Out of the shadows

Norman Smith got very excited today. He couldn’t fathom why Sarah Champion MP (Lab) has written to Jeremy Corbyn to unresign and Jeremy Corbyn has accepted her unresignation. She’s to get her old job back on the front benches. What was her role again? The MP for Rotherham was shadow home office minister for preventing abuse and domestic violence.” 

That appearance on the Victoria Derbyshire show must have whetted her appetite for more of the adulation to which she has become accustomed. 

Norman Smith thought her mysterious capitulation would herald an avalanche of returning MPs, as in the domino effect. Someone had compared the Labour Party’s resignees to the striking miners. Norman Smith thought the miners’ strike had lasted about a year, whereas Ms Champion’s spell in the sidelines has only lasted for about two weeks. 

Wot no Flying pickets? Now that Corbyn looks set to stay indefinitely, deciding to ‘blackleg’  looks like a good career move. Get in quick so no-one else can nick your seat.. 

Sarah Champion is campaigning about raising awareness of bullying and online abuse, which is all very well. But it’s a bit like protecting synagogues rather than addressing antisemitism. Shouldn’t Ms. Champion prioritise raising her male constituents’ awareness of the modern, British, enlightened attitude to girls and women?

Talking of child sexual abuse, the BBC is to dramatise the Rochdale abuse scandal.

Filming begins this week on Three Girls, a new three-part BBC One drama based on the true stories of victims of grooming and sexual abuse in Rochdale.The drama will look at the way in which these girls were groomed, how they were ignored by the authorities directly responsible for protecting them, and how they eventually made themselves heard. A BBC Studios production in association with Studio Lambert, Three Girls is made by the team behind the multi-award winning BBC drama Five Daughters. 

Maxine Peake (Silk, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Lesley Sharp (Scott And Bailey, Capital) will play two women who were instrumental in getting the girls’ voices heard.Other cast includes Paul Kaye, Lisa Riley and Jill Halfpenny as parents of the girls, alongside Ace Bhatti as Nazir Afzal, former Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West. They will be joined by Olivia Hill, Ria Zmitrowicz, Molly Windsor, Simon Nagra, Qas Hamid and Wasim Zakir. 

Written by Nicole Taylor (The C Word), Three Girls is produced by the same team as the acclaimed and award-winning BBC Drama, Five Daughters including director Philippa Lowthorpe (Call The Midwife, Jamaica Inn), producer Simon Lewis and Executive Producer Susan Hogg.

I can’t imagine hard leftie, pro-Palestinian Maxine playing anything other than a passionate Social Justice Warrior. It will probably be all about the struggle against those heartless authorities who wouldn’t listen. Not about the grooming gangs with a warped attitude to females.