I see you handing in your resignation letter, a super special one this time because it’s going to someone who – recently at least – has been getting fewer than twelve a day. It’s time to focus on your family, isn’t it? Which is a pretty bold way of phrasing “I probably shouldn’t have threatened to twat that journalist with a bat,” so kudos to you for ballsiness I guess.
It’s monstrously unfair, of course, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. All you did was lie about knowing all about your son’s drug arrest, continue to employ him out of nepotistic loyalty when he was convicted and then chuck a bucket of water over a journalist asking questions. Honestly, who hasn’t done that on a Friday?
You cocked right up, Kate Osamor, and now you’re front page news – a ‘militant leftie’ threatening a journalist. It’s an absolute gift for a media beast that’s chomping at the bit to savage any and every Labour mistake in rhetoric and image and you walked straight into the bite radius. Yes, it’s got to be irritating to be constantly harassed on your doorstep, but when the questions coming your way are a result of your own dishonesty it’s a bit rich to reach for the mop bucket in response. You don’t get to claim ignorance about it and wave away your son’s arrest with one hand while sending a letter to the court pleading leniency with the other.
The weirdest thing about it is how your son managed to be so thick in the first place. Theresa May now has Michael Gove backing her Brexit plan, which means that even she’s figured out more than Ishmael did – that if you want to get something dodgy past security you need to get the feeblest, pastiest white boy to carry it. No one’s looking at a chin weaker than a hot blancmange and suspecting that guy of bringing the party. And can we take a second to discuss the fact that the court accepted your son’s
claim that he wasn’t going to sell anything on? Just how damning an indictment of Bestival is it that one man needs £2,500 worth of gear all to himself just to get through the fucking thing?
It’s not a good look, and by covering for him and continuing to employ him you’ve mired yourself in his mess. It’s right that you go, safe in the knowledge that in a few weeks time it’ll be some other opportunist’s turn to jump up and stick the knife in and there’ll be a new job opening in the shadow cabinet. Westminster seems to have a one-in, one-out policy at the moment, with all the job security of a zero-hours contract at Toys R Us.
But until then, Kate Osamor?
Until then you’re sat on the backbenches twiddling your thumbs, having squandered your potential and failed to conduct yourself with the sort of integrity the movement you champion is supposed to stand for. And then there’s the buzzing.
The constant, needling buzz against your thigh during the day. The deeper, resonating buzz through the wood of your nightstand at night, the one that jars you awake and interrupts your sleep. The constant, three-burst buzz, like a swarm of bees banging against the glass of your sanity.
Ever since the story broke it’s been constant, your phone vibrating harder than an Anne Summers in Alaska. And it’s always the same two bastard numbers, the same two bastard acquaintances asking the same bastard question.
Keith Vaz and George Osborne, asking for your son’s number every single minute of every passing day.
And you don’t even know why.
I see you, Kate Osamor. I fucking see you.
