Odd this day
It’s the 46th anniversary of the day the daughter of the Maltese Prime Minister threw horseshit into the House of Commons.
That’s her with her accomplice John McSherry. The handwritten signs they’re holding up (ah, the days before photoshop) are protesting about troops in Northern Ireland.
That was also the focus of their 6 July 1978 protest, which is why they chose to disrupt… er, points of order on debates about the Scotland Bill, in which Tam Dalyell was speaking at the time.
One MP was most distressed not to be able to sit down
because the Bench has been soiled by some of the offensive matter that has just been thrown from the Public Gallery.
…and, to be fair, one account does say the bags of shite
burst on the floor and benches, and the contents splashed among MPs
…so I’m guessing it was fresh, rather than well-rotted and garden-ready.
Some years later, Dalyell gave an account of the event to the BBC, saying:
I was standing on my feet waxing eloquent about the details of Scottish education and suddenly all this dung showered down. Being a sort of stiff-upper-lipped cavalryman — what the infantry call a donkey-walloper — I was determined to go on speaking, much to the approval of my colleagues.
Apparently, though, proceedings were suspended for 20 minutes so they could clean up. Rather splendidly, when it was all over, Dalyell even made some attempt to trace the source of the ordure…
Shortly afterwards I went out of the chamber and said to one of the badge messengers, with whom I was friendly and whom I knew to be a former Corporal Major at Horse Guards, ‘Where on earth did they get that manure?’ His reply I will remember to my dying day: ‘Not us, sir. Too loose.’ So it certainly didn’t come from the Horse Guards or the Life Guards.
Yana and her mate were charged with criminal damage and bailed at Bow Street. She looked positively cheerful as she left court…
…but then, through her mother, she was descended from Dutch and British nobility. This would explain why she was in the Socialist Workers Party, throwing shit into the Commons. It’s not like a fine for criminal damage would matter to her.
Also, of course, it didn’t change anything. Operation Banner — the Armed Forces operation in Northern Ireland — continued for a further 29 years. Mind you, people from wealthy backgrounds making empty meaningless gestures isn’t meant to change anything, only to make them feel important for a time.
Not that this story has any contemporary relevance, you understand.
Anyway, something something horseshit in the Commons something.
Ho ho, very satirical.
