Calling the Shadow Home Secretary a ghoul in a suit is an unwarranted slur
Chris Philp clearly had only the best of intentions when he Tweeted as last night's horrifying events in Liverpool unfolded
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The Barrie Hudson Column
Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…
Shadow Home Secretary’s Tweet in no way exploited an ongoing tragedy to score political points
Whatever one’s personal political beliefs, any suggestion that a senior Opposition figure sought to indulge in partisan point-scoring even as terrified victims were still being taken to hospital is clearly monstrous.
Yesterday evening, as courageous members of the emergency services in Liverpool scrambled to save and bring comfort to dozens of innocent people who were hurt when a vehicle was driven into a Premier League victory parade, many people made their feelings known.
One of them was the Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, who took to Twitter with a message concluding: “The public deserve to know the full facts as quickly as possible.”
This has led to some monstrous accusations being levelled at this clearly morally irreproachable elected public servant, chiefly that his comment was worded in such a way as to give the impression that there was going to be some sort of cover-up by the police and the Government, so as to save the Government embarrassment and public ire.
Some have even gone so far as to describe Mr Philp as nothing more or less than a ghoul in a suit whose first thought when contemplating a dreadful human tragedy was to indulge in some sort of political point-scoring exercise.
Indeed, some have accused him of exploiting not just last night’s tragedy but also slyly exploiting the memory of other horrific tragedies, notably one which occurred last year in a town not far from Liverpool.
Clearly nothing could be further from the truth.
For one thing, as a simple glance at our recently-sourced images of the Shadow Home Secretary and a ghoul in a suit reveals, the two look nothing like one another.
To address some of the specifics of the criticism of Mr Philp, there was clearly nothing about this tragedy, which was almost immediately revealed to be nothing whatsoever to do with any form of terrorism, that might have led large numbers of frightened and angry people to jump to the conclusion that it was a terrorist incident.
It is not as though, for example, this tragic non-terrorist incident bore any resemblance, however superficial, to other incidents in the past which were indeed acts of terrorism, and that it was therefore incumbent on anybody in a position of authority not to say anything irresponsible in case they heaped further horror on the situation.
