Bully For You

100 of Priti Patel's mates have signed a letter to say she has never bullied them and is using this as evidence she's not a bully. That's just dandy then - if ever I'm accused of a transgression, such as stealing something, I'll get 100 of my friends to sign a letter to say I've never stolen anything from them and so couldn't possibly have stolen anything from anyone else, using that as a reason why I shouldn't therefore have to face a police investigation - despite several allegations made against me.

The twisting of logic being perpetrated by Patel is beyond belief. It's a formal fallacy - because A did not do B to C does not preclude the possibility that A could have done B to D. It's the fallacy of the biased sample and like saying Trump can't possibly be an idiot because his followers don't believe him to be one, despite him saying idiotic things - all the time. Clearly this is logically incorrect.

Imagine you're getting a character reference for a job - who do you ask? Certainly not people you've had altercations with or upset in some way - you get your mates to write one. No sensible person believes a character reference anyway, and I can't see why companies use them.

There needs to be an independent investigation, as there should be for Labour's antisemitism allegations, Bercow's bullying allegations and the Conservative Islamophobia allegations. You cannot simultaneously be screaming for Bercow to be investigated while shouting that Patel should not, especially when Patel is on your team. That's what we experts call a lack of consistency. In the political sphere it's called political bias.

One of Patel's accusers received a payoff of £25k, or some such figure, for dropping the case. That is bribery, but not fully in legal terms, which seems strange. There's a continuum from bribery to blackmail - at the one end, someone is offered an inducement to do or not do something without asking for that inducement, which is semi-illegal; at the other end there's a request for an inducement and it's automatically called blackmail and is fully illegal. Why, the minute there's a request, does an inducement become illegal? Anyone with an answer, you know where to write your response.