Don’t cancel Andrew Gywnne

In his biography of Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion often has the air of a headmaster pulling an errant boy into his office for a talk. Motion tuts and grimaces, for example, over Larkin’s private correspondence with Kingsley Amis, in which the pair were deeply lecherous and absurdly spiteful.

There is some extent to which this did reflect bitter and libidinous tendencies in the two great writers. We know from their personal lives that Larkin and Amis could be terrible to women. But Larkin was also the author of “Faith Healing” and “Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album”, and the friend and advocate of Barbara Pym. His nasty jokes to Amis may at times have been meant seriously but they were not meant literally. The men were clearly inhabiting characters — characters that embodied aspects of themselves, for sure, but characters nonetheless.

Andrew Gwynne has been sacked as health minister over various unpleasant messages in a WhatsApp group called “Trigger My Timbers” (a terrible name, but that isn’t relevant). In one message, for example, Gwynne fantasised about responding to a pensioner who had written to him about bin collections with:

Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.

Unpleasant, sure, but also a joke. Does it reflect, to quote one commentator, what Gwynne “really thinks of old people”? Maybe. But I doubt it. Perhaps it is nothing more than Gywnne ironising the frustration that he can never show in public. 

It would be difficult to lead an Andrew Gwynne defence committee. For one thing, Gwynne participated in the hysterical, deeply disingenuous cancellation attempt on Roger Scruton. To some extent, then, he is getting his just deserts.

It might be the case that his jokes on WhatsApp reflect his real opinions. Asked if “Marshall Rosenberg” — reportedly an inexplicable reference to the renowned American psychologist — was being invited to a local Labour meeting, Gwynne replied, “He sounds too militaristic and too Jewish. Is he in Mossad?” Of course, if Gwynne sincerely thinks that people with Jewish names are inherently suspicious, that is disgusting. But was he expressing a sincere opinion or being deliberately absurd? I doubt that he thinks people called “Marshall” are inherently militaristic, so I also doubt that he thinks people with Jewish names are liable to be in Mossad. It’s a bad joke, and it might reflect genuine anti-Semitism, but removed from context it is impossible to know.

I wouldn’t make a joke like that, but I’m absolutely sure that I have made jokes that would look terrible in public. Frankly, reader, I suspect that you have made such jokes as well. Few of us can claim that we have never privately expressed annoyance in a hyperbolic manner, or expressed desire with comical exaggeration, or joked obscenely with conspiratorial facetiousness. “Now the mask slips,” claims the Mail on Sunday. But we wear all kinds of masks in private. Clown masks, for example.

I’m not going to demand that Gwynne get his job back. If nothing else, I’d like all Labour ministers to lose their jobs. But I think it is unfair to judge him by a literal interpretation of his comments. It seems almost certain that he did not mean them literally.

The real villain of the piece, in my opinion, is whoever leaked the WhatsApp messages. I’m all for “snitching” when serious crimes have been committed — or even, in the case of public figures, when their deeds or words are relevant to their work. When the “crime” in question is juvenile humour, though, whoever betrayed the trust of the other members of the group is a slimy and ignoble human being. They are not a whistleblower. They are a telltale.

Of course, as a government minister at a time when people are being sent to jail for posting memes on Facebook, Gwynne has been complicit in greater injustices than the injustice to which he has fallen victim. But I am naive enough to think that two wrongs don’t make a right.