Ben Bradley is the hardest-working member in the House

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Joe has found the UK's hardest-working MP:

As well as being a Tory MP for Mansfield, Ben Bradley is the leader of the Nottinghamshire County Council and a member of the Executive Board of East Midlands Councils.

Both jobs apparently total 30 hours of additional work per week, raising questions as to how Bradley finds time to be an MP.

The website goes on to point out that studies have found that MPs work an average of 69 hours a week.

Assuming Bradley does his 69 hours, Joe calculates that his extra duties, if he works weekends, leave him only five and hours for sleep and a private life each day,

But life is not all work for Bradley: the website reminds us that in June he accepted a £1961 ticket to Wembley for England vs Germany in the UEFA Euros from the gambling firm Power Leisure Bookmakers.

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"The reason the Department hasn’t done the simplest, cheapest thing and just give parents a bit of extra cash is because they don’t trust them to spend it properly. Or rather they are scared of the public perception that, as Tory MP Ben Bradley luridly put it last year, the money would be spent in crack dens and brothels." Sam Freedman says myths about poverty must be refuted so that parents are trusted with £20 and not half a pepper.

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Nothing I learnt in school mathematics after the age of 12 has been of use to me since

It's fashionable at the moment to pile on to Ben Bradley, the Conservative MP for Mansfield, and I see no reason to discourage this.

So here's one tweet Bradley has not deleted:

Except 1 in 3 kids don't live in poverty, thats an absolute fallacy. Labour's measure of 'relative' poverty is meaningless. If Richard Branson gets richer, more kids get 'relatively' impoverished. Its just an arbitrary line on income, ignoring things like local cost of living etc https://t.co/UpOyDBgtdJ

— Ben Bradley MP (@BBradley_Mans) October 22, 2020

Bradley is talking nonsense because this measure of poverty is based upon median income not mean income, and he appears not to understand the difference. 

I do understand it because, before we moved to Leicestershire when I was 13, I went to secondary school in Hertfordshire. There we studied studied mathematics using textbooks produced by the School Mathematics Project.

These made the subject interesting and turned out to be useful. We learnt some basic statistics, notably the concepts of mean, median and mode.

If I had stayed with SMP I would soon have been learning about computer programming, but in Leicestershire maths was very different.

We were offered an old-fashioned diet of arithmetic, trigonometry and algebra. It was dull beyond endurance and nothing I learnt in maths in the next four years has ever been of use to me since. I did get an O level, but was delighted to give the subject up at 16.

You may say I was strictly on the arts side after that, but I turned out to be good at formal logic at university. I found that Venn diagrams could be used to test the validity of syllogisms - and I had learnt about Venn diagrams in primary school.

So when I saw this exchange the other day (and thanks to the reader who helped me find it again) I almost cheered.

This is absolutely right.

Probability/statistics is *by far* the most important branch of maths - both for everyday life and to be an informed citizen. Hopelessly underemphasised in curriculum. https://t.co/DjTdTvxDWP

— Jonathan Portes (@jdportes) October 19, 2020

No doubt a lot has changed since my schooldays. But, judging by this and Mr Bradley, not enough.

Ben Bradley is a rare beneficiary of snobbery

Ben Bradley is solidly middle class. His parents sent him to Derby Grammar School, which despite its name is an expensive private school. Its current fees the sixth-form students are £14,233.

Ben Bradley is as much a career politico as it is possible to be. When he was elected to parliament at the age of 27 he had a degree in politics, was a member of Nottinghamshire County Council and Ashfield District Council, and was working at Westminster as a political researcher.

So why do people regard him as a working-class outsider? How does he get away with being the Chairman of Blue Collar Conservatives?

The answer is snobbery. Because Bradley speaks with an East Midlands accent, people assume he must be working class.

This is absurd and patronising, but our national life is so dominated by people from the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge that people in the political world seldom come across people with an accent different from their own. 

When they do, they generally assume it's because he or she is working class - as if there are no middle-class people north of Watford Gap.

This makes Bradley a rare beneficiary of snobbery. He has so far largely got away with his repellent views because it has been thought his is an authentic working-class voice with no time for the niceties of middle-class debate. Salt of the earth and all that.

I suspect this view of him will not survive his current manic self-exposure.

In the 19th century accents were more diverse. Gladstone is reported to have had a Lancashire accent (though its hard to detect in the only genuine recording of him), while Charles Kingsley spoke with a strong West Country accent.

The only survival of this you hear today is when a Northumbrian aristocrat is interviewed and turns out to speak with the local accent.

Photo of Ben Bradley by Richard Townshend.

Did Kemi Badenoch hack Harriet Harman's website?

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From the Mail on Sunday today:

A Tory MP tipped as a future Prime Minister has admitted breaking the law by hacking into a Labour opponent’s website. 

Kemi Badenoch, a newly appointed vice-chairman of the party, confessed that she launched the cyber-attack on the Labour MP’s site in order to write pro-Tory propaganda under their name. 

Hacking into websites is a criminal offence – and can be punished with a prison sentence of up to two years.

A youthful prank that can be forgiven after a good telling off?

No, Badenoch was 28 when she carried out the attack.

As to the victim, Aaron Bastani suggests it was Harriet Harman.

He links to a cached copy of a deleted page from the Guido Fawkes site that laughed at an attack on Harman's site.

Sure enough, the attack took place 10 years ago, when Badenoch was 28.

Like Ben Bradley, incidentally, Badenoch is a vice chairman of the Conservative Party.

Later.

.@KemiBadenoch has written to me apologising. I have accepted her apology.

— Harriet Harman (@HarrietHarman) April 8, 2018

Ben Bradley apologises to Jeremy Corbyn over tweet and makes payment to charity

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Ben Bradley, the Conservative MP for Mansfield, has apologised unreservedly for his tweet claiming Jeremy Corbyn had "sold British secrets to communist spies".

He has also pledged never to repeat the claims in any form, agreed to make a substantial donation to charities of the Labour leader’s choosing and meet his legal costs.

Corbyn will divide the donation between a homeless charity and a food bank in Mansfield.

The Labour Party website has the wording of the apology Bradley will tweet:

On 19 February 2018 I made a seriously defamatory statement on my Twitter account, ‘Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp)’, about Jeremy Corbyn, alleging he sold British secrets to communist spies. I have since deleted the defamatory tweet. I have agreed to pay an undisclosed substantial sum of money to a charity of his choice, and I will also pay his legal costs. 

I fully accept that my statement was wholly untrue and false. I accept that I caused distress and upset to Jeremy Corbyn by my untrue and false allegations, suggesting he had betrayed his country by collaborating with foreign spies. 

I am very sorry for publishing this untrue and false statement and I have no hesitation in offering my unreserved and unconditional apology to Jeremy Corbyn for the distress I have caused him.

There are serious questions to be asked about the Labour left's attitude to the Soviet Union and its satellites, but (like its attitude to the Provisional IRA) I suspect it is all too long ago to concern most voters.

Bradley - despite his expensive education - turns out to be about the least-equipped person to raise those questions. I am reminded of the demise of Katie Hopkins.

Ben Bradley MP and his expensive education

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Ben Bradley, the accident-prone Conservative MP for Mansfield, has been in the news again today.

This time it was for tweeting a thumping libel of Jeremy Corbyn and then deleting it in the face of threatened legal action.

Those Conservatives who defend Bradley generally do so by accusing his critics of snobbery.

But is he really a local, working-class boy made good?

Go to Ben Bradley's website and you will find his biography begins:

Born in 1989 in Ripley, 28 year old Ben initially went to study Sports Science at Bath University, but after deciding the course wasn't for him, trained and worked as a Landscape Gardener. 

Why no mention of the schools he attended? If you are running as the local candidate there is nothing better than being able to say you attended local schools.

Go to the Ben Bradley entry on Wikipedia and the mystery is solved. Ben Bradley attended Derby Grammar School.

Despite its name, this school was founded in 1995 and has always been a private, fee-paying establishment.

And its current fees are £12,993 a year.

No wonder Ben Bradley doesn't mention it on his website.

I imagine Bradley's Conservative defenders have assumed that because he has a Nottinghamshire accent he cannot come from a wealthy family.

It's sad that people from the affluent South East of England often know so little about the country they live in.

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