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Jared O’Mara, Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam.
Jared O’Mara, Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
Jared O’Mara, Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

If only it were so easy to forgive Jared O’Mara’s sins

This article is more than 6 years old
Catherine Bennett
Labour expects his Sheffield constituents to forget his sexist and homophobic past. Why should they?

‘By the age of 30,” wrote the psychologist William James, “the character has set like plaster and will never soften again.” If it has yet to be proved, James’s point is something the voters of Sheffield Hallam might want to bear in mind when they come to pick their next MP. For now, unless he resigns, their hopes of effective representation appear to rest with the recently suspended MP Jared O’Mara, who earlier struck Labour’s national executive committee, correctly as it turned out, as a worthy opponent for the anti-Brexit Nick Clegg.

The Liberal Democrat’s qualifications could not compete, for Sheffield Hallam, with those of the 35-year-old journalism graduate whose principal qualification appears to have been his superior sensitivity. “Having a disability,” O’Mara said, “can make us more passionate, resilient, empathetic and hard working than non-disabled candidates by virtue of everything being harder for us in life.”

But for reasons that remain obscure, O’Mara did not warn his patrons that he had, presumably before his empathy had fully developed, shared online a variety of homophobic, sexist and otherwise degrading comments and ditties, eg: “I wish I were a misogynist / I’d smash her in her face.” If these might well have delighted like-minded members of Ukip, or his fellow satirists on the Commons women and equalities committee, they would be harder – at least in principle – for O’Mara to reconcile with a career in the party currently advertising “a transformative vision of a better Britain”.

To be fair, maybe Mr O’Mara had simply studied the Labour party’s attitudes towards women during the Alastair Campbell and John Prescott years and figured his own contribution to progressive bants was not so much a cultural anomaly as extended homage. Or perhaps Momentum’s favoured candidate was never asked, in the haste of a snap election, if anything in his past might concern those of us he once taunted as “slags” or, no less culpably to Labour’s hardworking equalities expert, “fat”.

It is less easy to understand, however, after his insults were reported on the Guido Fawkes website, why senior Labour party allies were so ready to endorse O’Mara’s chosen exculpation – the allegedly vast gulf between his 22-year-old self and the reformed character still planning his debut (four months after the election) in the House of Commons. “I made the comments as a young man,” he wrote, “at a particularly difficult time in my life, but that is no excuse.”

The shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, explained why gay people in Sheffield should be represented by someone who used to address them as “fudge packers” and “poofters”. It’s because O’Mara deserves it. “I think in relation to things that happened 15 years ago people should be given a second chance.” Even if further complaints, of brutish behaviour towards women, had not preceded this homily, an age-based pardon for the now contrite O’Mara sets an awkward precedent for any Labour campaigners who still think it worth mentioning, say, Nigel Farage’s schoolboy fascism, Boris Johnson’s early period fabrications, the exceptionally stubborn stain that is membership of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club.

Even without various compelling aides-memoire in the shape of Posh, Laura Wade’s play, then film, and a number of regularly exhumed photographs, it seems improbable that opponents of Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne would respond favourably to excuses that involvement in this always ghastly all-male institution was a forgivable folly committed by young people with immature frontal lobes, who deserve a second chance.

Not unlike the O’Mara apologists protesting that any prospective MP could have gone through a phase of repeatedly posting obscene sexist and homophobic comments they would later regret, Osborne has hinted at the exodus that might result if we banned all the naive young men – blessed with the required subscription and interest in posing – who have ever joined a club historically dedicated to the persecution of waiting staff. “I hazard a guess,” said Osborne, who may of course genuinely believe the Bullingdon to have become a franchised operation welcoming vandals from all backgrounds, “that quite a lot of people in the country who do things at university now say, ‘Ooh, I’m not sure that was the most sensible thing to do.’”

None of Cameron’s more energetic acts of contrition, from Pringles on a budget airline to self-flagellation on the BBC – “We do things when we are young that we deeply regret” – ever fully expunged Bullingdon-related suspicions about his true nature. Given his recent leisure choices, public scepticism about sudden character discontinuities looks well-founded. Anyone who believes the child to be father of the man, the fascist to be father of the Farage, the preening prat to be father of the incompetent grandee with a £25,000 shepherd’s hut may well have had their theory confirmed by Cameron’s recent return, following his well-documented journey towards normal persondom, to both pheasant shooting and the dining room at White’s. Both were ostentatiously set aside while he was ushering his country towards international ignominy.

Even if O’Mara is willing to put more lasting effort into his reinvention than either Cameron or, more recently, Harvey Weinstein – cured of molestation in a week by redemption specialists – constituents could argue that genuine alterations of character, though they are possible, require time or commitment that may not easily fit round duties as a sitting MP. Couldn’t O’Mara just get re-elected when he’s not reported to have said or done anything insulting to women for, say, six weeks?

But if some of O’Mara’s supporters are correct, his visible re-education is not just possible but more edifying to the masses, like Christ’s one sinner that repenteth, than would be his party’s unequivocal statement on decent conduct. On that basis, Johnson could yet do us a favour – if his party ever stopped being fine with it – by showing the route to rehabilitation for all other colluders in GBH who were only 26 at the time.

Respect for one individual’s commitment to change is not, however, inconsistent with respect for thousands of constituents and their right to representation by a political activist who, even with a standard trail of embarrassing juvenilia, has somehow resisted the temptation to post homophobic and sexist insults. Are these paragons so rare? Without knowing the intricacies of O’Mara’s appointment, it is hard to believe there was no such competition and, on the evidence of his parliamentary activity, his replacement with a convincing non-misogynist is something the people of Sheffield Hallam might conceivably endure.

The alternative, if O’Mara stays, even supposing political constituencies should double as therapeutic institutions for the exemplary reform of superficially guilt-stricken sexists, is that Labour again demonstrates how unwilling it is to grasp – even after Weinstein – the extent, and the impact on women, of the O’Mara-like mindset. If, as some conclude from this episode, historical online activity could constitute a fresh obstacle to young women’s political ambitions, it cannot come close to that already represented by Westminster’s living enforcers of the status quo.

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