Sad Versus Bad

Eric Joyce - the MP for Falkirk and former member of the Labour party - gave a big long interview to the Sunday Times yesterday.

I found most of it 'sad' rather than 'bad' - and it seems pretty clear to me that he needs help on a number of fronts - because he seems to me like a man who is in denial.

But instead he has been disowned and dropped like a red hot coal - by the political party he served loyally for 12 years - but which is much more worried about the damage done to Labour's reputation - than it is about Eric Joyce's health and wellbeing.

Now I find that quite extraordinary and if you had the job of representing Eric Joyce - in a disciplinary sense - instead of just joining the queue to kick him while he's down you'd put the employer on the spot. 

By inviting the employer to take some responsibility for the mess that's occurred to one of their own - because it certainly didn't happen overnight.

No - this was a car crash waiting to happen.

Which means that lots of people must have been turning a blind eye to what was going on - long before that fateful night in the Strangers Bar.

Eric Joyce: Me, I could start a fight in an empty Commons room

The MP fined for brawling in parliament admits he is no stranger to ‘enthusiastic self-defence’ and tells how alcohol led to his downfall.

Eric Joyce became the MP for Falkirk in a by-election in 2000

I wish I could say that Eric Joyce, the Labour MP, seemed full of remorse after he headbutted and punched “between one and four” Conservative MPs in a House of Commons bar last month. But as a smile plays quietly over his lips in his sunlit Westminster office, he is clearly bursting with pride.

“This is not meant to be hilarious,” he says, as we go over the details of the night in the Strangers’ bar, which culminated in Joyce, 51, being escorted away in handcuffs and convicted on four counts of assault. He was fined £3,000 and ordered to do 12 months of community service; last Monday he delivered a sober apology to parliament.

He had seemed so pale and serious as he read out his statement that I thought he would now be quite broken and quiet, but he actually seems rather jolly, swaggering around like Bruce Parry in a paisley shirt and jeans, explaining how he had drunk only “a bottle of wine” on the evening in question: “Three big glasses.”

He didn’t feel particularly out of control, just “well lubricated”, pleased when one of his friends started singing some opera, a little skit he found “proper funny” — but a group of nearby Tory MPs didn’t.

“They were, like, will someone shut the oik up?” He was instantly wound up, not least because they were “yahs”, “slightly loud, slightly Tory, not actual posh-boy Tories, more mock posh-boy Tories, who are much more annoying”, so he went and “remonstrated with them assertively”.

They didn’t know he was an MP so they began talking down to him “a bit”, “and suddenly a couple of people jumped up and said, ‘You can’t speak to an MP like that’.” So Joyce snarled, “there are too many f****** Tories in here” and tugged one of their ties “unpleasantly sharply”.

“And then they all tried to grab me and one tried to bear-hug me” and Joyce went totally wild, roaring and punching and clawing, throwing one to the floor as two others fled outside, screaming “I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit”.

“It was completely mad,” he says. “I just saw red.”

By the time the police arrived he was headbutting Stuart Andrew, the Conservative MP for Pudsey, Horsforth and Aireborough. The police immediately called for backup as “I wasn’t that keen [on being arrested]” so five more officers piled into the bar and carried him out in handcuffs “lashing all the way”. He was taken to a police station in Belgravia, central London, where he stayed overnight.

The next morning he felt awful: “It was very clear that I could go to jail. The whole thing was hideous. A complete disaster.” He was particularly ashamed for his twin daughters, 10, who heard about it at school, “which was awful, unspeakably awful”.

He also knew his career was over. He was immediately ejected by the Labour party, although he keeps his seat until the next election. He is now in a “funny kind of limbo”, wondering what to do after he steps down in 2015. “I’m hoping that I won’t be sleeping under the Southbank Centre,” he laughs.

In some ways he seems relieved. He says the incident in the Commons was inevitable — the culmination of years of stress and drinking and “risky behaviour” after he failed to land a government post in 2005.

He had done quite well at first when he became the MP for Falkirk in a by-election in 2000, after he was “flung out” of the army for publishing a pamphlet in which he described the forces as “racist, sexist and discriminatory”.

Tony Blair loved him, particularly when he went on Newsnight to support the Iraq war “saying what a fantastic idea it was, what a super, super idea, because Downing Street asked me to”. He knew his views were unpopular but “didn’t think twice. Obviously, I’d be a minister. I was 100% sure I was going to be a minister. And then 2005 comes along and I’m like, I do not know why I’m not a minister yet. This is completely mad, I am such a talented guy. What the f***’s going on?”

In fact, the party hierarchy thought he was “a liability”. After an alcohol-fuelled altercation with a journalist, in which he claimed he had “killed with his bare hands” — “obviously a joke”, he scoffs now — “[Blair] was discouraged from putting me in government”.

He sighs: “I realised everything was f*****.” He lost his confidence, “went through a phase of thinking, you know, I’ve just f****** broken my back, doing the line and everything, and I’ve kind of been pointlessly cast aside”.

He always knew he wasn’t a “super- talented” or conventional politician. He has a string of convictions for assault, stealing cars “and blowing them up” and was once charged with actual bodily harm or, as he describes it, “enthusiastic self- defence” but now realised he could never be like most of the other MPs, smooth career politicians who were “cunning” and “constructed the right relationships”. He found it “quite impossible” to network or fake his emotions.

He was better at constituency work in Scotland but even there his openness got him into trouble. One woman came to see him so many times he had to ask his secretary to act as a chaperone with female constituents and there were problems in his personal life, too. In 2006 he split from Rosemary, his wife of 11 years, after a “torrid, difficult time”. He still can’t believe he left his twin daughters, then aged five.

“Being separate from my kids is the Everest of regrets,” he says. “Everything else pales into insignificance. I am an absent father. I am absent from their lives, for the key important decisions, and that’s just crap, isn’t it?”

He moved out and went off the rails, drinking and fighting and “the odd sexual thing. A one-night-stand type of thing”. He had a relationship with a woman but “that was quite uncertain most of the time” because of his scraps.

In 2010 he started working with a 17-year-old student, Meg Lauder, who had offered to help Joyce, then 49, with his election campaign. She now claims they had an affair and gave an interview last week about a string of sex sessions and overnight stays at his flat.

Joyce vehemently denies her claims. He says they never slept together or even kissed. They were alone in his flat only “twice, for a couple of hours”. When he saw the story he was “completely astonished and shocked”. It was “literally the most sickening moment”.

Why doesn’t he sue if the story is false? He shakes his head. “I unquestionably put myself in a compromised position. You’re an MP, you’ve got an 18-year-old girl in your flat at lunchtime. It’s a bad call.” He pauses. “The whole episode’s been . . . You see people in their true colours. People are, on the whole, great. And yet there are several people — all women, incidentally, who I’ve spent a lot of time and effort on — who have completely shafted me.”

Are his relationships with women complicated? “Yes.”

He has always been difficult or, as he says, “idiosyncratic”. As a child in Perth, “I was a regular sort of clever kid, not like a prodigy, but . . .” he trails off. “Then I started getting into fights and then I was in my teens, I was kind of wasted clever.”

After his father died of cancer, when he was 15, he went haywire, assaulting a teacher — or, as he puts it, “picking her up and popping her down” — and being expelled from three schools.

He eventually found an outlet for this behaviour in the army and when he went on sabbatical to go to university, took a job as a head bouncer at the local nightclub for on-tap scraps.

“I fought every week,” he says, with a note of nostalgia.

There is no way of overstating exactly how much Joyce loves fighting. He spends half of the interview describing a handful of his favourite “engagements”, such as an incident on Christmas Day in 2007 when he attacked two men on the street in Perth after they told him his coat was “poofy”.

He strode over and punched them “severely”, leaving them sprawling on the floor, “and [one of their girlfriends] hitting me with her shoe, as they do, saying ‘It’s Christmas Day for God’s sake’. She [later] apologised, cos I asked her.”

He was slightly worried afterwards that they would go to the newspapers, as he was a serving MP, but they didn’t. He was concerned, too, that he might have inflicted a broken jaw or cheekbone but never found out — a fact that seems to disappoint him.

In all of his anecdotes he feels almost let down if there isn’t total carnage — there was no blood in the Strangers’ bar, for example — or if the opposition doesn’t put up a good fight. He was disgusted a few years ago when a teenager had the “audacity” to mug him “incompetently” in Croydon, south London, coming up to him with a “stupid little blade, a stupid little thing” which he removed. Later, he was angry with himself for “not being more aggressive”.

“He [the teenager] really didn’t know how to mug,” Joyce says.

He was also amazed that the Tories in the bar handled things so badly when he got out of control “because it’s ill advised”, he explains, “if you’re trying to control someone, to put your face in theirs”. They were just “like Keystone Cops”.

Why does he need to fight so much? I get that he’s Scottish, but this is extraordinary.

“I haven’t psychoanalysed myself,” he says. “But it’s not the first time that I’ve been physically aggressive under the influence of alcohol.”

Does he drink too much, then? “Possibly.” And will he address his issues with alcohol and violence? “Yeah, I’ll have to. Or I’ll die. Or go to jail.” The bar incident was “hopefully the end point”, a chance to “get real”.

Joyce smiles and rakes a hand through his reddish hair, gives a charming smile and for a moment — but only for a moment — I want to believe him.