I think I know a certain amount about insults. Having arms like sails and legs like tree trunks, I am well used to wearing my skin as thick as my belts. So I must admit that when news of Carol Thatcher’s comments in The One Show green room broke, I thought that it was a bit of a Beeboid overreaction. Like many on the right including, I think, Iain Dale, I assumed that she had been referring to Andy Murray’s mad “afro” haircut and that the whole thing had been deliberately taken out of context.
It doesn’t seem that way now. While I don’t think anyone is accusing Ms Thatcher of being directly racist, it’s quite clear that she displayed thoughtless uncouth ignorance and then, when pulled up on the description, she repeated it. What unsettles me about this is the reaction of Conservatives to her sacking. So many are accusing the Corporation of being on a mission to “get” Carol because of her surname. Leaving aside whether she would have been employed by any television company if it wasn’t for her surname, I would argue that it is the Conservatives who are jumping to Carol’s defence precisely because of who her mother is.
I’m conscious that I am referring to Conservatives when, of course, there has been no official statement from the Conservative Party, and why should there be. However a quick look at ConservativeHome, Iain Dale, the Coffee House, shows by far the majority of commentators are in full-on, mouth-foaming mode. On the Coffee House, I made a few gentle points about how I thought my own employer (a long way from the public sector) would react to the use of such a word and I was patronised in a quite antidiluvian way. Moderate articles by posters such as James Forsyth have been pilloried as being more appropriate to the New Statesman. I have no doubt that many posters on these sites, often the most vocal, will not actually be Conservative Party members, but UKIP members and worse. Nonetheless I wonder if they would be moved to Carol’s defence if she had been just any ditsy, rah-ry middle-aged woman.
I think we should be very grateful that the Labour Party’s main attack dog in the blogosphere is the odious Mr Draper. Fortunately by being such an aggressive, twisting, so-and-so, his attempts to portray the entire Conservative Party as racist have gone largely un-noticed in the real world. Too many of the correspondents of the right have, unfortunately, been presenting him with an open goal recently.
