Aidan Burley should not have been fired

I realise this is unlikely to be a popular blog post but yet again I find myself compelled to stick up for a politician who has done something highly inadvisable in their private life and who has paid for it with their political career.

Aidan Burley, the Conservative MP for Cannock Chase has been fired by David Cameron as a PPS to Justine Greening because he attended a stag do where some guests were wearing SS uniforms and during which there was a toast to "the ideology and thought processes of the Third Reich". The story broke last week but he seemed to be weathering the storm claiming he was merely an attendee and should have left when he realised what was happening but in the last day or so it became apparent that he had hired one of the SS suits, hence he had clearly been deemed part of the organisation of the event and therefore fired.

Now I fully appreciate that some people will have been offended by what he did. The problem from my perspective is that the reporting of the event and the subsequent sacking take no account of nuance and the highly likely fact that the participants were doing this in a totally misguided attempt at irony. I do not believe that any of them actually do agree with the thought processes and ideology of the Nazis. If evidence emerged that Burley actually did hold these beliefs then it would be a different matter. Instead he went on a stag do where a few people wore distasteful fancy dress costumes and made a few comments almost certainly for shock effect in an attempt at humour. And for that he has now likely paid with his political career.

The reporting by the Mail on Sunday today also tries to show a pattern of behaviour by Burley. They have gone through his history as a student and dredged up the fact that he was kicked out of halls of residence because of an "undisclosed incident" involving a female and a dance floor, that he once stole a sign from outside a dentist's surgery and that he once dressed up as Timmy Mallett and was pictured licking a woman's face.

I've no idea what the "undisclosed incident" was, but until it is substantiated in some way it is frankly immaterial. Stealing a sign from outside a dentist's is stupid of course but how many graduates have done similarly stupid things involving traffic cones etc. when they were students? As for the Timmy Mallett thing, that is where the MoS's agenda becomes crystal clear. They had him on the ropes because of the stag do so they are just pouring as much shit over his head as they possibly can to try and smear him to the point where his position becomes untenable. And they seem to have succeeded. If it had not been for the main story, these other elements would never have been deemed newsworthy as of course they aren't.

Burley did a very stupid thing. He should have known that attending a party like that could easily come back to bite him. His apologies should really have been enough though. I am sure he will not do anything like that again. But to have to pay for it with his career seems disproportionately harsh.

Sadly it is par for the course. We've seen time and again how any transgression can be fatal for political careers. And then we wonder why we so often end up with automatons as MPs who struggle to relate to ordinary people and often seem to have had a sense of humour bypass.