Rights and responsibilities

More on Andrew Gwynne whose indiscreet WhatsApp posts have derailed – for how long we don't know – his political career.

I've lost count of the number of people – many on the so-called 'libertarian' right and left – who are arguing that he should not have been sacked because he had every right to rant in private.

One writer has even made an impassioned plea for clemency on the grounds that, by its very nature, WhatsApp encourages bad jokes among friends.

Look, I get these arguments, and it's clearly preposterous that Gwynne's posts have been classified as a 'non-crime hate incident'. Likewise the absurd suggestion that he should be prosecuted. (For what? Making a tasteless joke?)

I deplore too the actions of whoever it was who grassed Gwynne to the Mail on Sunday. If you join a WhatsApp group your fellow members have a right to expect a substantial degree of privacy and, if you don't like what's being said, leave the group.

But let's not make him out to be a martyr because there is one very important factor the free speech and privacy lobby are forgetting. Andrew Gwynne was not just an MP, he was a junior minister with the ambition, perhaps, of being in the Cabinet.

If all these posts were published when he was a teenager, or a student, or before he became an MP, I would have a great deal more sympathy for him. But he wasn't. He is now 50-years-old and was first elected as an MP in 2005.

He was a shadow minister in the last parliament, and a junior minister in the current Government. That brings with it responsibilities, both in public and in private.

No-one's perfect, everyone makes mistakes, but the public deserves MPs and government ministers who, at the very least, are able to demonstrate good judgement.

I don't care therefore if these comments were made among 'friends' in the privacy of a WhatsApp group. How stupid do you have to be to make some of the comments that have been attributed to the former health minister, even if they were in jest?

Politics is notorious for the fact that not only do you make enemies, most of your enemies are in the same party.

I've no idea how many people are in the 'Trigger Me Timbers' WhatsApp group, but I cannot believe that every member was a close personal friend of Andrew Gwynne, and he should have known he was playing with fire.

I can't tell you the number of emails I have deleted before pressing the 'send' button. Likewise social media posts to my small number of followers.

I learned a long time ago that once something is in print (or, more recently, online) there's no going back. It cannot be erased.

Even private comments intended exclusively for friends go through a mental filter.

Likewise, having been sued for defamation as a young student journalist, I learned that even things written in jest can come back and bite you. Bigly.

It's jaw-dropping to me that people who should know better are defending the former health minister.

Forget free speech and the right to offend (which I support). In this instance the most important issue is that a government minister has demonstrated extremely poor judgement, and for that reason alone he deserved to be sacked.

See: Andrew Gwynne has every right to rant in private (Spiked)
Andrew Gwynne and the truth about WhatsApp (The Spectator)
Ex-Labour minister’s WhatsApp chat recorded as non-crime hate incident (Telegraph)