@DavidWrightMP’s Hollow Excuse

David Wright MP managed to get himself in trouble yesterday with the following tweet:

He has since retracted and back-pedalled furiously, but not before denying everything:

He genuinely apologises, before then claiming his account was “tinkered with”.

Sorry, but that’s rubbish.  As mentioned on Paul Waugh’s blog, you can’t edit a tweet.  More importantly, the statements fail as a matter of logic.  If your account was hacked, surely you don’t have anything to apologise for?

The problem really is that this is a matter of consistency.  If his account had been hacked, it would have been an out-of-character post, separate from all his others.  It wasn’t.  Throughout the day Mr. Wright was posting and “engaging” with other twitterers clearly in his capacity as MP, and during this time several tweets came out to substantiate the idea that he genuinely did write the “scum-sucking pig” comment.  Here are just a few of his previous missives, sent at various times and on various days

#1: “upsetting Tories is great fun.”  – Your apology wasn’t forced then?

#2: “Tory twitterers are fair game I think you’ll find” – You didn’t write the comment, did you?

#3: Or perhaps he was “#torybaitingforfun”

#4: When he discovered he was “Upsetting tories again”, he didn’t apologise, but concluded he “must’ve hit a nerve”.

#5: Of course, for him the issue was that it was the use of the word “scum”.  Because it’s not like he’s never called Tories scum before?

Mr. Wright probably thought he could get away with such an excuse, given what he thinks of the intellectual calibre of his opponents.  The problem is, if you want to claim your account was hacked, you need to take action to disavow the results as soon as you find out.  Moreover, it’s the oldest excuse in the internet user’s book to distance oneself from a stupid remark made in haste.  It renders his “sorry but” worthless.

Charon QC fairly asks whether this matters.  It does.  Politics is at a low, and tough decisions have to be made.  Calling each other “scum” and going for the cheap attack undermines what little value we still set in our political system.  You can’t debate, and you can’t have a civil society, if you’re just going round calling the “other side” scum, nazis and so forth.  As David Wright himself says, “resorting to personal attacks” is a sign of “losing the argument”.

Tagged as: David Wright, twitter