Brooks Newmark is a good constituency MP, even if he is less than enthusiastic about fish suppers at Essex village functions.
We know about the fish and chips apathy courtesy of the Sunday Mirror, which yesterday printed the contents of his Twitter and Whatsapp exchanges with a Tory party activist called Sophie Wittams.
Newmark's electronic conversations with "Sophie" brought his ministerial career to an abrupt halt at the weekend. For the activist was the figment of a freelance reporter's imagination and Newmark, unable to keep his pyjama cord tied, fell into "her" honeytrap.
The editors' code of conduct forbids the use of subterfuge in newsgathering unless there is a public interest and there is no other way of obtaining the information.
The new regulator Ipso has now been asked to decide whether the Sunday Mirror's story complied with this clause. Newmark hasn't complained, but fellow Tory MP - and fellow target - Mark Pritchard has.
The paper insists that its investigation was in the public interest: Lloyd Embley the editor-in-chief went so far today as to say it was a "nailed on" example of public interest journalism.
Really? The Sunday Mirror story says that the trap was set as part of an "an undercover probe into claims by sources that MPs were using social media networks to meet women".
Before we go any further into the methods employed in this probe, can someone please explain what is wrong with MPs, who are actually human beings, using social media networks to meet women? And most especially MPs such as Pritchard, who is unmarried?
Newmark was the only one of several Tory MPs targeted in the Mirror's fishing expedition to take the bait. He's a fool and his wife and children won't be best pleased with him. But he was not a minister for the family or a moral crusader. He can be accused of disloyalty and stupidity, but hardly hypocrisy.
Alison Phillips, who runs the Mirror's weekend operations, told the Guardian that as a co-founder of the Women2Win campaign to get more women MPs, Newmark's exchanges with someone he believed to be a young intern interested in politics were wholly inappropriate.
Why? "Sophie" wasn't a teenager, she was supposed to be 22. That's grown-up. It's not as though Newmark was grooming a naive child. Will women be put off entering politics because a man championing their cause couldn't resist a come-on from a flirtatious party worker? Surely not.
If the journalist involved was seriously concerned about MPs' use of social media, why did he target only Tories? Don't Labour, LibDem, Green and nationalists understand Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp etc?
And as for the execution of this sting: the reporter stole photographs of real women to create the "Sophie" persona. Unsurprisingly, they are angry.
This entire enterprise was malicious and misconceived, and has resulted in women losing a valuable voice in government. Newmark founded Women2Win with Baroness Jenkin, who happens to be the wife of neighbouring MP Bernard Jenkin, in 2005. That's nine years of campaigning to help women advance in the macho world of Westminster. Did the Mirror's freelancer think that Newmark was in it only to find young blondes willing to take their clothes off?
It's hard to think of many things less in the public interest than to set out to destroy the careers of random MPs for no clear reason other to sell papers and cause chaos in a political party whose policies you oppose. And how cowardly of Embley then to seek to distance his paper from the operation by saying it wasn't the Mirror's sting.
The only good thing to come out of this is the knowledge that 87% of the MPs targeted didn't take the bait.
We know about the fish and chips apathy courtesy of the Sunday Mirror, which yesterday printed the contents of his Twitter and Whatsapp exchanges with a Tory party activist called Sophie Wittams.
Newmark's electronic conversations with "Sophie" brought his ministerial career to an abrupt halt at the weekend. For the activist was the figment of a freelance reporter's imagination and Newmark, unable to keep his pyjama cord tied, fell into "her" honeytrap.
The editors' code of conduct forbids the use of subterfuge in newsgathering unless there is a public interest and there is no other way of obtaining the information.
The new regulator Ipso has now been asked to decide whether the Sunday Mirror's story complied with this clause. Newmark hasn't complained, but fellow Tory MP - and fellow target - Mark Pritchard has.
The paper insists that its investigation was in the public interest: Lloyd Embley the editor-in-chief went so far today as to say it was a "nailed on" example of public interest journalism.
Really? The Sunday Mirror story says that the trap was set as part of an "an undercover probe into claims by sources that MPs were using social media networks to meet women".
Before we go any further into the methods employed in this probe, can someone please explain what is wrong with MPs, who are actually human beings, using social media networks to meet women? And most especially MPs such as Pritchard, who is unmarried?
Newmark was the only one of several Tory MPs targeted in the Mirror's fishing expedition to take the bait. He's a fool and his wife and children won't be best pleased with him. But he was not a minister for the family or a moral crusader. He can be accused of disloyalty and stupidity, but hardly hypocrisy.
Alison Phillips, who runs the Mirror's weekend operations, told the Guardian that as a co-founder of the Women2Win campaign to get more women MPs, Newmark's exchanges with someone he believed to be a young intern interested in politics were wholly inappropriate.
Why? "Sophie" wasn't a teenager, she was supposed to be 22. That's grown-up. It's not as though Newmark was grooming a naive child. Will women be put off entering politics because a man championing their cause couldn't resist a come-on from a flirtatious party worker? Surely not.
If the journalist involved was seriously concerned about MPs' use of social media, why did he target only Tories? Don't Labour, LibDem, Green and nationalists understand Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp etc?
And as for the execution of this sting: the reporter stole photographs of real women to create the "Sophie" persona. Unsurprisingly, they are angry.
This entire enterprise was malicious and misconceived, and has resulted in women losing a valuable voice in government. Newmark founded Women2Win with Baroness Jenkin, who happens to be the wife of neighbouring MP Bernard Jenkin, in 2005. That's nine years of campaigning to help women advance in the macho world of Westminster. Did the Mirror's freelancer think that Newmark was in it only to find young blondes willing to take their clothes off?
It's hard to think of many things less in the public interest than to set out to destroy the careers of random MPs for no clear reason other to sell papers and cause chaos in a political party whose policies you oppose. And how cowardly of Embley then to seek to distance his paper from the operation by saying it wasn't the Mirror's sting.
The only good thing to come out of this is the knowledge that 87% of the MPs targeted didn't take the bait.
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