The sexual politics of Oona King

Jonathan Gornall:

King, you will recall, recounted last December that, while she had been working as a young political assistant in 1991, a Labour MEP had offered her £10,000 to sleep with him. Personally, I find it strange that even the dullest MEP would consider blowing half his expenses on a single shag and equally puzzling that King failed to kick up a fuss about the indecent proposal at the time. But the most outrageous thing of all was that King, having let the cat half out of the bag, refused to name the man, thus casting suspicion on a string of innocent suspects.

Fleet Street’s finest investigative journalists might not have been able to pin much on Galloway (other than a few jokes about German cars, fat ties and fake tans), but it didn’t take them long to come up with a shortlist of six contenders. But the mystery remains unsolved (and all six names blackened), as King has never spoken out and cleared the innocent.

Nice. Almost as nice as her suggestion that not only was the MEP in question a sleazy perv, he was an incompetent sleazy perv, who asked her to dial his constituency because he hadn’t figured out how the phones worked in Brussels. King, writing in the Daily Mirror, went on to suggest that it was “this average, mediocre white man who couldn’t do the job” that had inspired her to become an MP.

Now, let’s not even go into the questionable nature of that “white man” comment, but when it comes to the mediocrity charge, how about pots calling kettles black? In a later interview in The Observer King brought her own competence into question. After university she was offered a job as an intern for the Socialist Group in Europe. “I thought the job was in Westminster,” said King. “I was quite disappointed.” Such was her passion for politics, in fact, that “I had no idea the European Parliament existed, or where it was”. Still, at least she knew how to use a telephone, unlike that dumb old honky, eh?

Apparently, she has a history of making these sort of allegations:

December wasn’t the first time King had raised her allegations of sexual impropriety. In January 1998, shortly after taking over Peter Shore’s then safe seat, she had told the Mirror that, while working at the European Parliament, “a high-ranking party official, smitten by her sultry good looks” had yanked her into a lift, from which she had escaped only by screaming. Men, eh?

Nobody, it seems, is safe: in December last year she put out a press release with the headline “Oona victim of indecent proposal”, claiming that George Galloway had sexually harassed her. Legal writs flew and in March King was obliged to withdraw her claim, apologise to Galloway, pay his legal costs and donate £1,000 to a charity of his choice.

No wonder why Galloway was able to defeat her in the general election.