It’s been a busy old week in politics, and in the midst of it Mike Hancock, disgraced former MP and alleged ‘pro-Putin’ ‘Kremlin lobbyist’, has reared his head again. The Liberal Democrats are no doubt thrilled to be reminded of their erstwhile colleague. Better than that - they can still take tea with him in the Mother of Parliaments! The Mail on Sunday has reported that 7 years after the man left Parliament, and 8 years after the Lib Dems were finally forced, red-faced and squinnying, to sideline ‘Mr Teflon’, Hancock is still able, if he chooses, to swan around the parliamentary estate courtesy of his special ‘Category X’ pass.
Read moreFireworks Ahoy - the Questions That Still Exist for the Portsmouth Lib Dems
This will be the shortest blog piece I’ve ever written. In 2014, I put in a dossier of complaints and concerns to the Lib Dem Party after I resigned from the Portsmouth Council Group (and Cabinet) over its mishandling of the Mike Hancock scandal and the toxic culture that enabled it all to happen. I had a one hour meeting with Tim Farron in London, and received correspondence from him and Nick Clegg saying that my compliants and concerns would be investigated. To the best of my knowledge, despite pushes from me, no such investigations have ever been undertaken. A lot of questions remain about the conduct of the Portsmouth Liberal Democrats from 2010 to date. The fact that the Lib Dems haven't answered the questions doesn't make the questions go away. I haven’t gone away.
Read moreToo Unwell To Talk, Not Too Unwell To Speak - Hancock's Still Spinning
You might recall from my recent piece, 'Hancock's Back', how The Guardian reported last week that Mike Hancock has been censured by the Council of Europe (PACE) for not giving evidence to its ten-month judge-led inquiry concerning politicians and Azebaijan. The reasons he has given to the media for his non-participation are (a) being unwell, and (b) not having anything to do with the Council of Europe any more. One would perhaps be forgiven for thinking that Hancock must have been debilitated throughout the whole period of evidence gathering and report writing up to that point.
But lo! He was risen - and to be precise, he was filmed, recorded and photographed at a conference in Paris on 9th February 2018.
Read moreHancock Calling - And He's Got Gerald's Number
In a short piece in the Portsmouth News published last Saturday, its political reporter Ben Fishwick wrote about a recent conversation that he had had with former MP Mike Hancock, including some overbatim details of that conversation.
Hancock is reported to have said:
‘I’ve phoned him, I wish him all the very best.' ‘I wish him luck and I hope it goes well for him and working with Liberal Democrats and Labour.' 'I hope they work well together.'
What can we potentially gather from this reported conversation? And who is Hancock really talking to? I've come up with 8 things. (Just the eight?, I hear you ask …)
Read moreHancock's Back
And in true Hollywood style, just when the Liberal Democrats were banging on again about Hancock being 'old news', his past as a Lib Dem MP rose up off the ground and threw itself back into the fray.
Reported first in The Guardian and then in the Portsmouth News, just a few days ago, his previous well-publicised activities in Azerbaijan have finally come under current scrutiny. And this one isn't going to go away quietly - the Council Of Europe's assembly known as 'PACE' and the Speaker of the House of Commons are going to need to decide what to do with him.
Read moreGerald Vernon-Jackson and his Hancockian Resurgence to Lead a Lib Dem Portsmouth
Some politicians seem to have nine lives. And just when you think Gerald’s are all used up, along come the Labour Party to give him one of theirs.
Will Portsmouth Labour regret this? Today there are already comments on social media calling them ‘enablers’ and the ‘enablers of an enabler’ – referring to GVJ’s alleged role in ‘enabling’ Mike Hancock to evade for far too long the justice he deserved for his appalling behaviour towards ‘Annie’, a vulnerable constituent.
And indeed, this story is far from over – I hear from a source that two more members of the Portsmouth Liberal Party, one a former city councillor, have been spoken to fairly recently by the Police concerning their continued harassment of ‘Annie’ online, and their potentially breaching the High Court Order which preserves Hancock’s victim’s anonymity for life.
Read moreThe Liberal Democrat MPs, an Alleged 'Russian Spy', and Their Teeny Tiny London Flat
You really have to wonder how a married man can actually spend four years living in a small flat in London with his Russian lover and another Lib Dem MP, without anyone else seemingly knowing.
And then, a tribunal of SIAC - the Special Immigrations Appeals Commission - apparently believed Zatiliveter's account concerning what it judged to be an 'enduring' relationship. Go figure.
Read moreA History Lesson from Gertrude Bell to The Lib Dems - Hancock and Armenian Genocide Denial
I've been researching Gertrude Bell's role in WW1 recently; and, in re-reading some passages by her and about her, I’ve been reminded of the denial of the Armenian genocide by the then prominent Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock - and I feel fucked off all over again by the Liberal Democrat Party’s tolerance of his stance. The Lib Dems are not the Party you'd expect to be in denial about one of their own MP's genocide denial; but it seems that Hancock could get away with pretty much anything - including (in my opinion) indirectly traducing the memory of not just Bell but also British war hero Lt Col Charles Doughty-Wylie VC who was in the frontline, saved thousands of lives, and recorded in detail his prevention of the 'dry run' of the genocide.
Read moreThe ‘Best Deal We Could Get’ – The Role of Alistair Carmichael MP, Chief Whip, In a Scandal
Five very important men sat in a small room in the heart of the Parliamentary estate in London on a warm afternoon on 3rd June 2013. One of them was accused of sexually harassing and abusing a vulnerable female constituent, 'Annie'. Three of the other four had either been written to by her, or had met her to hear her allegations in person. They were all high-fliers - four Members of Parliament and a hotly-tipped successor, senior figures with illustrious careers behind and ahead of them. Or so they thought.
Read moreIf The Lib Dems Care About Women's Well-Being, They've Got A funny Way Of Showing It
Vince Cable has been a bit quiet lately on the scandals of sexual harassment of women and young men that is wrapping itself round Parliament. I've not seen anything at all from Alistair Carmichael MP, the Lib Dem whip who supposedly 'investigated' the circumstances whereby one of their own MPs crossed the line (and then some) with a vulnerable constituent, 'Annie'. I find it strange behaviour - especially when the Lib Dems reckon they care about women's well-being and mental health. I've got a whole archive of Lib Dem leaflets telling me just how much they care - all with photos of women being looked at very caringly indeed by a Lib Dem politician or a health practitioner.
For me it is a glaring Liberal Democrat dichotomy that whilst the party's members regularly boast of their support for mental health initiatives in their literature, many of their number have participated - and continue to participate - in behaviour that denigrates and demeans people with mental health issues, and some of them seem to have a real issue with women. In fact I think it's more than a dichotomy - it's a disastrous hypocrisy that feeds into an unpleasant narrative that anyone who has ever spoken of having a mental health issue, must naturally lack credibility and integrity, and be a liar and a 'nutter'.
Read moreWhy Weren't Hancock's Texts Enough?
I've often wondered why Hancock's wildly inappropriate text messages sent to vulnerable constituent 'Annie', which emerged in late 2010 and which he never denied sending, weren't enough for any kind of action from the Liberal Democrat Party at that time, given that he was a Cabinet Member of Portsmouth City Council with oversight of policies and practices which affected the lives of vulnerable people.
The Liberal Democrat Party, either locally in Portsmouth and federally, or both, could and should have acted on the behaviour which Hancock admitted to in 2010 - irrespective of any other pending matters. In fact as far as I can see, those pending matters became a handy excuse for inaction, and helped set up a convenient screen that the local Party and the federal Party chose to hide behind. For years. They left a victim in painful limbo for years. That the Police weren't charging Hancock was transmogrified by leading Lib Dems into 'alternative fact', as they tried and tried to cast a spell upon us all that no wrongdoing had been shown to have taken place. And at a number of points the inaction and delay in dealing with the wrongdoing were blamed upon the victim having complained.
This was the deception that was spouted by Lib Dems from Portsmouth up to London and repeated ad nauseam. So to some extent, this is an essay about the nature of collective denial, protection, fear and illusion-making within a group of people, using what is to me a very stark example of wrongdoing at its heart. For me, living through it, as a colleague of both Hancock and the Council Leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson, both forceful characters, it was troubling and worrying, and life within the Council Group became a toxic miasma of shape-shifting and discordant echoes. The day I finally resigned was a bitter-sweet liberation.
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