http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/t...y-comment.html
Last night’s documentary See You in Court (BBC One)
Quote:
Lembit Opik was a Liberal Democrat MP in the last parliament but lost his seat in rural Wales where he enjoyed a majority of more than 7,000. Mr Opik believes he was removed by the voters because their view of him had been warped by the unfair coverage he received in the Press.
Actually, what this film demonstrated was how good their judgment was, the only mystery being why they put up with him for 13 years. Mr Opik takes the view that the result in his former Montgomeryshire constituency was the biggest surprise of election night last May.
Mr Opik considered that his well-publicised dalliances with various women, including a member of the Cheeky Girls pop band, did not mean newspapers were entitled to write disobliging articles about him. He even managed to find a solicitor who was willing – on a no-win, no-fee basis – to consider whether he could sue one newspaper for a particularly hard-hitting opinion piece in the aftermath of his defeat. Among other choice epithets, the article, in The Sunday Times, called him “a guitar-strumming Estonian loon”.
Since he was out of a job, Mr Opik felt he could not get a new one without rebuilding his reputation and justifying the respect of others. His lawyer’s task would have been less forlorn had her client not appeared on Have I Got News for You the day after the election; or taken part in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!; (from which he was the second participant to be evicted, presumably because of the way it was reported); or been photographed with his latest squeeze in Hello! magazine.
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