections, the major national parties and their leaders can regularly see whether the sun is shining for them or whether a storm is brewing. If the forecasts for Thursday’s election weather are not completely off the mark this time, the prospects for Boris Johnson are mixed to bleak.
Of the DailyTelegraph, also a paper located in the immediate vicinity of the Tories, actually visited Somerset County in southwest England, part of the “Blue Wall”, the blue Tory wall, at the weekend for exemplary illustrative reasons. The Conservative candidate told the paper that the election campaign was not going so well: people tore their posters off the walls and sometimes burned them.
There are stories like this from all sorts of Tory constituencies, which is why Boris Johnson has been on the road a lot in the past few days in terms of election campaigns. He once visited a stadium here and a construction site there, shook hands, slapped shoulders, threw slogans. This gave his supporters and colleagues courage: It is in the nature of populists that they were born to campaign. Keir Starmer was also out and about, he even took a few selfies and emphasized at every opportunity that he didn’t go into politics to be in the opposition, “but to win elections”. But what Starmer said in a recent radio interview is also true: He and Johnson have “absolutely nothing in common”.
Many of the seats up for vote are firmly in Labor hands anyway
The polls, says John Curtice, would continue to predict bad results for the Tories, despite Johnson’s election campaign final sprint. But he says he doesn’t expect the Tories to panic. You have to understand what exactly Thursday is about in England, namely about 4000 seats in the councils, which are a kind of mixture of city council and city administration. That’s only about a third of all council posts in the country, and most of those councils that are now elected have been firmly in Labor hands for many years anyway. That means it’s quite possible that the Tories will lose several hundred individual seats, but rather a few councils overall. “Boris Johnson couldn’t ask for a better setup to defend himself after a bad result,” said Curtice.
Is that enough? Who knows. Curtice has no doubts that the local elections are one of the many issues the Tories are considering. One thing is certain, he is sure of that, especially with a look at the polls: “Partygate will stay with us for a long time,” says John Curtice. He doesn’t mean it, but it sounds like a threat.