51) Would being shouted at really drive a man to suicide?
Some years ago, a friend of mine, Phil Cherrington, committed suicide. It was a shock, not least because apart from being a friend, he was a work colleague, and, in HR speak, I was his line manager. To be more specific, in the argot of the advertising world of the 80s, Phil was a copywriter and I the head of the creative group in which he worked. Not long before he put a plastic bag over his head - that sounds brutal but that kind of thing is - I had very clumsily remonstrated with Phil about a piece of work that he was doing but which didn’t, in my not very humble opinion, reach my lofty standards. I had known Phil for several years before we worked together, even been on a sailing holiday with him, and I knew he was prone to depression. I was clumsy with my admonition to say the least.
A week or so later, after the funeral service, his father came up to me and told me not to worry, it wasn’t my fault.
It was especially kind of him because he must have been absolutely devastated and I appreciated the thought. But he really needn’t have bothered, because not for a moment did I think - and I still don’t - that anything I had said or done was the fundamental cause of Phil taking his life. It is conceivable I suppose that my feeble impersonation of ‘the hairdryer’ had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. But camel’s backs are normally pretty strong and fortified by a hump or two and don’t break under the weight of a single straw unless they are already on the very point of disintegration.
Of course, one never knows the precise state of someone’s mental fragility - and although I knew Phil to be a depressive I don’t think I ever seriously thought he was going to kill himself - so it is always wise to be cautious and temperate lest one runs the risk of being the heavy hand that pushes someone over the edge. But, as I’ve already said in different words, that someone must have already got themselves so unsafely close to the edge that one unwitting shove - which in normal circumstances would be met with a shrug of the shoulders or two fingers or a shove back - can send them off to oblivion. Life is too precious to any healthy balanced adult for them to chuck it away just because some unthinking tosser is nasty to them.
Which brings me to the strange story of Mark Clarke - the Tory party former activist whom, we are invited to infer, drove a younger Tory activist, to take his own life.
The thrust of this story seems to be that Mark Clarke’s actions, in and of themselves, are responsible for this young man’s death. Frankly, I just don’t buy that and that I think it is quite wrong for the Guardian and the BBC who both seem to be doing their damnedest to make this story fly, to allow such an inference to be drawn. I feel incredibly sorry for the young man’s father but should Newnight be giving him a platform for making his charges? In his lengthy interview on Friday night, Emily Maitlis, normally a forensic interrogator, made not the slightest serious attempt to ask if there might have been any other contributing factors to his son’s suicide,which, basic common sense tells you, there must have been.
In the cause of pushing this line (even if it isn’t their avowed aim, that is the effect) The Guardian ran a headline yesterday, Saturday November 28th, which was downright untrue.
It said:
Lady Warsi letter warning Tory party chair Grant Shapps of bullying by aide.
But the letter which was printed underneath does NOT do anything of the sort. If you find it hard to believe that The Guardian would be so sloppy or mendacious as to do something so misleading, here is a link to an article which has a reproduction of the letter in full:
The first thing to say about Baroness Warsi’s letter is that it is not, principally, a complaint about Mark Clarke. It begins,
“I am writing in relation to the conduct of Alan Burton, the chairman of the Dewsbury Constituency Chairman.”
The background is this: Baroness Warsi resigned as Communities Minister in protest at what she claimed was David Cameron’s 'morally indefensible’ failure to condemn the suffering in Gaza. Then at a speech in Huddersfield she upset Alan Burton, who happens to be Jewish. (As - co-incidentally? - Lord Feldman and Grant Shapps are.) Mr. Burton was so incensed by what he heard that, as was reported at the time, he decided ‘to walk out just minutes into Baroness Warsi’s speech. After the high-profile event, Mr Burton expressed his anger on Facebook.He wrote: “Just listened to Sayeeda Warsi speech at Itrat Ali’s event which turned into a diatribe against Israel and a pro-Hamas speech.Walked out in disgust, never again will I speak to her.” ‘
Baroness Warsi’s motive in writing the letter seems chiefly to defend herself against the charge of anti-Semitism. Mark Clarke is only a secondary target of her ire. His sin was to Tweet the following:
“Baroness Warsi is now slagging off the Jewish Party Chairman of her old seat of Dewsbury who was upset by her speech.”
Nowhere in the letter does she does make any charge about Mark Clarke being a bully. She does claim that she received a number of abusive messages following the Tweet, but not from Mark Clarke. The inference is merely that his Tweet, and Alan Burton’s Facebook comments provoked this response.
It may be indeed have been very unwise of Mark Clarke to have so Tweeted but Baroness Warsi’s letter most certainly does not make the charges the Guardian headline explicitly claims it does. And where in the letter does it say, as the Guardian claims in the same article that ‘Warsi felt Clarke’s wrath when he attempted to troll her on Twitter’?
How on earth does this single Tweet amount to Trolling or ‘abuse’, by any conceivable definition of the terms, as the Guardian article explicitly claims?
For all I know Mark Clarke is the not-very-nice-chap that all this sound and fury implies. I hold no particular brief for him. But there is nothing so odious as the whiff of injustice no matter who the accused is. And it seems totally unfair to be flinging all this mud around on the basis of what, so far, doesn’t seem to amount to anything very substantial. I would hazard a completely uninformed guess that what is really driving this is an agenda to damage the Conservatives and in particular David Cameron - who we are constantly told is a close personal friend of Lord Feldman - by association
This now seems to have succeeded because Grant Shapps has resigned his ministerial position, accepting responsibility for the ‘scandal’ since he was Party Chairman at the time.
I hold no particular brief for Grant Shapps, any more than I do for Mark Clarke, but I wonder if he has not been sacrificed by Tory high command because the tide of this story, whatever the rights and wrongs, was simply overwhelming them and they felt some public gesture had to be made. And Grant Shapps, an easy and frequent target of the press, was no great sacrifice to make. (On the basis that chucking meat to sharks only encourages their bloodlust, this will very likely prove to be a silly mistake, and serve them right.)
I do not deny for a moment that there are charges against Mark Clarke which must obviously be investigated – the bizarre blackmail business connected to another young man, for one. And the fact that he has been banned from Tory Party for life does suggest that there is fire connected to all this smoke. Yet, when you look, what does it all really add up to?
Take this blackmail charge: In case you don’t know what that is about, here is more from The Guardian;
“ Among the allegations levelled at Clarke – it is understood more than 25 complainants have approached CCHQ – was a serious one of blackmail made by a Tory activist, who has spoken to the Guardian.
The 20-year-old, who wishes to remain anonymous, made a complaint to the party about Clarke’s behaviour after he allegedly pinned the man’s girlfriend to the wall during a Road Trip 2015 night out.
Three months later, the activist was befriended on Facebook by a French woman who quickly contacted him on Skype, stripped in front of him and persuaded him to perform a sex act. Soon afterwards he received a demand via Skype for €3,500 (£2,500) and was told that if he didn’t pay it the film would be posted on Facebook.
The demand was received four days after he went to CCHQ to give evidence against Clarke. “I was pretty distraught,” he told the Guardian. “Pretty annoyed at myself for letting it happen to me. It was a rough day.”
So, three months after the young man’s girlfriend was allegedly pinned to a wall by Clarke he is contacted by a woman on Facebook who then persuades him to commit a sex act on Skype.
Aren’t there a few questions that The Guardian might have asked before reporting this story. For instance:
a) What is the evidence that Clarke had any connection to this persuasive woman? The Guardian makes no mention of any that I have seen.
b) What evidence is there that the blackmail attempt had anything to do with Clarke? Again, The Guardian offer none.
Mark Clarke, we are faithfully reminded during all of these reports, denies all the charges. But then, are we are not always told that, in every case, of whatever kind, but only after after we have been left in no doubt that what we are really supposed to think is, as one correspondent wrote in The Guardian comments section yesterday, ‘Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?’
