Clive Lewis had denied the claim, which was made after Labour party conference. [Image: Martin Pope for the Guardian].

That was the time the Tories ignored a Parliamentary vote demanding the pausing of the Universal Credit rollout until its many problems are fixed; when Theresa May confirmed she would not spend a single penny to make tower blocks safer after the Grenfell Tower inferno; and when the Tories had been caught charging people without any money at all 55p a minute to phone the Universal Credit helpline – among many other scandals.

So the right-wing Guido Fawkes blog dug up a ‘dead cat’ allegation about Mr Lewis saying “On your knees, bitch!” to a man at a Labour conference fringe event, and this was followed by an allegation of sexual assault. The allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had just broken, so the claim was certain to garner a great deal of attention.

(A ‘dead cat’ is, as everyone should know, a tactic to distract attention from an important issue – equivalent to throwing a dead cat onto a table and shouting, “Look at this dead cat!”; everyone looks, and forgets about whatever they were discussing before).

Now we see there was no substance in the sexual assault allegation. We already knew there was nothing more than manufactured outrage about the incident at the Labour event.

They served their purpose. For the Tories, the problem is that worse crises were to follow – and have yet to come.

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP and former shadow business secretary, has been cleared of allegations of sexual harassment after a party investigation.

Lewis, the MP for Norwich South, was accused of grabbing a female Labour member’s bottom at a fringe event at the party’s conference in September. The woman told the Independent last month: “We had a hug and while we were having a hug he gave my bum a big squeeze.”

Lewis had previously apologised after it emerged he told a man to “get on your knees, bitch”, understood to be at the same event, part of Momentum’s The World Transformed festival.

An internal investigation has dismissed the claim of sexual harassment against him… Labour MPs Kelvin Hopkins and Ivan Lewis remain under investigation.

Source: Clive Lewis cleared by Labour over sexual harassment claim | Politics | The Guardian

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