We all remember the outcry over the newly elected Labour MP Jared O'Mara, and his history of posting grotesque misogynistic and homophobic comments right?
We remember how the scandal was whipped up by the hard-right Guido Fawkes blog, and pushed hard by a load of grandstanding Tory MPs don't we?
We also remember that the Labour leadership were quick to suspend Jared O'Mara from the Labour Party over the scandal.
Well the Tories have triggered a scandal of their own by appointing the obnoxious right-wing polemicist Toby Young to lead their new Universities Watchdog.
Young already had a reputation as a person with very nasty views (he's written columns attacking equality legislation and disabled people, describing working class students at Oxford as "stains", and actively promoting eugenics), but this appointment inspired people to go back through his online comments to highlight all manner of vile and outrageous things he's spouted over the years.
These comments range from obsessing over the size of various women's breasts (including those of an underage girl), stating that he'd had his "dick up her arse" about Padma Lakshmi, accusing George Clooney of being "as queer as a coot", and describing Helen Mirren as a grandma he'd like to shag.
Young has subsequently tried to hide the evidence by deleting some 50,000 Tweets, but it's come far too late. If he'd had any sense at all he would have deleted them before applying for a public sector job, or maybe even considered not spewing vile sexist and homophobic comments all over Twitter in the first place.
Given the absolute stink the Guido Fawkes blog kicked up over Jared O'Mara, you would have thought they'd be keen to stick the boot into Toby Young over this scandal too, but somehow no!
Young has actually written a social media post vindicating himself, and thanking Guido Fawkes for the support they've given him!
Then there's the grandstanding Tory MPs who made such a fuss over Jared O'Mara's history of posting sick online comments. They're suddenly much less critical when it's one of their own who has been caught out spewing vile comments all over Twitter. In fact Boris Johnson has even tried to pass off Young's offensive stream of bile as "caustic wit"!
One of the most interesting things to consider is the fact that Jared O'Mara was hastily picked as a Labour candidate in a seat they didn't really expect to win because Theresa May called a snap election, denying Labour the time to conduct the kind of due diligence that would normally be expected.
When O'Mara's grim online comments history was discovered, he was quickly (and rightly) suspended from the party.
Now compare this with the Tory government's decision to overlook more qualified candidates to appoint Toby Young to their Universities Watchdog. They had plenty of time to carefully consider their decision, and to check that he was an appropriate candidate (by reading some of his blogs, or by looking through his Twitter feed for example).
Not only did the Tories fail to do their due diligence when they had plenty of time to do it, they're desperately retreating into defence mode now that his vile comments have been revealed, rather than admitting that a mistake has been made and that he's actually an entirely inappropriate person to have been awarded the supposedly impartial role he's been given.
If there's one thing that's even more glaring than the fact that a supposedly impartial role should never have been given to a vile hard-right polemicist like Toby Young, it's the absolute hypocrisy of the Tory Party (and the Guido Fawkes blog) for bitterly attacking Jared O'Mara for his vile online comments, and then desperately defending Toby Young when he's been caught out posting exactly the same kind of disgusting online abuse.
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Elements of the mainstream media (including the BBC) are working hard to try to whitewash it, but the fact is that Theresa May's handling of the Tory sex pest scandal is outrageously self-serving and inept, even by her own piteous standards.
Theresa May knows that even despite having bribed the DUP extremists into propping up her government, she's in a position of extreme weakness in parliament. The thinness of her government's majority means that she simply can't afford to properly punish her MPs for serious sexual misdemeanours.
Thus we're in the bizarre position of seeing Labour quickly suspend Jared O'Mara for having made a load of vile Internet comments years before he actually became an MP, while Theresa May is far to weak to even ditch Mark Garnier as a government minister after he openly admitted treating a junior female employee in a massively inappropriate manner during his time in parliament, let alone suspend him from the Tory party.
If a guy in pretty much any other job used sexist terms at a junior female colleague, and sent her out to buy sex toys on company time, he'd be in big trouble. But in Theresa May's Tory party this kind of behaviour is apparently so acceptable that there's no punishment for it whatever.
Then there's the married Tory MP Stephen Crabb who hasn't been suspended despite having been caught sending inappropriate sexual texts to young women for a second time! If a young woman applies for a job in your office, you don't then have the right to send her a load of sexual filth after you rejected her job application. The sight of Tories actually defending this behaviour is quite extraordinary, and the fact that Theresa May hasn't suspended Stephen Crabb suggests that she's absolutely fine with it too.
Then there's the case of Michael Fallon, who, according to Robert Peston, resigned as Defence Secretary because he knows that he's sexually harassed numerous other women, and the stress of waiting for them to come forward and expose his behaviour did for him.
Theresa May's response to this preemptive resignation was absolutely extraordinary.
Instead of demanding that Fallon provide a list of women he remembers harassing and groping in order that the party can consider whether he should be permanently expelled or not, she actually sent the guy a bloody love letter detailing how all the things she adores about him.
In her love letter to Fallon she even praises him for having set a good example by resigning, but makes no effort whatever to address the fact that sexual harassment is unacceptable.
The shockingly lax attitude Theresa May has been displaying towards the sex pests in her own party is bad enough, but the Labour MP Lisa Nandy really nailed her to the floor in parliament when she drew attention to Theresa May's abject lack of response in 2014 to her questions about how the Tory whips office use the sexual misdemeanours of Tory MPs in order to blackmail them into unquestioning loyalty to the party.
Amazingly the BBC news team decided that this question was not serious enough to include in their news reports on the sex pest scandal, as if the Prime Minister getting caught out like that isn't noteworthy enough to tell people about.
The way the leaked Tory sex dossier jumbled together extreme cases of sexual harassment with stuff like consensual affairs between Tory MPs and the kinky sexual tastes of others made it absolutely clear that it was more of a blackmail list than an effort to confront sexual harassment/assaults within the Tory party.
Lisa Nandy raised the subject of blackmail by the Tory whips office three years ago and Theresa May did nothing about it. The leaked Tory blackmail list is evidence that this blackmail culture of collecting accusations of sexual harassment/assault (along with stuff like extramarital affairs and unusual sexual proclivities) has still been going on under her watch.
It's absolutely obvious that when the party becomes aware that an MP has an issue (groping women, forming inappropriate relationships with junior staff, perpetual drunkenness, use of drugs and/or prostitutes ...) they should ensure that the MP gets help with their addiction problems, and launch disciplinary procedures/notify the police if the offences are serious enough to warrant it (which stuff like groping, sexual harassment, and assault definitely are).
Not only has Theresa May allowed the Tory whips office to continue collecting dirt on Tory MPs in order to blackmail them into compliance, she's allowed this blackmail culture to continue on her watch despite being explicitly warned about it multiple times three years ago, before she even became Tory leader.
It's obvious that all political parties are going to have problems with inappropriate sexual behaviour. Even smaller parties like the Lib-Dems and the Greens have tens of thousands of members, so just a 0.1% rate would result in dozens of incidents to deal with.
The thing that differentiates the parties is how their leaders react when sexual misdemeanour cases come to light.
If they react quickly to suspend the suspects while investigations are conducted, they're taking the issue seriously.
If they deliberately turn a blind eye to the blackmail culture of the whips office for years, and then allow people who openly admit that they're sex pests to not only remain as Tory MPs, but as members of government too ... well it's obvious that they're prioritising other factors (like desperately maintaining a razor thin parliamentary majority) over dealing with the sex pest scandal.
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The Guido Fawkes blog has been handed proof of a significant Tory party scandal, but they've handled it in an atrocious way.
Rumours had been circulating for days that the Tory party had compiled a secret dossier of sex pest Tory MPs. Tory HQ denied its existence, but someone has leaked the spreadsheet to the Guido.
Instead of posting the unedited dossier of 36 sex pest MPs (over 10% of serving Tory MPs are on the spreadsheet), Guido has posted a heavily redacted version with all of the names blacked out, and a significant proportion of the alleged offences too.
Presumably the intention isn't to permanently hide the identities of those accused of sexual harassment by their own party, but to gradually leak the names out over the course of several days in order to maximise the clicks and ad revenues.
If obscuring the names of sex pests in order to maximise profits on the story isn't gross enough, there's a sad little know-it-all boast at the end that proves how bad the problem of sleazy sexual conduct at Westminster really is, and that Guido is actually part of the problem.
The brag that "Guido had heard all but three of the stories before" goes to show that knowledge of this kind of repulsive sexual misconduct was widespread, but nobody in Westminster actually did anything to confront or expose it.
Numerous people in the Westminster bubble felt comfortable enough to go and gossip to Paul Staines and his Guido mates about the sexual misconduct of their fellow parliamentarians, but they didn't think to confront the sex pests, or to report them.
And then, despite running a website dedicated to scurrilous Tabloid style muck-raking, Paul and his mates have just openly admitted sitting on the information that more than 10% of current Tory MPs are known/heavily suspected perverts, rather than investigating the accusations further and publicly exposing them.
It's only when the spreadsheet of Tory sex pests fell into their hands that they decided to publish (a heavily redacted version of) it, and presumably only because if they had it, it was clearly only going to be a matter of time before someone else got their hands on it too.
It's pretty much beyond doubt that the names on the list will eventually come out, either as Guido drip feeds them one by one to maximise clicks and ad revenues, or when someone at the Tory party decides to leak the non-redacted version of the spreadsheet to another more responsible outlet to stop the Chinese water torture of one-by-one reveals on the Guido blog.
Despite breaking the story in this grubby and self-incriminating manner, Guido are absolutely right about one thing. This spreadsheet is going to "send shockwaves through the Tory party and the government" however May handles it.
After Jeremy Corbyn moved swiftly to remove the party whip from Jared O'Mara and suspend him from the Labour Party over his history of posting bigoted Internet comments before he even became an MP, May must come under pressure to deal similarly with at least some of the worst of her sex pest MPs; However If she suspends even a third of the 36 alleged Tory sex pest MPs, her parliamentary majority evaporates and leaves her completely powerless to enact legislation without the support of MPs from either Labour or the pro-EU Lib-Dems or SNP!
On the orther hand she would have an awfully difficult job trying to explain why most of this grotesque assortment of 36 alleged perverts and sex pests in her party don't deserve the same treatment as Jared O'Mara got while the claimed offences during their time as MPs are investigated.
So she either follows Jeremy Corbyn's lead, does the decent thing, and flushes away her parliamentary majority in the process. Or she puts herself in the outrageous position of being more far more lenient on the repulsive sexual misconduct of her MPs than Jeremy Corbyn was on one of his MPs for having been an obnoxious little Internet gobshite before he even entered parliament.
It's a lose-lose situation for Theresa May, but her limpet like impulse to cling to power means she's almost certainly going to take the PR hit of refusing to punish the sexual misconduct of her own MPs in order to save her own skin.
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We all saw the absolute hysteria that the Tories and their attack dogs in the right wing press whipped up about the Labour MP Clive Lewis using the word "bitch" at a man during an obscure comedy event and then over the unacceptable comments that the new Labour MP Jared O'Mara made long before he became an MP.
The Tory MP Sarah Wollaston was one of the most high profile grandstanders, posting an article from the disgusting right-wing Guido Fawkes blog alongside a demand that Labour sack O'Mara and call a by-election in his constituency.
Wollaston's fellow Tory MP Nus Ghani even tried to trigger an emergency parliamentary debate on Clive Lewis' "bitch" comment. A move that was dismissed by the Speaker John Bercow as "wholly absurd and inappropriate".
Everyone is familiar with the expression about people in glass houses throwing stones, and when it comes to stuff like homophobia and misogyny, the likes of Sarah Wollaston and Nus Ghani knew perfectly well that the Tory party is absolutely full of bigotry when they were kicking up such a stink about Clive Lawis and Jared O'Mara.
And so it came to pass. Within a week of the Tory hysteria over Jared O'Mara it was revealed that the former Tory minister and leadership candidate Stephen Crabb had been sending sexually explicit text messages to a teenager who had applied for a job in his office (the second time he's been caught out sexting women in the space of a year). Additionally another Tory MP Mark Garnier was exposed for calling his female assistant "sugar tits" and sending her out to buy sex toys.
Not only is Stephen Crabb a sex pest who thinks it's fine to abuse his position as an MP to send sexually explicit text messages to women less than half his age, he's also a brazen hypocrite and a homophobic bigot too.
Crabb is a glaring hypocrite because he loves to pose as if he's a devout Christian and happily married man.
And yes there's no 11th commandment "Thou shalt not send pervy messages to teenage girls on thy work phone", but it should be glaringly obvious to anyone who is serious about their Christian faith (or capable of basic human decency) that sending sexually explicit messages to teenagers is completely incompatible with having respect for your wife.
Despite having been twice caught out proving beyond doubt that he's willing to completely ignore the basic tenets of his professed Christian faith when it conflicts with his personal desire to send sexually explicit messages to women less than half his age, Crabb has repeatedly used Christianity as an excuse for interfering in other people's lives.
In 2007 Crabb voted against legislation to ban discrimination against LGBT people, and in 2014 he voted against gay equality legislation to allow same-sex couples the same right to marriage as heterosexual couples.
Both times he used Christianity as an excuse for his homophobic bigotry, and what's worse is that he's even taken political donations from a bigoted bunch of Christian extremists called CARE that advocate gay conversion "therapy".
Sarah Wollaston and other Tory MPs have every right to criticise the unacceptable comments that Jared O'Mara made. However if they don't speak out with the same fury when it's one of their fellow Tories speaking or acting like a pervert, homophobe, misogynist or bigot, then we can see that their previous complaints were just faux outrage motivated by a tribalistic urge to score political points against their political opponents.
So has Sarah Wollaston posted a hatchet job article about Stephen Crabb, slammed his misogynistic attitudes towards young women and his wife, attacked his bigoted attitudes towards LGBT people, and called for him to be sacked from the Tory party, and a by-election to be called in his constituency (where his majority over Labour is just 314)?
Of course she hasn't.
And has Nus Ghani decided to try to call an emergency parliamentary debate over Stephen Crabb's abuse of his position as an MP to send sexually explicit messages to a teenager?
Of course she hasn't.
This abject hypocrisy makes them part of the problem. If they're only willing to speak out when there are political points to be scored for their party, but they keep their lips tightly sealed when criticism of abuse, misogyny, homophobia or bigotry would damage the Tories, it's beyond obvious that they've got no real interest in confronting bigotry, and any criticism they aim at opposition politicians over bigoted words and actions is just artificial outrage expressed purely for party political advantage.
Nobody has a problem with people calling out bigotry. The issue here is consistency.
It shouldn't really matter whether you think politicians should be harshly punished for the things they wrote on the Internet long before they became parliamentary candidates, or the fact they got caught abusing their position as an MP to send sexually explicit texts to much younger women for a second time. Or whether you think they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they express regret and state that their views have changed and they won't behave like that in future.
What matters is consistency. If you're going to howl outrage over bigotry, then be consistent. Howl just as much outrage even when the bigot is a member of your own political party. And if you're going to give your political allies the benefit of the doubt, then you absolutely must give the benefit of the doubt to your political foes too.
In a way the double standards of Tories like Sarah Wollaston and Nus Ghani are perhaps even worse than Stephen Crabb's bigotry. Being a creepy pervert, homophobe and hypocrite just seems to be part of his personality. It's who he is.
Wollaston and Ghani on the other hand have displayed extreme double standards. Calling out bigotry on the opposition benches, but saying nothing about the bigots in their own party trivialises the issue by piggybacking their own party political agenda onto it.
They want to turn bigotry into a frenzied media circus when it's to their party's advantage, but just days later they won't even issue simple statements of condemnation when the bigot is one of their fellow Tories.
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Isn't it amazing how short some people's memories seem to be?
Of Course the Labour MP Jared O'Mara's bigoted comments about female celebrities and gays back in the early 2000s were unacceptable, and he's done the right thing by apologising for making them, explaining that his views have changed and then resigning from the Equalities Committee in shame.
However it's impossible not to notice the opportunism of point-scoring Tories like Sarah Wollaston who was literally dripping with hypocrisy when she decided to tweet "Hard to see how anyone with his views was selected and retains the Labour whip. Sheffield Hallam deserves a By-election".
Is it remotely possible that Wollaston has completely forgotten about the furore over the candidate the Tory party fielded in Darlington in the election just four months ago?
Has she really forgotten how it was revealed that the Tory candidate Peter Cuthbertson had written a load of quite extraordinary blog posts attacking the women's movement, LGBT activists and ethnic minorities, praising bigots and homophobes, criticising gay public figures, and whipping up outrage about gay couples adopting children?
Does she seriously expect anyone to believe that she's completely forgotten how Theresa May (who had even made personal visits to Tory target seat of Darlington in order to support Cuthbertson) leapt immediately to his defence by insisting that "Peter has made it clear that his views have changed"?
How, other than rank partisan hypocrisy, is it possible for points-scoring Tories like Sarah Wollaston to think it fine for Cuthbertson to remain their candidate in Darlington because his views from the early 2000s have changed, but bitterly attack O'Mara for his comments in the early 2000s, despite the fact he's apologised and explained how his views have changed?
If Wollaston is serious in calling for O'Mara to be punished by the Labour Party for what he wrote 15 years ago on a Morrisey fan page, surely she should have immediately demanded Cuthbertson's resignation as the Tory parliamentary candidate for the numerous displays of much more calculated bigotry he had posted on his blog "Conservative Commentary"?
Of course Wollaston would never have called for a fellow Tory party candidate to resign in the middle of a general election because it would have harmed the Tories' election campaign by drawing much more attention to a dirty little scandal the Tories were busy trying to bury.
It shouldn't really matter whether you think politicians should be harshly punished for the things they wrote on the Internet long before they became parliamentary candidates, or whether you think they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they express regret and state that their views have changed.
What matters is consistency. If you're going to howl outrage over the issue, then be consistent. Howl just as much outrage even when it's a member of your own political party. And if you're going to give your political allies the benefit of the doubt, then you absolutely must give the benefit of the doubt to your political foes too.
Anything else is just the worst kind of cheap partisan point-scoring. And worse too; it's an example of hypocritically piggybacking your personal political biases onto important issues like women's rights and the LGBT equality movement that affect the lives of millions of actual people.
In my view this kind of grotesquely hypocritical grandstanding from the likes of Sarah Wollaston is actually much more sickening than the fact that a couple of politicians said bigoted things years before they decided to stand for parliament, but now claim to have grown up and moved on from their bigotry.
This kind of point-scoring hypocrisy is worse because it exists in the present moment, not in the early 2000s like Cuthbertson and O'Mara's bigoted comments, and because this kind of integrity-deficient and highly partisan party political point scoring is one of the ugliest and most apathy inducing things about the current state of British politics.
Another issue to consider is why nobody in the mainstream media has bothered to draw parallels between these two remarkably similar cases. It's almost as if there's a deliberate agenda to create a narrative of Labour Party bigotry, which means a remarkably similar story of Tory party bigotry from just four months ago needs to be flushed down the collective memory hole, because noting the similarities would obviously destabilise the intended narrative.
Aside from clocking the repulsive hypocrisy of opportunistic Tories cashing in on this O'Mara scandal when their own party leader was making excuses just four months ago when one of their own Tory colleagues got busted for posting much more calculated examples of bigotry, and the remarkably suspicious forgetfulness of the mainstream media, there's also an important lesson for all of us.
Be careful what you post on the Internet kids. Because who knows what direction your life might have taken in a decade or two, and who knows who might consider it beneficial to go trawling through your Internet history to find damning comments you'd all but forgotten about making.
Whether it's a future political opponent, a disgusting muck-raker like Guido Fawkes, a potential employer digging around in your past, or someone with an interest in forcing you out of your job or wrecking your personal relationships. It should be pretty damned obvious that any careless/tasteless/bigoted/intolerant/extreme-right comments you make today could always come back to bite you in the arse in the future, because the Internet doesn't forget.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
