Читать книгу Crap MPs - Dr. Grosvenor Bendor - Страница 10

(1905–76) Independent & Labour, Maldon 1942–55, Barking 1959–74

Thomas Edward Neil Driberg had many attributes, but a devotion to Parliamentary duty was not among them. He spent most of his time working as a journalist and on his other main interest: blow jobs.

Elected first as an Independent, before taking the Labour whip, Driberg was an assiduous MP in his early Parliamentary career. However, from the 1950s onwards, he increasingly spent his time on writing and oral sex.

There can be few MPs whose skills in fellatio helped gain them a place in the Dictionary of National Biography, but, as the book states, ‘Driberg had a consuming passion for fellating handsome, lean, intelligent working-class toughs.’ Policemen, fellow politicians, miners and sailors were all among his conquests.

Driberg was also an effective, popular writer for newspapers and magazines, and preferred that to spending time on his work as an MP. When Clement Attlee’s government was in its final days, calling in MPs from their sickbeds to help maintain their slim majority, Driberg was off for months at a time covering the Korean War. And we can be reasonably certain that his interest in military activity was not confined to the war effort. Men in uniform had often caught his attention. During the Second World War, he was once caught by a policeman when he was just about to service a sailor’s ‘long, uncircumcised, and tapering, but rock-hard erection’.

While that particular coitus ended in interruptus, most of his encounters were carried off successfully. Apart from one unsuccessful prosecution, Driberg was lucky. It was widely suspected that he had avoided exposure because he had so much incriminating material on pillars of the establishment. It is claimed that he performed fellatio on Nye Bevan, and that he even made a pass at Jim Callaghan. Despite his extracurricular activities, Driberg got married, to a Mrs Ena Mary Binfield. Upon the surprising event, one wag commented that ‘she won’t know which way to turn’.

Intelligent, cultured and able, Driberg might have made a good MP, but we think he deserves his place here for his constant distraction from Parliament. Unsurprisingly, although he was tolerated as an MP, he never achieved ministerial office – that, at least, his party might have found a little too hard to swallow.