Dick of the year: Tommy Sheridan
This is a nomination for the Bright Green ‘Dick of the year award’ from James Mackenzie. You can nominate too by emailing 200ish words to adamramsay ‘at’ gmail.com before 30 December.
Tommy Sheridan is a worthy contender for this inaugural award, despite the real problem not being with his eponymous member. If he’d stuck his hand up when the News of the World had first run the “un-named MSP is a shagger” story, after a few weeks of internal turmoil in his party it would all have been forgotten. Even a more dignified “it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to discuss my private life, which remains a matter for me and Gail” would have worked.
Instead, he tried to get his party’s entire leadership to lie about it all, he went ad hominem with his female former colleagues in particular, he broke the hearts of a generation of left activists in Scotland and then split them in the classic left style. He lost the cross-party respect he rightly gained for direct action against warrant sales, and ceded the moral high ground to the News of the World. Finally, he opened the door to a egomanaical run from George Galloway, who ought to be a former holder of this award, and made sure the Greens are the only left party represented at Holyrood this session and almost certainly the next one too.
Tommy Sheridan deserves our admiration. He might be flawed but I’d rather stand with him any day of the week than stand with the drooling, hypocritical, prurient editors and journalists and readers of the News of the World, and all those other commenters and bloggers who are so gleefully putting the boot in just now. It’s sad that we are so excited by the Tommy Sheridan perjury trial, baying for his blood, yet so completely uninterested in the systemic perjury committed with impunity by police officers, which too often results in innocent people being found guilty of crimes they did not commit.
Actually, the media built him up, and are at least as responsible for his former hero’o’the’left status as he and his former comrades are. I don’t believe they’d have been able just to knock him down without his extraordinary foolishness (to repeat, the lying, not the shagging).
Also, it’s impossible to take him seriously after their April 2010 broadcast – he’s clearly lost his mojo long since.
He’s the architect of his own downfall… you can’t really blame NOTW.
How is this post in any way intelligent, interesting or humurous. Rather it feels like kicking a man when he is down.
Sheridan has worked hard for Scotland. I have no idea whether he did those things or not and I don’t care. I do care about the fact that like every person who has challenged the establishment ever the media has tried to use anything to discredit him.
Dave Osler offers a more balanced view over at Liberal Conspiracy – http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/12/23/the-fall-of-tommy-sheridan/