For a crime that many people were claiming has no victims, the conclusion of the Tommy Sheridan trial has a queue of people claiming to be victims. Unfortunately there was a lot of BS being spoken by those claiming victimhood.
We can now say that Tommy Sheridan did visit swingers clubs, and we can say that Sheridan was unfaithful to his wife. Sheridan claims that he is the victim of a vast conspiracy to bring him down, where in the future films will be made starring Kevin Costner. The truth is that Sheridan was the victim of a conspiracy by his party to oust him from his position, and was a victim of his own vanity. The film of that will star a couple of guy’s from River City. Sheridan let his vanity take over when he began his libel case.
Had he not launched the case he might have been able to laugh it off and make a comeback a couple of years down the line. Instead of which, Sheridan adopted the same moral high tone of Cecil Parkinson and David Mellor and painted himself as an honest man with family values. Were this a certain kind of blog, I would be speculating about exactly what kind of relationship the Sheridan’s have. After all Sheridan’s career is now dust because of his desire to keep his extravagant sex life out of the public eye, and more importantly from his wife.
First in the queue for victimhood are the SSP. If memory serves, they ousted Sheridan from the leadership and started to brief against Sheridan from the off. Not exactly the wronged stance they have been attempting to re-write in recent day’s. Unless i am very much mistaken, adultery, sex clubs are not illegal. After all, this is the UK not Iran. Yet the SSP took the puritanical line, that this kind of behaviour was not acceptable and that Sheridan should be removed from his post. I should point out two things here. Firstly I don’t think Sheridan’s behaviour was acceptable, but secondly i don’t think he had the full support from his party. Which is why i think his ousting as SSP leader is the only conspiracy on show here. I think that winning 6 seats at the 2003 Holyrood elections went to some people’s heads, maybe Colin Fox’s, maybe Carolyn Leckie and maybe people thought that we don’t need Sheridan, and oops here’s an opportunity to get rid of him.
Not that this post is the only one gunning at the pious positions taken up by the anti-Tommy camp. The rival party set up by Sheridan, Solidarity, has backed their man and attacked the SSP hierarchy for taking the side of Rupert Murdoch in this argument. Conveniently ignoring the fact that Sheridan “slept” with a News of the Screw’s columnist.
The truth is that the real victims of Sheridan’s conviction, and the events surrounding it, are voters of a left wing persuasion. At a time when a right wing government (wearing a red rosette) has been replaced with an equally right wing government (wearing a fetching blue/yellow combo), politicians from the Solidarity/SSP camps have shown themselves to be selfish, duplicitous, sneaky, untrustworthy, and perfectly at home in adopting Tory family values. They have preferred to train their fire on each other than on the enemy. In short they have made themselves un-electable.