A Bridgen too far

 

The Life and Death of Colonel Bridgen

For the last 14 years, I have been represented in Parliament by Mr Andrew Bridgen MP. For the vast majority of my life I, like so many, have been largely apolitical. You cast your vote in the various elections (The next general one is only a few weeks away), and after that, apart from general grumbles, you ignore the result. As the late Douglas Adams put it, you vote for the lizard, because if you don't, the wrong lizard gets elected.

However, being part of Andrew's constituency has changed the way I look at politics. Let me explain..

In the beginning...

We moved into NW Leicestershire in about 1990 which at the time was were represented by David Taylor MP. 

David was a typical back bench MP. A local guy, working hard to represent the area, and his only ambition was to do the best job he could. We would quite often bump into him in the village, either hand-delivering leaflets, or just having a coffee in a church café. Whatever his politics (He represented Labour), I never met anyone who had a bad word for him, and he was generally well respected (He was one of the few MPs who came out of the parliamentary expense scandal with any credit).

In 2008, he announced he would be standing down as MP (He unfortunately suffered a massive heart attack in 2009). Therefore, in 2010 we knew we would have a new MP representing us. 

NW Leicestershire is a weird mix of a constituency. It consists of old mining towns such as Coalville, where you would expect strong Labour support, market towns such as Ashby-de-la-Zouch, where there is a mix and rural areas, with strong Conservative representation. 

As it was, in 2010, with Labour suffering the backlash from the world financial crisis Andrew Bridgen MP was voted in with 44% of the vote (an 8% swing to conservatives).

I will declare now, that my politics generally would be considered left of centre, but even I had to admit the Bridgen's CV looked impressive. An ex-royal Marine officer who had done a degree in Genetics then went on to become a millionaire businessman running a vegetable growing company.  

However, a bit like that CV when you send to a company highlighting your team leading experience, when in fact all you did was answer a few phone calls while your boss was on holiday, we later found that Andrew's qualifications were a tad exaggerated. 

The gathering storm

The first suggestion that Andrew Bridgen had a few issues came in 2011, when a political aide claimed she had been sexually assaulted by Mr Bridgen  While the charges were eventually dropped, it raised a few issues such as why she was in his flat in the first place. As a precursor of many instances to come, his local conservative organization rolled out the line about how he was a loving family man.  His wife obviously had other ideas, and they divorced soon after. 

One interesting point from the newspaper report was that, despite his claims, Bridgen had never actually completed his Royal Marine training course, so his purported fact to be an ex-member of the armed forces was a bit of a exaggeration. We would later find out later, that his purported reasons for leaving, to help run his potato empire, was also disingenuous.

The sexual assault was eventually , to turn a phrase, put to bed and for a while, Andrew was rarely on the news. 

When he did surface, however, it seemed to involve money. Putting the dots together over the years, it is now obvious that one of Andrew's major concerns was the contents of his bank account. 

In 2013, Andrew complained that good MPs were being put off by poor pay and were having to ask their families to make sacrifices (presumably by this point, the sacrifice was his ex-wife's alimony payment). Despite earning almost 90K plus and all the extra benefits that come with an MP, alleged millionaire Bridgen felt he was on his uppers. In 2017, he complained about the cost  in paying for wreaths to the various remembrance ceremonies in his constituency. You would have thought that an ex-marine, albeit one who never finished his training, would have been proud to commemorate Armistice Day, but Andrew felt more concerned about the impact on his wallet.

In 2015, Andrew sold his house for £2million. The buyer was the government under the HS2 Exceptional Hardship Scheme, since it was within 100 yards of the proposed HS2 rail route. In theory, to qualify, homeowners had to prove they had personal or health reasons to sell before the scheme was announced. Andrew claimed that the proposed route had blighted the value of the house and needed to sell quickly to fund his upcoming divorce. Andrew, a vocal critic of the scheme was brought up, not for the 1st time, by Parliament’s standards watchdog, for failing to register an interest in debates on the high-speed rail line. The HS2 line was not built

The Brexit Years

Despite this, Andrew was re-elected in 2017 with an increased majority. We now reach peak Bridgen. 

Andrew was always a euro sceptic and during the Brexit debate, he was one of the most prominent voices for the leave side, often being wheeled out to tell of the sunny uplands of Brexit on TV. In one famous interview he claimed fears that freedom of movement would be curtailed were false, since anyone who wished to work in Europe could just apply for an Irish passport, ignoring the slight issue that only those showing Irish ancestry in the last 3 generations could apply. 

In the Brexit debate, Andrew showed the qualities that would later define his career, with his belief that he had a unique understanding of the issues, despite how much contrary evidence was presented. The ability to double down on his confirmation bias, was an asset in a debate that often relied on aspirational rhetoric, rather than hard facts, and his total confidence in his views were often used to counter experts opinions. 

One of the strange aspects of Bridgen's political career is that despite being a leading Brexiter, a supporter of Boris Johnson's premiership, and part of a government that often seemed to value ideological purity over purity, he has never been given even a junior ministerial role. Andrew, who as we speak, is trying to cast himself as an independent voice, would say it was because he was perceived as a maverick. However, it is just as likely that he was considered untrustworthy and a political liability by the wider party. 

On the back of the Brexit win, in 2019, he increased his majority to 62% (Strangely, in his latest pamphlet, poked through the door, he ignores Brexit as one of his major contributions). The winds were set fair for Mr Bridgen political future, but like any melodrama, just when the world seemed his oyster, the wheels came off [mixed metaphor - Ed]

The decline

In 2022, he was found to have broken the MPs' code of conduct by approaching ministers and officials for a company that had given him a donation. This resulted in a 5-day suspension from parliament. While he denied any wrong doing, what could not be denied was him trying to put pressure on the select committee chair to come to the "right" conclusion, The Standards Committee said that Bridgen showed a "very cavalier" approach to the rules and found he broke lobbying rules "on multiple occasions and in multiple ways"

In 2022, the claim to be a self-made millionaire, was put to the test when he took his brother Paul to court, claiming he was ousted egregiously from the family firm. To say the Judge did quite see it in Andrew's favour would be an understatement. It came out in court that Andrew has been claiming £100 000 to just attend monthly board meetings. Also, he lived rent-free in a £1.5 million company owned property.  It also stated that Andrew had initially resigned from the company to reduce the alimony for his ex-wife, then he tried to claim he had been thrown out by the firm. In summing up, the judge stated that Andrew "lied under oath and behaved in an abusive, arrogant and aggressive manner". 

While a dispute between two brothers over a potato business, seems like the starting point for a Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson comedy (No Irish passports were hurt in the making of this film), the more serious accusation came when Andrew was shown to dishonestly reported his brother for fraud to the police and pressurized them to investigate. 

Similar to the lobbying investigation earlier, Andrew acted in a way that tried to skew the court case, and it was stated that in January 2017, the Tory MP had sent texts that were so aggressive that he was on the verge of a “nervous breakdown”. It is claimed Bridgen later called a board meeting where he called the directors a “team of w*****s” and “liars and thieves”. 

In a typical manner in which his world view countered reality, Bridgen actually claimed it as a victory, despite being ordered to pay £800,000 in legal costs and subsequently evicted from the property. Presumably his brother was also removed from the Christmas card list

Despite being called a liar by a high court judge, basically bankrupt, suspended from parliament, Bridgen remained the conservative representative for NW Leicestershire and to be honest if he had kept his head down, would probably still be so today. But the Covid hit, and the final nail in his career as a member of the conservative party was driven in.

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, 

and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

― Bertrand Russell

 It's not really clear about what happened to Andrew during lockdown, but he came out of it transformed from a dabbler of conspiracy theories into a true believer. Andrew Bridgen's second (and now estranged wife) claimed he was radicalised on the Christmas of 2022 and she increasingly became concerned about his mental wellbeing. (Andrew's 2nd wife is a Serbian opera singer. I always find it ironic that many who try hardest to reduce freedom of movement for others often have (or had) foreign born spouses) 

Some have suggested that his damascene conversion as another way to make money by gathering funds from fringe pressure groups. However, it could equally be the result of a mental breakdown caused by the stresses brought about by his world view rapidly dismantling. Whichever it is, Andrew Bridgen quickly doubled down on a range on conspiracy theories including Covid vaccination causing early death, and Trumpian election fraud theories.

This in itself would not have been enough to have him de-selected from the Conservative party (we are not so much scraping the barrel, as 10 foot under and still digging). However in 2023 he compared Covid Vaccinations with the Holocaust. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back and he was finally expelled from the Conservative party 

Independence day

At this point the honourable thing to do here was to resign as a MP, stand down totally or run in a by-election as a independent MP. 

Andrew did none of these thingw. Maybe still requiring the MP cash to fund his upcoming second divorce (and presumably not getting the yearly stipend to attend his brothers board meeting anymore), he stayed on as a MP and unkeashed from the Conservative party whip we finally got pure unvarished Bridgen. 

A stream of twitter posts soon arrived extolling even more outlandish anti-vax theories, backed up with little or no medical evidence to back them up. He increasingly became subsumed into the world of QAnon to find evidence to support his world view such as on 29 February 2024, when he suggested the use of  capital punishment as an appropriate response to doctors and researchers, who in his words committed "crimes against humanity" regarding the vaccine rollout.

He briefly joined Larwence Fox's  Reclaim party, becoming there only MP, but he found it even too chaotic even for him, and left and has spent the last months touting himself as a truly "independent" MP, while at the same time taking funding from outside interests such as a "£4 million loan" from Jeremy Hoskins for reasons that has never been made clear

The final chapter

You may now be thinking that this blog has been written as some sort of anti-tory rant. While it is true I am not politically aligned with Bridgen on many values, it is only right to say Bridgen has not been all bad as a MP. 

For example, he was one of the few MP's to stand up for the post office workers during the Horizon IT scandal. Ironically this may of just worsened his present state of mind, since any conspiracy theory even partly proved will embolden those who minds are setup to believe dark forces in every corner and double down on their world view that the entire world is corrupt and only they can see it.

Also, I am not angry with him (well a little angry). It many way this is more about concern and pity for someone who clearly has suffered some sort of breakdown and is spiralling into disaster, egged on by the sycophants around him who just see him as a useful tool, to be discarded as soon as his worth has been diminished

While living here, I have had two opposite examples of what an MP should be. One asked for little, but selflessly gave their all, and the other who has given little, and claimed he has not been given enough for it. Unfortunately, in a world where the ability to self-promote is given more importance that honesty and general decency, it is often the former that succeeds, and Bridgen is a prime example of that

Without knowing Bridgen's upbringing, it is hard to know how he came to be like he is. He is clearly a man who constantly requires attention and self-affirmation, and sees value and self-worth purely in financial terms. These are defects in an ordinary person, but are fatal in anyone close to the levers of power, since such people are easily used as tools by individuals and organisations who their own agendas. 

I am sure there were many in Bridgen's NW Leicestershire conservative party, that saw sign of the impending breakdown, but refused to take early action in case it reflected badly on the Conservative party as a whole. In many ways this about how people deal with mental illness. The news item "MP treated for mental illness" is never a election winner, as compared to a physical illness  

The coming storm

Andrew is still out there campaigning for his seat, but the path in UK politics for an independent is hard. You no longer have the party apparatus to fall back on, and most vote for the party, not the individual. Independents do win, but usually they rely on campaigning on single issues or seen as morally above the field. Andrew can claim neither.

I do hope however he loses. 

Not just because he is a terrible MP, and because of his deep moral defects, but because as a human being, I feel sympathy to see another human clearly suffering distress. 

I hope, if and when loses, he will get the help from the people who love him, because while he is in power, there will always be people who will use his paranoia for their own gains and with no interest into his personal well-being. 

Despite their destructive presence, we should only feel pity for the Bridgen's of this world and hope that someday and somehow they reconcile their defects and can feel peace again.

Addendum 5th July 2024

Andrew lost his seat polling just 1,568 votes as the seat went to Labour again