To adapt the words
of Oscar Wilde, to lose one parliamentary candidate due to unfortunate use of
social media looks like misfortune, but to lose ten starts to look like carelessness.
Unless, of course, we are talking about Reform UK Party Ltd, the mostly Farage-owned
limited company standing over 600 candidates (although a currently unknowable
number of those may have fallen by the wayside in the meantime) in the
forthcoming election. It seems that selecting any old Tom, Dick, or Harry as a
candidate and waiting for their past misdemeanours to be exposed is actually a deliberate
strategy. They have, in effect, outsourced the vetting of candidates to the
media, who are having something of a field day as they work their way through
the list uncovering incriminating past statements.
Outsourcing
candidate vetting is a novel approach to a difficult issue. The more cynical
might even wonder whether Reform are quite happy to be associated in the mind
of potential voters with some of the racism and misogyny being spouted by their
candidates whilst also hoping to get some sort of credit for acting quickly to
sack them when their words are exposed. Both selecting candidates and
subsequently sacking them are definitely easier for a hierarchical company
where one man has effective total control than for a democratic party where members
might, wholly unreasonably, expect to have an input. Abolishing concepts such
as membership and democracy is not without its advantages. For a control freak
or would-be dictator at least. And for a party which has, according to the
polls, zero probability of having anyone elected, maybe they really just aren’t
that worried. The company’s puppet leader, Richard Tice, said that “Every
party has their fair share frankly of muppets and morons”. From the horse’s
mouth, as it were. But I almost agree with him; it’s just that some have a ‘fairer’
share than others.
He does make the
entirely correct point that the vetting process is “valid the day you do it,
but if the following Friday night someone has a glass or two too much and puts
something out on social media they permanently regret, in a sense it never
stops”. Well, yes. Although quite how that applies in the case of the
candidate for Orpington whose offensive words date from 2019 is an unanswered
question. A date 5 years ago is hardly between one day and the following Friday
night. Not without a Tardis, anyway.
Candidate vetting is
a difficult process, and can be sensitive. I recall one case of a Plaid
candidate who was outraged to discover that party officials had looked at their (public)
social media accounts, and claimed it was an invasion of their privacy. We
thought that it was an extreme reaction, but it highlights the fairly common
belief that social media accounts, even if visible to the world, are somehow
also private to the individual and his or her online friends. Understanding the
way in which social media can broadcast and amplify throwaway comments is still
slow in developing in some quarters.
And even when
candidates have been vetted, and nothing incriminating has been found, one can
never be entirely sure that the individual won’t, as Tice put it, have a glass
or two and say something silly. It’s not only a problem for Reform, although to
date they’re the only group that have tried to turn a problem into a ‘feature’,
as a software developer might describe it. Whether it’s just bad luck, or
whether there is a particular propensity on the political ‘right’ to say silly
things, it is the Tories who have, in recent months and years, suffered some of
the biggest problems. Some of them seem to think that they are just voicing
aloud ‘what everybody thinks’ and that makes it just common sense. That was,
for instance, a major part of Lee Anderson’s defence. Indeed, returning to
Toms, Dicks, and Harrys (and especially the second of those) it turns out that
the MP who sent pictures of his body parts to a man through a dating app, and
provided the contact details of other MPs so that they could also be targeted,
is a fully paid-up member of the so-called Common Sense Group of Tory MPs. But
then, ‘common sense’ as defined by Tice’s ‘muppets and morons’ is always going
to look a bit strange to the rest of us. An inability to agree on a common
sense definition of common sense is one of the reasons why vetting is so hard
to do.
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