“I was stupid [and] there’s no fool like an old fool,” said Simon Danczuk, MP for Rochdale after apologising unreservedly for his “inappropriate” behaviour” in sending sexually inappropriate text messages to a 17 year old woman. Within minutes rather than hours, the General Secretary of the Labour Party had suspended him from the Party pending a National Executive Committee investigation. Danczuk is therefore no longer a Labour MP and is listed as “independent”.
Danczuk’s road to Parliament began in controversy: during the selection process for Labour’s candidate for Rochdale in the 2010 General Election, Manchester Labour councillor Afzal Khan secured the highest number of local nominations but was not shortlisted. Danczuk won the selection after a high turnout of postal votes.
Danczuk went on to take the seat from the Lib-Dems – despite Gordon Brown’s visit to a local voter and the subsequent broadcast of his comments that she had been bigoted during their discussion on immigration.
As an MP, he quickly made a name for himself outside Rochdale. It was Danczuk who made the formal complaint to the police which led to Tory Minister Chris Huhne being found guilty of lying. Huhne’s car was caught speeding, and he pretended that his wife had been driving to avoid the penalty points being added to his licence. He also achieved a degree of notoriety after his wife, Karen Danczuk, began tweeting selfies, many of which varied between mildly flirtatious and overtly sexual.
Danczuk also took up the cause of abused children. In particular, he was instrumental in allegations about the late Cyril Smith, former Lib-Dem MP for Rochdale, becoming public – which suggested that Smith had been part of a child-abusing paedophile group. Danczuk appointed himself something of an expert on child sex abuse thereafter, going on to pursue, publicly, allegations of child sex abuse and cover ups of similar allegations in Westminster. In July this year, around the time that his marriage broke down, Danczuk announced that he was discontinuing his campaigning work on abuse as it had driven him to drink and made him depressed to the point of being suicidal. It seemed at the time an odd level of detail for an MP to share with the public – as if Danczuk was prioritising publicity for himself rather than releasing newsworthy material.
In 2015, Danczuk’s activities seem almost to have been designed to hit the headlines. He was one of the many MPs whose constituencies were flooded this year, and like many other MPs he called for cutbacks in flood defences to be reversed. Unlike other MPs, he called for cuts in foreign aid should be cut to fund better flood defences. In particular, he called for cuts in aid to Bangladesh – which did not go down well with many of the large number of voters of Bangladeshi heritage in his constituency.
Before that, he made it known that he opposed Jeremy Corbyn MP being Leader of the Labour Party – despite Corbyn’s massive majority. This was a gift to the tabloids, who slavered over finding a Labour MP who would speak out injudiciously against Corbyn. The resulting spotlight fed Danczuk’s love of hyperbole. He pompously announced that if the Labour Party, under Corbyn’s leadership, did not do well in next May’s elections, he would stand against Corbyn. The papers called on Corbyn to sack him – Corbyn did not respond to the calls and just got on with his job, leaving the sideshow to run its course, which it may now have done.
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The sexually explicit text messages which have now come to light are not controversial: Danczuk has said that the media coverage of the messages is “not entirely accurate”, but has admitted sending them, and that they are inappropriate.
The messages were sent to a young woman named Sophena Houlihan over the summer. Media reports vary over whether Ms Houlihan asked Danczuk to give her a job in his constituency office earlier this year or whether she had just asked him for advice on how to make a career in politics. The two kept in contact for some weeks via text messaging – which soon became lewd. He texted “God I’m horny!” She texted that she had fantasised about having sex with him. He responded that he should “discipline” her for that thought and when she agreed he texted “You want me to spank you?”
It seems that Ms Houlihan, who is now 18, soon found the explicit messages distasteful rather than exciting. Mr Danczuk should have known better than to send them. It is believed that they were seen by Danczuk’s girlfriend, Clare Hamilton, who ended the relationship with Danczuk. At the time, she commented that she believed he was having online dealings with a number of women. The messages were reported to local police who, after investigation, confirmed that no criminal offences had been committed.
Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn was asked about Danczuk while he was viewing flood damage in York. He said: “We are concerned about things like this and that’s why it should be investigated. We expect the highest standards from our MPs.”
An official statement from the Labour Party had a similar tone, stating, “The General Secretary of the Labour Party has today suspended Simon Danczuk’s membership of the Party, pending an investigation into allegations published today. A full investigation will now take place under the authority of the National Executive Committee, which will be responsible for determining any further action.” Tower Hamlets Labour Party members will be excused for indulging in a hollow laugh at the idea that the National Executive has responded to allegations being made by investigating those allegations rather than sentencing the person they relate to without investigation – but the Executive has done the right thing here.
In some ways, Danczuk is the new John Prescott: gruff and working class – and trying to break from old fashioned sexism and racism but not always quite knowing how. After Danczuk started attacking Corbyn, thousands signed an online petition asking for him to be deselected. Pride goes before a fall, they say: and it is now possible that Danczuk, as did Prescott before him, may have engineered his own fall from grace.
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