"He's an arsehole" or, "He's an a*******" as Hansard put it, was precisely how Greg Mulholland, the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Leeds North West, described Ivan Lewis, the Labour member for Bury South and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Department of Health (or health minister for short). It appears that Mulholland became annoyed when Lewis would not let him intervene during a debate on the 30th January 2008, at which point he uttered those immortal words, and then stormed out of the chamber leaving a slightly stunned Lewis to remark; "That was not very parliamentary language".
When interviewed by BBC News, Mr Mulholland was later quite unapologetic about his outburst, and explained that Ivan Lewis had, during the course of an "extraordinary rant", failed to listen to the "very real concerns of the hospice movement" and rather "launched a nasty and misleading party political attack" and described Lewis's refusal to let him respond as "downright cowardly". His explanation for the choice words directed at his Labour counterpart was simply that it was "unfortunate that the official recorder picked up me expressing my anger about this performance to colleagues as I left the chamber". For his part Mr Lewis cited both Mulholland and his Liberal Democrat colleague Mark Hunter, as the "only speakers who sought to make cheap and misleading party political points", and claimed that it was the fact that he "rebutted their attacks" which prompted what he referred to as "an outburst unbecoming of a parliamentarian".
The subject which so excited the passions of both Mulholland and Lewis was the rather unlikely question of the funding of the hospice movement. In the United Kingdom hospices provide what is known as palliative care, which is to say they care for people who are dying. Although it might be imagined that it was the job of the National Health Service to care for the sick in Britain, irrespective of the whether they are expected to live or die in the forseeable future, in practice this is not the case. Many of those who are actually in charge of hospices (which are generally speaking charities) believe that they should receive fair reimbursement from the government for the costs incurred in providing a service that the NHS would otherwise have to provide, rather than being forced to go cap in hand to the public at regular intervals. Whilst the government has promised to do exactly that, it has, to date, failed to do so.
A reading of Hansard shows that it was Stephen O'Brien, the Conservative member for Eddisbury, who drew attention to the 2005 Labour Party manifesto commitment to "double the investment going into palliative care services", and noted that "there is a problem with that: to double anything, one needs to know the number that one is starting with." It was at this point that Hansard records a Mr Ivan Lewis interjecting with the comment, "Unless you are a Liberal Democrat." Such a remark would certainly qualify as being both "cheap" and "party political" and very probably "misleading" as well, since O'Brien was about to make the very real political point that the Department of Heath had later admitted that it did not collect data on palliative care, and therefore it was the Labour Party which had no idea of what number it was promising to double.
However despite directing this undoubted political jibe at his Liberal Democrat opponents, when Lewis himself took the floor to wind up the debate, he somehow felt able to make the claim that the "only partisan contributions made during the debate were made by the hon. Members for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) and for Leeds, North-West (Greg Mulholland). They turned it into a party political issue". Their crime apparently being one of earlier making the accusation that the government was responsible for "a real-terms cut in the amount of funding for hospices", which Lewis described as being "absolutely opportunistic and disgraceful". (It is believed that this is what Mr Lewis means by a rebuttal, although it is notable that he didn't describe the claim as being in any way "inaccurate".) It was whilst Ivan Lewis was making these remarks that Greg Mulholland made a number of attempts to answer these accusations, only to find that Lewis refused to yield and led directly to Mulholland's unparliamentary outburst.
Having therefore considered the evidence, this author has concluded that Greg Mulholland was correct; Ivan Lewis is an arsehole.
SOURCES
- Justin Parkinson, MP defends himself over swearing, BBC News, 1 February 2008
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7221750.stm
- Hansard
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080130/halltext/80130h0009.htm