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Reply to letter from Timothy Kirkhope MEP
Bruxelles 1047 Belgium Dear Timothy After an elaborate "Review Panel" process, you have offered re-instatement of the whip on conditions so onerous and detailed that no one could seriously expect me to accept them, and which, if accepted, would prevent me from doing my job. Your tactic is clear: you want to exclude me from the delegation, while giving yourself a pretext to pass the blame to me. You have now proved conclusively what was clear from the outset -- you have no intention of finding a solution. You are letting your misplaced sense of grudge and grievance stand in the way of your manifest duty to the delegation and the Party. It is clear from our correspondence on September 28th that of the two accusations on which you based the suspension of the whip, one was grossly exaggerated, and the other quite simply false, and quite possibly malicious. I still await an apology and retraction on the second point. You had inadequate grounds to suspend the whip in the first place, and you have no basis on which to maintain the suspension. You have been scraping the barrel for imagined sleights and trivial misdemeanours. Exactly which line of the Telegraph letter should I apologise for? I have read it again, and it is reasonable, measured and factual. How can I be bound by a commitment on the EPP given to Liam Fox last year, when as a leadership candidate he has publicly repudiated the EPP relationship? I am astonished that even after last week in Blackpool, you seem oblivious to the anger and dismay, and frankly the sense of outrage, you have created amongst Party members and activists across the East Midlands, and elsewhere. I have some sympathy for the Chief Whip, who bore the brunt of Party members' righteous indignation. He was (as they said at Nuremberg) "only following orders", and his embarrassment was palpable. You put him in an invidious and untenable position, and the fault is yours, not his. You attempted, unsuccessfully, to have my Conference pass withdrawn. You brought forward your Conference speech on Wednesday, in an apparent attempt to pre-empt dissent. I invite you to confirm or deny persistent reports that you sought police protection for your speech, because of fears of disruption based on nothing more than groundless rumour and corridor gossip. If so, it suggests a paranoia of almost clinical proportions. In any case, you have inadvertently provided a richly comic sub-text for one of the most exciting Party Conferences of recent years. I have made repeated offers to sit down with you to thrash out a fair, honourable and face-saving solution to our problem, but you have rejected every overture. During the last four months, I have exercised (at least by my standards) considerable restraint, in the interests of facilitating a resolution. Now that you have made it clear that no resolution is possible, I consider myself absolved from that obligation. Accordingly, I intend to publish this letter on my web-site, together with my 1400 word submission to your Review Panel, and your letter today. Party members and the wider public can judge the rights and wrongs of the issue for themselves, and you will have to live with the consequences of your intransigence. I do not intend to waste any further time on efforts to seek a rapprochement. I confidently expect that by January we shall have a new leader of the Party, and a new leader of the delegation, and I am content to let the matter rest until then. Regards Roger Helmer See also • Roger's Submission to the Review panel • Timothy Kirkhope's letter to Roger |