Theresa May’s performances at PMQs (Prime Minister’s Questions) started badly and have grown ever worse as the floundering PM’s ground has eroded beneath her. But today we saw the spectacle of a Prime Minister reduced to stammering incoherence by a simple question that she simply had no viable answer for.
Labour MP Lisa Nandy left May looking a wreck and struggling to form a sentence – with a simple challenge on why May as Home Secretary did nothing when Nandy raised with her three times the issue of Tory ‘Whips’ using information on sex assaults and harassment to keep MPs in line, instead of dealing with it:
May looked like her legs were about to give way. Guilt put on the hook will do that to a person. Just about the one coherent phrase she managed was the ‘I am very clear’ line that she always uses when she’s about to obfuscate and has no intention of being clear at all.
Ms Nandy subsequently tweeted the text of one of those three questions she had put to May and seen no action:
3 yrs ago, I asked Theresa May to act on evidence that Whips had covered up sexual misconduct. Today at #PMQs I asked her again to act. pic.twitter.com/NBl0iwyJK3
— Lisa Nandy (@lisanandy) November 1, 2017
The BBC interview to which Ms Nandy referred in 2014 – from the 1995 programme Westminster’s Secret Service – is as shocking as it is awful, with a frank admission from former Whip Tim Fortescue that the Tory Whips would even help cover up child abuse or ‘any kind of scandal‘ for Tory MPs if they could exploit it to keep them pliant:
Small wonder that May floundered and struggled not to collapse altogether. She knew about this – was asked three times just by Lisa Nandy about it – and did precisely nothing.
Allowing abusers to remain protected and in power – and enabling the abuse of more women and men to continue in Westminster.
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