Chris Bryant: Rhondda Y-Fronts

A LABOUR former minister has revealed details of a bizarre email in which he was slated as a politician – before being encouraged to reveal his dating profiles.

Chris Bryant told the House of Commons this afternoon he was labelled “Rhondda Y-fronts” by an admirer, a reference to when he sent a photo of himself wearing only Y-fronts to a gay dating website.

The email initially criticised a television appearance made by Mr Bryant but the writer then quickly changed tack and told the Rhondda MP he fancied him.

Speaking during the second reading of the Digital Economy Bill, he said: “We all know as Members of Parliament that we live in a digital economy because we have so many emails from constituents and others.

“This is not from a constituent but I thought I might share it with the House: ‘Dear Rhondda Y-fronts – just watched you and that other dull dishcloth of an MP on Daily Politics.

“‘You both sum up clearly why Labour will never win an election any time soon – uninspiring, pathetic career politicians with no substance or gravity.

“‘By the way, are you still on Gaydar, Grindr or Scruff? If so, what’s your profile as I quite fancy you.'”

Mr Bryant joked: “Self praise is no praise.”

The Sun.

Once got heavily cruised by Chris in the queue for the loos at The Shadow Lounge. Sadly I only have sex with socialists.

Chris Bryant: Death Threats

Published without comment.

Bianca Jagger: Oops!

The human rights campaigner started a Twitter storm after sharing a list of MPs who voted in favour of the Iraq War in 2003 in an effort to support current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Bianca wrote: "List of UK #MPs who voted for #IraqWar - Please read it carefully, understand why they want @jeremycorbyn out RT."

However, when the former model's followers clicked through the attached link, it didn't direct to a Wikipedia list, but a webpage for a far-right encyclopaedia with vile and hugely offensive descriptions of Labour and Conservative representatives.

Next to Tottenham MP David Lammy's name, the editor wrote: "Negro", while Bethnal Green & Bow's Oona King was described as "Judeo-Negress".

Rhondda's Chris Bryant was described as: "Infamous homosexual exhibitionist, brags about loving 'rimming' and 'fisting'. Connected to Labour Friends of Israel."

And in the notes next to Crosby's Claire Curtis-Thomas, it read: "Married to a Jew."

Other MPs were described as "Jews", "openly homosexual" and "feminist nuts"...

 
Daily Star.

Gay MPs: Stiff Members

LGBT History Month is celebrated in February – and this photograph of 28 MPs and peers is a bit of history in itself, as it is the largest number of publicly out parliamentarians pictured together at one time, from a parliament with more gay members than any in the world...

Independent On Sunday, apropos of fuck all.

We've got the highest number of out gay crooks and liars in the world!

Wooh! etc.

The IoS provide a handy Who's Who guide.

Remember their names, come the revolution these motherfuckers will be the first against the wall.

PS There's also a collection of glib platitudes by Chris Bryant and David Mundell, Secretary Of State for Scotland, who came out a few weeks ago and is now an expert on all things gay.

Tweet Of The Day: Match Of The Day

Why I want to go head to head with Tyson Fury, by Labour MP @RhonddaBryant https://t.co/C9XAmMfLYp pic.twitter.com/YqxroGPzbV

— Mirror Politics (@MirrorPolitics) December 4, 2015

LOL! etc.

Out: But Who Isn't?

Pink News.

Again, it's 2015, why say someone is 'out' - like as if being 'in' is the default option?

And like you're gonna say if someone is in the closet.

'Sake.

PS Not sure which politicians aren't out these days. Maybe William Hague and Liam Fox?

PS The OUT Angela Eagle is as boring as twigs. As is...

But he's an OUT gay, so hooray! Never mind the (right-wing) politics...

Twitterspat Of The Day: Blood Ban

@Mike_Fabricant you are a deeply offensive man and it's time you apologise

— Chris Bryant MP (@RhonddaBryant) June 17, 2015

Two of our leading parliamentarians, there.

Church News: You Sexy Dancer!

The Londoner, thumbing the Rev Richard Coles’s autobiography, found an intriguing passage about
his days with The Communards. “Wherever we went,” Coles writes, “Jimmy [Somerville] was fêted by the gay community... in venues like the Nightingale in Birmingham or Rockshots in Newcastle, friendly, with go-go dancers in cages, one of whom I discovered years later was the Rev Giles Fraser, Canon of St Paul’s.”

Surely not! Intrigued, we pinged the open-minded Fraser pinged an email asking if he was a dancer. “Yep, I think I spent more time in Rockshots than I did in lectures when I was at university in Newcastle,” he recalled. “Did I dance in a cage? I can’t remember but I certainly wore some strange kit: bleached blond flat-top and a M&S plastic bag one night, I seem to remember. They were great days.”

The Londoner is jealous. It’s been years since we danced in a cage.

Londoners' Diary, Evening Standard.

From last week, but only found by Fagburn during his recent sojourn to London. ^^^

And to think, some laugh at me for picking days-old newspapers off the floor and reading them!

And from a similarly yellowing Times' Diary...

Chris Bryant, the vicar turned MP, was talking to one of the TMS lackeys at the launch of Fathomless Riches, the memoir of the Rev Richard Coles, the pop star turned vicar, when out of nowhere during a chat about politics he named a famous gay actor and said: “I don’t think I’ve had sex with him.” My chap was nonplussed at the non sequitur but Bryant continued: “He says we’ve had sex in Clapham. I’m fairly certain I’ve never had sex south of the river.” Makes him sound like a carnal cabbie.

O-kay...

PS Other ex-members of The Communards are available.

Thought For The Day (Not): Rev Richard Coles

“[Going to church] was like going to AA and thinking, ‘I need this but I don’t want to be part of your club.’ I felt this powerful attraction to faith but I rationally didn’t believe it was real. In the end I had to put that to one side. I told myself, ‘I am hungry and this is the food I need to eat.’ So I did eat and everything else began to shift. My anxieties were not in the same order as my connection with it.”

“It is difficult to imagine yourself having to defend and be a public representation of an organisation that seems to discriminate against gay people… We’re in a complicated foxtrot that goes backwards as well as forwards. But if you can live in hope, you can live.”

The wonderful Rev Richard Coles is profiled in The Times today.

His autobiography, Fathomless Riches - alternative title; More E, Vicar? - is published next week; “Sex in lay-bys and telling a lie about being HIV might be too fruity for the Church of England, but I’m not going to apologise for telling the truth.”

The Daily Mail are shocked!

Elsie Bitchface is however also adored by the Daily Express; '... a clergyman who won't do Thought For The Day because "I just don't like being preached to over my boiled egg. I can't bear it, I really can't". No wonder he has been dubbed "the atheist's favourite priest".

Not 'arf!

Update: Ex-gay priest Chris Bryant on the hip priest, The Guardian. 'Like Kenneth Williams in a cassock and biretta.' And here she is on cracking form in The Independent...

Richard Ingrams: So Farewell Then...

In 2005 he quit the Observer as columnist over its pro-Iraq war stance. "That was a said affair. I got on with Roger [Alton, the then editor] fine but unfortunately he was seduced by Alastair Campbell when he was invited round to No 10. These people are impressed by those sort of things." He was, though,fired from the Independent as a columnist by then-editor Chris Blackhurst in 2011. "He invited me to his club, the Reform Club and we had a very nice lunch. I went away thinking he's a decent bloke, seems to like the column. Two days later I got a letter from him saying: 'I enjoyed our lunch and you're fired.'"

"And they brought in this new columnist to replace me, Chris Bryant, the gay vicar." That must have really hurt, I suggest to Ingrams, particularly as you're a committed homophobe? "No, no, no," says Ingrams. He waves away the question when I ask him to expand on this – leaving me unsure if he is denying the hurt or the homophobia. But his hostility to homosexuality is certainly longstanding – it guided Private Eye's long-running opposition to the gay rights movement during his editorship and has led him in the past to tell one interviewer: 'Don't you think it's disgusting what they do?' I think it's very hard, if you're not that way yourself, not to think it's disgusting … The idea that they're just the same as everyone else seems to me just wrong – most of them have terrible lives."

Profile in The Guardian.

Richard Ingrams - one of England's stately homophobes - has resigned, under something of a cloud, as editor of The Oldie, a magazine he founded 22 years ago.

Under Ian Hislop's editorship, Private Eye's infamous homophobia soon disappeared.

Fagburn understands they even employ a known homosexual these days.

Mr Ingrams must be turning in his grey y-fronts.

Chris Bryant: So Farewell Then...

Chris Bryant signs off from his Independent column.
Quite a decent chap I've always thought...

Update: I have been informed Chris Bryant is "a right-wing anti-immigration reactionary bastard - and that's just the view in the Labour Party."
I stand corrected!
Lest we forget, Chris is also an expenses-diddling war-supporting ex-Tory and ex-curate.
He was quite good to me once, though, all things considered.

Paul Flowers: It's Political Correctness Gone Mad!

The Daily Mail's gay Uncle Tom, Andrew Pierce, predictably sticks his oar in. 

Also in the Mail today, their new star columnist Dominic Lawson writes; Just tick the right diversity boxes and, hey presto, you can run a major bank.
Eh?
The liberal conspiracy gets worse...
"But as a member of the ‘LGBT community’, Flowers can somehow be seen as part of an oppressed minority, whom it would be politically incorrect to denounce as a sexual predator..." etc etc.

Yeah, right, that's happened.
Fagburn can't recall seeing a single sentence defending Paul Flowers against  the media lynch mob.
Lawson replaces Melanie Phillips - who left the Mail under something of a cloud recently.
Oddly Phillips has written a rather similar article about Flowers for this week's Spectator; The Revd Paul Flowers ticked all the right 'progressive' boxes — that's why he could get away with anything.
Maybe it would have been easier for the Mail to keep Mad Mel on?

PS Another professional Tory shitbag, Toby Young (no relation), pipes up in the Daily Telegraph;

As for his crimes and misdemeanours, this is where the "smear" really does exceed a Tory spin doctor's wildest dreams. Fined for committing an act of gross indecency in a public toilet in 1981! Forced to resign as a Labour Councillor in 2011 when pornography was discovered on his computer! Caught red-handed by a national newspaper trying to buy crystal meth, crack cocaine and ketamine! Renowned for his use of prostitutes! Engaging in behaviour that even his former rent-boy described as "debauched"! The list goes on and on.
It certainly has the whiff of a smear – the most imaginative, brilliantly designed smear ever cooked up. Miliband's right about that. Trouble is, it's true...

Good to see Toby "Sniff Sniff" Young banging on about Paul Flowers' drug use here...

Question Time: Paris Is Burning

Paris Lees seemed to be quite the hit on last night's Question Time.
A star is born! etc.
Though it turned into a bit of a love-in on Twitter.
Surely everyone can't have, not just agreed with, but adored everything she said?
But yes, she did make those identikit MPs - Chris Bryant included - look ever so grey.
It's not on YouTube in full yet, but you can watch it on BBC iPlayer here.

Question Time is repeated on BBC2 at 10am, apparently they're going to take out Ed Milliband's penis. http://t.co/b7QdmZJLxk
— Paris Lees (@ParisLees) November 1, 2013

Paris is profiled on the BBC News website, From Prison To Transgender Role Model...

Strangely, Paris thanked provocative writer Julie Burchill when she topped the Pink List earlier this month.
Burchill was widely criticised for an Observer article in which she described "trannies" as "a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs" - a piece which Paris describes as "pure transphobia".
"I'm grateful to her for doing that because it was so bad that it put trans on the radar for a lot of people," says Paris.
"Julie Burchill, thank you for being awful."

Gay Marriage: The End Is Nigh!

On Monday and Tuesday, the Commons will be debating the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. Doubtless there will be the usual appeals to biblical texts and church teaching and complaints about the immorality of “redefining marriage”. We will be threatened with plagues of pink locusts, swarms of rainbow-coloured frogs and the end of civilisation as we know it. Exaggerated concerns will be raised about teachers in religious schools being forced to mention the existence of homosexuality.
Some will even complain that civil registrars will be required to perform same-sex marriages, even though registrars are civil servants employed expressly to register that which is legal, and we would never allow them to refuse to marry divorcees just because of any personal convictions they may have about the indissolubility of marriage.
Despite all the huffing and puffing, there will be a hefty majority in favour of the Bill, and I hope that when it comes to it, the unelected House will remember that the Commons is more representative of the country...
In the end, though, the issue is simple: everyone should be treated equally under the law and nobody should be discriminated against merely because of their sexuality.

Chris Bryant MP, writing in his column in The Independent.
Oh, how I dream of the day when we're not discussing this and the whole silly pantomime is finally over...

Full Disclosure: I've cut out a section in the middle where he argues for straight people being allowed civil partnerships.
I agree wholeheartedly, and did so merely for reasons of space, so please don't write in.

Marriage: Question Time

 “I have just never felt that this is what we should be focusing on this... And it seems to me that there was no huge demand for this and we didn’t need to spend a lot of parliamentary time and upset vast numbers of people - vast numbers of people - in order to do this."

Philip Hammond, Defence Secretary.

WELL WHY DON'T ALL YOU SODDING TORY MPS STOP GOING ON ABOUT IT THEN?!!

Clip from last night's Question Time, posted to YouTube by Coalition4Marriage, who've curiously cut out all the responses, including Chris Bryant's, that make Hammond look a serial homophobe, and a hypocrite, and a bigoted fool.
You can watch the whole programme on BBC iPlayer.

• The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill is back in the Commons on Monday and Tuesday. Should be a hoot.

Margaret Thatcher: Some Of Her Best Junior Cabinet Members Were...

Generally she arrived at her opinions based on some simple principle. British history and her libertarian instincts had the strongest influence in forming those principles. That could lead to surprising attitudes. She was neither racist nor homophobic, nor even judgmental about people's private lives. She chose many Jews to serve in her cabinet and many gays. Cecil Parkinson's affair with his secretary worried but didn't disgust her. She had an extraordinary rapport with the Asian community, with whom she had some values in common...

A gushing tribute to Margaret Thatcher by ex-gay ex-Tory MP, Michael Portillo in The Observer - but then what did you expect?
In a breath-taking bit of revisionism Portillo argues the Iron Lady was actually a really nice lady.
And in-no-way was she homophobic - something ex-Tory MP and still-gay Matthew Parris also claims.
But if so, as Chris Bryant wrote in The Independent yesterday, doesn't that make her exploiting homophobia for electoral gain and sponsoring Section 28 "cynicism writ large", and arguably all the more odious?
Portillo suggests that having "many gays" in her cabinet is proof she couldn't have been anti-gay.
Though I can't quite see how this follows - doesn't politics usually operate under the maxim; "It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice"?
Maybe it didn't matter if a man was one of them as long as he was "one of us".
But did she even know who was? One gets the feeling she was somewhat gauche.
Here is a list of all her Cabinet members.* 
By Portillo's logic she didn't seem to like gay men that much, or maybe didn't like that many gay men.
There was the late and closeted Lord Avon and Sir Peter Morrison - though the latter was widely suspected of being a child abuser, which perhaps supports the notion that Thatcher wasn't "judgmental about people's private lives".
Is Michael "I had some homosexual experiences as a young person" Portillo including himself here?
Despite the rumours that Mr P was having an affair with his cabinet colleague Peter Lilley, it's now assumed he isn't/wasn't gay.
And so who does that leave?
Norman St John-Stevas!

PS Has anyone heard if Ivan Massow and Matthew Parris have been invited to the funeral?  

* Note also there is only one female cabinet minister here, the psychopathically homophobic Baroness Young. 

Thought For The Day: Chris Bryant

I’m grateful to Mrs Thatcher; she turned me into a socialist. Not particularly because of that “there’s no such thing as society” nonsense. True, her closeness to General Pinochet didn’t help. After all, friends of mine were beaten, tortured and killed by his regime while Britain turned a blind eye. And while I was attending Free Nelson Mandela concerts, she was condemning him as a terrorist and refusing to consider sanctions. But that’s not it.

It all changed when I went to theological college. First stop, a month-long placement in Walker in Newcastle. This was 1984. Across the UK, unemployment was at its highest level, 11.9 per cent, and in Walker, every second man had no job. The housing estates were begging for investment. The inner city felt resented and ignored. I ate every evening with a different member of the congregation, and although many were scraping along on benefits, they were generous to a fault. Every Sunday, the church held a second collection, for the miners, and once a fortnight a minibus with tins of food, children’s toys and other gifts went down to the twinned church in the County Durham minefield.
We were all in it together. Hence the socialism.

And finally, a few years later, I worked out I was gay, and that’s when I really lost it with Thatcher. Again, not because I think she was homophobic. People who knew her tell me she was not. No, my problem was that when her party wanted red meat she gave them Section 28, a ludicrous amendment to the Local Government Act, that prohibited teachers from “promoting” homosexuality or “pretend family relationships”. This was cynicism writ large. It meant another generation of youngsters growing up hating themselves. And she sponsored it.

Chris Bryant MP writing in The Independent.

PS The illustration is of the NOTSENSIBLES single I'm In Love With Margaret Thatcher, which - despite it being rather obviously a piss-take - some Thatcher-lovers have taken literally and started a campaign to make it number one.
Who says irony is lost on stupid people? 

Chris Bryant: Pants

Labour MP for Chris Bryant MP [sic] was in his usual self-deprecating form at a Spectator debate about the Leveson inquiry on Wednesday night, joking with the audience over his appearance in the tabloids in a photo taken of him from a gay dating site in his underpants. To fellow panellist Richard Littlejohn he had nothing but thanks. Littlejohn, so Bryant tells it, featured him in his Daily Mail column no fewer than "eight times" and had thoughtfully used that same "very charming photo" of him in his underwear. "It's great," Bryant joked, "it increased my majority in Rhondda Valley." Bryant said he hadn't made a single complaint about the photo in the nine years since it was published, nor about its repeated use. But there was one small thing that did upset him, he said, and that was the publication of his address. He explained that subsequent to this he had a phone call one night. The conversation went like this: "Hi, my name is Colin, and I'm very submissive and I'm outside your door." "Well fuck off then," said Bryant. To which the caller apparently replied: "I'm not that submissive." But there was a serious reason for his anecdote. Bryant had to call the police to get the intruder removed from outside his abode, and that is one of the reasons why he wants "a smidgeon" of regulation to establish the new press regulator. 

The Guardian, Media Monkey.

PS There's something in the above which means a certain gay magazine could get sued, see if you can spot it...

Nadine Dorries MP: Behind The Price Of Milk

"Unfortunately, I think that not only are Cameron and Osborne two posh boys who don't know the price of milk, but they are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others - and that is their real crime."

Tory MP Nadine Dorries talking to the BBC's Daily Politics Show.
In fine she is correct - this is a government led by a cabal of ex-public school boy millionaires who have no idea how the other 99% live.
If only we could leave it there. 
The quote has been blown up by the media as a killer punch to David Cameron and George Osborne.
It sums up a regular recent Blimpish bleat from the Tory right that argues issues like gay marriage are only of interest to some metropolitan liberal elite, and are alienating the party from many ordinary voters.
Naturally the Telegraph loves Dorries's latest outburst.
But what does Nadine Dorries really mean?
Is it really a concern about the price of petrol and pasties and milk?
She's made her media name in the last two years mainly by mouthing off against social, specifically sexual, liberalism, and pushing pointless Private Members' bills about abortion and teaching sexual abstinence to schoolgirls.
Chris Bryant called the last one "the daftest piece of legislation I have seen".
I think she's a complete mentalist, but then even her colleagues call her "Mad Nad".
But it is exactly "this sort of thing" that vexes her far more than the cost of living.
Here she is ten days ago expanding on her theme for her blog for ConservativeHome;

'Social liberalism has always been an indulgence of the wealthy. The people who can afford to enjoy liberalism whilst protecting their own children from the societal influences of such by sending them to the most expensive schools. In addition to the majority of the British public being far from social liberals, they also aren’t stupid. They know that each family struggles financially whilst we send a 'billion of our hard earned cash to Europe each year.
'They know that gay marriage is a side issue which many gay couples living outside of London or bohemian Brighton (sorry Graeme) have no interest in and as one gay couple articulated to me in my constituency, “we wish Cameron and others would just shut the **** up and leave us alone in our civil partnership”. This from a couple who happily contribute to their local community and resent their relationship becoming a focus point for discussion as they queue for fish and chips and get on with their lives. Not all gay couples live in the south of England.
'And that is just about what everyone is doing, getting on with their busy lives and surviving to do too much about any of the disconnect they feel, however, suddenly a new dynamic has entered the political arena and penetrated the chatter bubble of everyone’s daily lives.'

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Thought For The Day: Chris Bryant

'Twenty or so eight- to 10-year-olds from Cwmclydach primary school trundled down the road to my constituency office last Friday because they were studying politics in the Rhondda. We had laid out some election leaflets for them to peruse and they seemed to be taking a genuine interest. Then came the questions, starting with: "So why did you become an MP?" That was easy enough. The next one was a bit more difficult: "Why did you stop being a vicar?"

'The truth is that I was ordained in 1986 and, within a year or so, at the grand old age of 25, I worked out that I was gay – and that is what prompted my move. But something in me felt I couldn't quite explain all that to a group of eight-year-olds. By the time I had sorted this out in my head, though, there was another question: "What's your wife's name?" So this time I fessed up. "Actually, I haven't got a wife. I'm gay, so I have a husband and he's called Jared." Open mouths all round. I expected fulminating letters from parents. But afterwards the teacher explained that they regularly talk about these matters with the children as the word "gay" is often used as derogatory in the playground and several children have gay parents or siblings.
'So the world has changed...'

Chris Bryant writes about the hot topic of the week in his Independent column.
The photo shows Bryant at his civil partnership ceremony at the House Of Commons in 2010.

And here's how many stories newspapers* have run about gay marriage in the last week (with the number of pro stories in brackets).

Daily Telegraph - 24 (2).
The Guardian - 16 (14).
The Independent - 13 (13).
The Times - 11 (10).
Daily Mail - 8 (2).
Daily Express 4 (1).

*  Includes articles only published online - the Mail's two pro-gay marriage stories did not appear in the print edition.
Also which stories I think are pro or anti are of course highly subjective, but it's my blog so NERR.