BY SEAN WALSH
Shovegate: the evidence is inconclusive.
To those of you who still defend the VAR system in football or the DBS review mechanism in cricket, may I draw your attention to the strange affair of Shovegate, in which the reliably caddish Nigel Farage is said to have pushed past LibDem MP Caroline Voaden (who? pictured above) in the House of Commons earlier this year, presumably while twirling a moustache – if not his own then someone else’s.
There is, you see, video evidence of this event which, like often happens with “ball tracking”, is inconclusive, question begging but serves as a dynamic Rorschach test to confirm the prejudices of the person watching it.
It proves nothing very much in other words and I’m surprised one of those police chiefs hasn’t popped up to warn everyone not to speculate, but the political class has its very own Zapruder tape and the fact that it exists at all is just as exciting to them as what’s on it.
From my point of view (and while I am no professional analyst I have seen both Oliver Stone’s JFK and the later Seinfeld reconstruction) the tape shows that while Farage probably was involved in some way, it’s also possible that he was the patsy and that there was a “second shover” hidden from view and operating from behind a green bench. Nothing else makes sense. If Farage was the lone shover then he’s got one magic elbow.
And by the way it’s interesting that, like with JFK, Ms Voaden’s brain seems to have gone missing immediately after the incident.
The way this was initially reported I thought she had been beaten to within an inch of her life and I wondered why all her male LibDem colleagues had just stood by and watched (and for all we know clapped). Is she that unpopular? Had one of those twisty west England MPs put Farage up to it?
Then I remembered that there aren’t many LibDem MPs who are men, just a few who happen to be attached to a penis. Which isn’t the same thing, apparently.
We are left with the following facts. Farage denies the shove, and Ms Boaden affirms it and insists that it was if not life-threatening then certainly life-changing. The whole business has left her “shocked and bloody angry” said the victim, who has obviously never travelled by tube.
Other commentators, all with vested interests, have chimed in to point out that this disputable incident when looked at in the light of past disputable incidents, confirms a pattern of bad behaviour on the part of Farage. Probably going back to his days at school when it is alleged that he bogwashed someone on racist grounds and not just because it was a fun thing to do.
But there are protocols and procedures which surround witness testimony and when it should be believed. And you really shouldn’t offer an earlier contestable anecdote as corroboration of a later one. That’s like using something said by Matthew Stadlen to corroborate something written by Michael White – a total bullshit Ponzi scheme.
The positivists and anti-realist philosophers for whom claims about the past quite probably have no meaning will say that there is no fact of the matter concerning whether or not Farage brushed past Ms Voeden in an aggressive way. So perhaps we should leave it there. Although I personally hope that her claims turn out to be true and that after months and months of being barracked by these self-righteous cretins something in Farage snapped and he did indeed send her flying. Alas, this seems like wishful thinking.
In any case let’s hope that the matter continues to be thoroughly investigated. As Ms Voeden has said “such behaviour is unacceptable in any workplace and it has no place in the House of Commons”. Quite right. The House of Commons is and has for a long time been a safe space in which LibDem MPs have been able to be ridiculous, nasty and irrelevant in equal measure. They should be able to pretend to be nicer than anyone else without any fear for their personal safety.
But as I say more work needs to be done on this and I’m frankly surprised that the Commons chamber has not been decorated with that blue police crime scene taping that can make even the most distressing murder seem that bit better.
It’s not as if the British people are being let down by politicians who care more for minor slights than they do about the collapse of border security and the consequent threat to the existence of the home nations. It’s not like we are being lied to about the real cause of imminent power outages. It’s not as if there’s a parallel parasite class of deep state operatives who quite probably at the very least acquiesce in the imprisonment or assassination of those thought to be politically inconvenient.
No, the most pressing issue for several days last week was whether Farage was less than gallant towards some spiteful and previously anonymous member of the oxymoronically named “Liberal Democrat” parliamentary cohort.
I hope he did shove her. But given that the footage is even worse than “snicko” we may never know.