According to Nigel Farage “He wasn’t vetted!” This was his ‘defence’ when asked why it wasn’t revealed before the 2024 election that Reform Party candidate James McMurdock had been convicted for assaulting his girlfriend. “He wasn’t vetted!” McMurdock, by now successfully elected, had repeatedly kicked his girlfriend on the ground. “He wasn’t vetted!” says Farage, who seems to think he chides Sky News for wasting his time about people unwittingly voting for their parliamentary representative, a man who oversees the creation and passing of our laws, being a genuine convicted thug. To simply snort derisively about that. Who thinks that’s acceptable? Who gets angry when called to account? Nigel Farage.
You’d think Farage would be bothered by thuggery. Apparently he can’t even hold a surgery in Clacton for fear of being stabbed – by whom, his own constituents? – although his claim the Speaker’s Office advised him of that wasn’t true. But not to even check someone’s CV, under ‘past experience – for going to jail for kicking in my girlfriend – maybe he misunderstood the term, ‘conviction politician’?
I was vetted
I was vetted. In late 2019, the Brexit Party (formerly UKIP, now Reform), organised a rally at Central Hall just off Parliament Square. I got a ticket, as did separately famed trade negotiator Jason Hunter – only for us both to find our tickets cancelled hours before the event (cue me pointing at myself then to Hunter and back as I seek fame by association). I’m pretty sure I was not disbarred for beating up my girlfriend. I think it was simply because the party of free speech hates free speech, but that’s just me.
Apply the same screening software to your own MPs, why don’t you? But see the company they keep, people among whom violent misogyny is accepted, tacitly defended behind the more vocal calls for ‘free speech’ – freedom to lie, defame, and incite riots. Promoted even, falling up; you can be convicted of rape and still getting elected back into the White House, with The Handmaiden’s Tale now trumping 1984 as their rubric.
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