Champagne socialists

The scumbags at the Scum were clearly mightily pleased with yesterday’s frontpage story of Jeremy Corbyn’s breach of the ‘rule of six’ banning more than six people meeting indoors, with a picture of nine people sat around a dinner table enjoying a ‘posh’ dinner. One wonders who amongst these friends shared the photo. Salivating over its exclusive, the Scum contacted a couple of Tory MPs to bear witness, and share their profound disgust at Corbyn’s behaviour. One of these was Richard Holden, MP for North West Durham, who along with his Durham colleagues was forced to make a statement back in May on the behaviour of Dominic Cummings. It has to be said that Holden and Co. weren’t too impressed by Cummings’ ‘irresponsible’ behaviour but most of their statement (online at https://www.richardholden.org.uk/news/statement-county-durham-mps-dominic-cummings) sought to minimise that behaviour by largely dwelling on the government’s phenomenal success in tackling Covid-19. So perhaps there wasn’t the complete scent of hypocrisy one might have expected when Holden told the Scum ‘The champagne socialists of the London-centric Labour Party consider themselves above the rules that the rest of us must live by.’  The same perhaps could not be said for his fellow Scum quotee, David Morris, MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale. Morris is a proven rules breaker, as a House of Commons report from last October
( https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmstandards/771/77103.htm) makes clear, dealing with his breach of rules relating to declaring his financial interests. After a complaint was made against him Morris eventually was forced to apologise to the House, but only after he had impugned the integrity of the Commissioner for Standards, as the report says ‘The Commissioner acknowledged that Mr Morris had “recently been through a difficult and testing period, and that stress can affect an individual’s usual behaviour”, that she understood him to be “deeply apologetic and remorseful for the tone adopted in your earlier correspondence”, and that she was “happy to accept [his] mitigation and apology for the tone of [his] previous correspondence, and […] that no disrespect had been intended to me or my office’.  So Morris had an excuse and a context for his behaviour! This didn’t make him think twice before telling the Scum ‘Millions of Brits are quietly sticking to the rules to defeat this horrific virus while Jeremy Corbyn is swanning around at a posh dinner party. People have had to delay weddings, been stopped from going to funerals, and friends and families have been torn apart by these tough restrictions. It is beyond belief that an MP – and someone who claims to stand up for the common man – has behaved this way.’ It must be a matter of concern that at this ‘posh’ dinner party, and as the Scum gleefully reported, our Jeremy was wearing a ‘checked shirt.’ Just how posh is that?