I was driving back from London on Monday night and as I had forgotten to download something decent, such as stuff by Sargon or Bearing or Rebel Media onto the mp3 player to listen to, I was stuck with the BBC. Whilst traversing the Chilterns I heard the BBC newscasters on Radio’s 4 and 5 breathlessly announce that a Tory MP had been suspended for gratuitous use of the ‘N’ word.

The announcers then went on to say that the MP Anne-Marie Morris the member for Newton Abbot in Devon had had the Tory whip suspended. When I heard that I thought: This must be bad. She must have called for lynchings of blacks or made some positive allusion to slavery or something similar?

However, the next day when I checked on Breitbart to see what the truth behind the BBC story was I was shocked at how much of a nothing story this was and certainly it seems to be an incident that does not deserve and should not require an MP to lose the Tory whip. The comment in question was ‘nigger in the woodpile’ which was used by Ms Morris, not in a racial context, but in the context of hidden dangers during the Brexit process.

Now ‘nigger in the woodpile’ is not a phrase that I would use myself either in an article or at a public meeting, as I would choose to use other words to describe the sort of things that Ms Morris was describing. But, Ms Morris doesn’t deserve the punishment she’s got for merely having a minor brain fart, which the use of this phrase most surely was.

She apologised for a poor choice of words and that should have been the end of it. Unfortunately Theresa May the PM has made things much worse by backing the suspension of the Tory whip for Ms Morris. Mrs May has made her party and her leadership look weak and completely unable to fend off an attack of the ‘offendotrons’, those individuals who are permanently and sometimes vicariously, offended by anything and everything. The Prime Minister has also set a bad and dangerous precedent by consenting to the suspension of Ms Morris. If the Left realise that they can get Tory MP’s suspended from the Tory Whip merely by poring over each and ever word that an MP says to find stuff that could be construed by this or that identity politics group as ‘offensive’, then Mrs May’s slim majority in the Commons could get even slimmer.

It doesn’t bode well that the Tories have caved in to the offendotrons like this. If they are so weak in the face of the permanently offended then how will they fare when more serious challenges face Mrs May’s government? Will they cave in to whines about ‘Islamophobia’ for example when Muslim groups complain about the Government’s anti terror programmes or throw our money at self declared ‘victim’ groups who complain that their feelings have been hurt by this or that statement by an MP of the governing party. Ms Morris should have said ‘sorry’ for the brain fart and moved on and there was no need for the Government to make this worse by making this into a bigger story than it needed to be by instituting the suspension. One should never give ones enemy a stick to beat you with but this is exactly what Theresa May and the Tory party management have done over this incident.

The English language is both ancient and rich and has, like a snowball rolling down a hill, picked up excrescences over the years. Some of these extra words and phrases have now been forgotten or have fallen out of use because society has changed or the reference to which the phrase was made no longer exists. For example phrases like ‘as black as Newgate’s knocker’ were common when I was a child and were used in the context of someone seeing a particularly dirty and mud covered child. The phrase originated because Newgate Prison in London was once the major hanging prison in the city and ‘black’ in this context originally meant ‘dread’ or ‘place of terrible suffering’. Eventually the phrase changed it’s meaning to refer most often to ‘dirt’, but the phrase itself remained the same until the idea of capital punishment ceased to occupy a major part of the minds of the public.

There are a whole raft of phrases, words and even plant names that could conceivably be called ‘offensive’ by somebody or another. Phrases such as ‘sold down the river’ for example also originally referred to slavery but have now changed their meaning and could also be at risk of triggering the offendotrons. What about the phrase ‘calling a spade a spade’ or the plant called ‘Wandering Jew’ or the ‘Turks head knot’ are these all to be renamed or banned because someone finds them offensive? I hope not because the English language would be much poorer if it was put under the control of the offendotrons. Can you imagine for example how empty and cold our language would be if the likes of Peter Tatchell or Fiyaz Mughal or Jeremy Corbyn controlled what words one could use?

Although there are many phrases that some, including myself deem offensive, words that I don’t use because I have better ways of saying what I wish to say, I don’t think people should be punished for using the wrong words especially if these words were used either by accident or as an unthinking cliché. In fact I think that Ms Morris should be censured more for her use of cliché rather than her use of the ‘N’ word.

Mrs May has really overreacted to this incident and as I said earlier she’s shown her weakness and her propensity to be bullied by offendotrons. These are not useful or wanted features in a Prime Minister, especially not at the current time when the nation faces many challenges both internal and external. Surely she has more to occupy her time than worrying about than the use of an outdated phrase used by an MP at a meeting when the words itself were in no way being used in a racial context? Personally I’d rather have MP’s who are human and made mistakes occasionally than have the sort of parliamentary automatons that always said the right politically correct things and who were beaten into inoffensive verbal blandness, but sadly these are the MP’s that Theresa May appears to desire, if her treatment of Ms Morris’s mistake is anything to go by.

Ms Morris made an error of judgement, we are all subject to those because we are all human, but throwing her to the offendotron wolves was the very worst thing that could be done. You should never give a weapon to a bully as it is likely that the bully will use the weapon against you, but this is what the Tories have done.