BARRY SHOULD HEED

BIBLE LESSON BOVINE

IF THERE were a competition to find the most ludicrous member of the House of Commons, surely the shortodds favourite would be Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield.

He has certainly had a long time to perfect the art of his idiocy: Sheerman has been in the Commons for more than 40 years and will be 80 in a fortnight.

This weekend, he made his latest bid to win my imaginary contest outright with a couple of tweets on the list of new peers: ‘Apparently there has been a bit of a run on silver shekels! . . . Apparently Richard Desmond and Philip Green were on the original list for seats in the House of Lords!’

As the Campaign Against Antisemitism immediately

pointed out: ‘Barry Sheerman’s first reaction on hearing that two prominent Jewish businessmen supposedly missed out on peerages is to think about “silver shekels”, alluding in one fell swoop to both classic and modern anti-Semitic tropes about Jews corrupting politics with money and being more loyal to Israel [the shekel is the Israeli currency] than their own countries.’

Sheerman then withdrew his tweets, claiming: ‘My attempt at irony talking about 30 pieces of silver has been misinterpreted by some comments . . . serves me right for re-reading the entire Bible in the lockdown!’ If he had actually done so with any degree of attention, he would have known there is no reference to shekels in the ‘30 pieces of silver’, and that the ‘Judas’ story is about betrayal, not donations.

Sheerman’s subsequent protest that he has ‘fought anti-Semitism all my political life’ only makes his earlier outburst all the more evidence of his implacable ignorance.

Funnily enough, he is openly contemptuous of those he deems less educated than himself (he was a university lecturer in economics before he became an MP in 1979).

Perhaps the Commons’ most intractable critic of the UK’s departure from the EU, in 2017 he sneered: ‘The truth is that when you look at who voted to remain, most of them were the better educated people in our country.’

And less than a fortnight ago, he was still tweeting that ‘the decision to leave the EU can no longer be regarded as valid or legitimate. We must delay our departure and hold a fresh referendum’. Bovine Barry is the last man in the country not to have got the message.

This sadly compulsive tweeter should act upon another passage from the Bible he claims to have re-read in full: ‘Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.’