webofevil | The O******l Rep*rt

You may recall the incident at the end of January when LibDem MP Greg Mulholland [right] called health minister Ivan Lewis an “arsehole” in a debate about hospice funding. (Mulholland’s further colourful remarks are sadly not on the record as he chose to make them after the debate had finished.) Commons Hansard, still jittery in the wake of “Absolute bollocks”-gate, printed his lively intervention as “He’s an a*******”. This might raise intriguing possibilities for researchers in the far future (“Why would he call the minister an anteater?”), but it sets a bad precedent in the present. Hansard is there to print the substance of what they say, not to emasculate or bowdlerise it because someone might not like it.

It has been suggested that profanities should be censored if they are directed at someone in the room but not otherwise. This is arbitrary and ultimately silly as the old rule that some magazines ended up with: a swearword was acceptable as a noun but not if it could be used as a verb, so “fuck” had to be asterisked but, bizarrely, “cunt” was okay.

Anyway, my point is that in these stakes Lords Hansard currently “pwns” Commons Hansard, thanks to an unexpectedly sweary Earl Erroll:

Earl Erroll: If you put big money out there and give it so some quangos to decide where it is allocated, it will not be farmers sitting on them because farmers will not have the time or inclination for the bullshit that goes on in these committees and they will not understand it—

A noble Lord: Really!

Earl Erroll: It is a technical term.