{"id":1059,"date":"2006-01-22T11:47:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-22T11:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/01\/22\/oaten-outing-follow-up\/"},"modified":"2006-01-22T11:47:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-22T11:47:00","slug":"oaten-outing-follow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/01\/oaten-outing-follow-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Oaten outing follow-up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Still can&#8217;t quite get my head around what the point of this whole outing thing was.<\/p>\n<p>I mean John Major\/Edwina Curry, yes &#8211; scoop. News. Potential extra angle on policy decisions. Important.<\/p>\n<p>Blunkett and wassername, yes &#8211; scoop. News. Potential conflicts of interests. Highlights interconnectivity of government and media. Abuse of ministerial power to aid private life. Important.<\/p>\n<p>Robin Cook\/his secretary, not really. &#8220;Man away from home for extended period makes bond with someone he sees daily&#8221; is hardly news.<\/p>\n<p>Oaten \/ some younger man, no. No conflict of interest. No extra angles on policy decisions. &#8220;Married man is secretly gay&#8221; likewise hardly news.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/5thnovember.blogspot.com\/2006\/01\/its-pod-what-did-it.html\" title=\"Guido Fawkes - Its The Pod What Did It\">Guido claims the scoop, anyway<\/a>. Not much to be proud of, I&#8217;d have thought, destroying the life of a minor politician and doubtless his family to boot&#8230; Still, Guido&#8217;s commentors seem to be having fun &#8211; latent homophobia or just the repression of wishing they had the guts to hire some arse themselves? How about this from &#8220;Delves Broughton Jocelyn Victor Hay&#8221;? (I really hope I&#8217;m just misreading a parody here&#8230;)<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I think Oaten&#8217;s prostitution policy not hypocritical rather stealthily pandering to his own homosexual interest. Another thing, the &#8216;Right Honourable&#8217; Mark Oaten is a gross moral coward and prevaricator, unwilling to confront his deviance&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This has also made Menzies Campbell go down in my estimation. I mean, what&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk_politics\/4636282.stm\" title=\"BBC -  Lib Dems need to draw together\">this crap about<\/a>?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;No party is entirely subject to what happens to any one individual. The party is much bigger than that and my task as acting leader is to restore a sense of unity and purpose&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Fuck off, Ming &#8211; your job as a decent human being is to back your colleague by stating that it&#8217;s a private matter and you&#8217;re not going to comment, not to try and make political capital out of it to bolster your leadership bid.<\/p>\n<p>I had no particular time for or interest in Oaten, and still don&#8217;t. He always struck me as a tad smug. But if his parliamentary colleagues are going to shun him over this due to pathetic fears that their tiny party might suffer electorally (newsflash, guys &#8211; you&#8217;re already at your peak, and it&#8217;s downhill all the way from here no matter what you do), then any sympathy I had for the little orange bastards will entirely vanish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Still can&#8217;t quite get my head around what the point of this whole outing thing was. I mean John Major\/Edwina Curry, yes &#8211; scoop. News. Potential extra angle on policy decisions. Important. Blunkett and wassername, yes &#8211; scoop. News. Potential &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2006\/01\/oaten-outing-follow-up\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}