Dennis Skinner, the Member of Parliament for Bolsover, was ejected from the House of Commons after he refused to withdraw the word "dodgy" from a question he posed to David Cameron during Prime Minister’s Questions this morning:
Does the prime minister recall that at the time after he became prime minister under the coalition and at the time when he was dividing the nation between ‘strivers’ and ‘scroungers,’ I asked him a very important question about the windfall he received when he wrote off the mortgage of the premises in Notting Hill, and I said to him he didn’t write off the mortgage of the one taxpayers were helping to pay for at Oxford. I didn’t receive a proper answer then. Maybe dodgy Dave will answer it now.
Skinner is a very amusing figure with a long history of doing this kind of thing. In 2005, in remarks about the Conservative Party’s economic record, he said that "The only thing that was growing [when the Conservatives were in power] were the lines of coke in front of Boy George and the rest of the Tories." (The Sunday Mirror had just run a story about possible cocaine use by George Osborne, then the shadow chancellor of the exchequer.) In 1994, he was given the boot after calling John Gummer, a Tory agriculture minister, "a little squirt" and a "wart." For years Skinner, a republican, has heaped scorn on the annual tradition under which Black Rod invites MPs to enter the House of Lords to hear the Queen’s Speech: "Have you got Helen Mirren on standby?" he said in 2006 following the release of a biopic about Elizabeth II. It is difficult to put into words how hilarious Skinner’s quips are without hearing them in the solemn context of a parliamentary opening:
Skinner is Labour to his core. He spent 21 years in the pits as a coal miner before winning his seat in 1970. In nearly a half-century in Parliament he has never missed a sitting of the House; when asked about his remarkable attendance record, he has been known to respond that "if you missed a shift at the pit, you would get the sack." He refuses to dine or drink with his fellow MPs while at the House and does not take trips or accept gifts. He is one of the only current members of Parliament who habitually wears a tweed jacket rather than a suit. Alan Clark, the Thatcher-era High Tory minister best known for his hilariously indiscreet diaries, once shocked a colleague by saying that Skinner was his favorite MP.
Skinner is in many ways a vile antinomian (he once used his tactical genius and knowledge of Parliamentary arcana to defeat Enoch Powell’s private member’s bill banning stem-cell research), but that is part of his appeal. He is also a great parliamentarian and—something we could all use more of—a colorful and memorable politician.