Le Cornu hits the airwaves with bizarre defence

Monday 08 September 2014

After being thrown out of his own political party, Deputy Nick Le Cornu has launched a bizarre defence of his “faking it” tweet saying that he was right to attack a politician for standing for re-election after receiving treatment for cancer.

In interviews with the Voice for Children blog and the BBC, the Deputy defended his tweet to his 291 followers on Thursday afternoon that read: “SHE is back and so conveniently in time. Faking it like all good girls do.” That message referred to St Peter Deputy Kristina Moore, who has just announced that she will fight for re-election after being treated for breast cancer over the last two years.

Over the weekend, Deputy Le Cornu led a rambling defence of his actions to the VFC blog and the BBC, in which he: claimed to have been deliberately misinterpreted and attacked by the media; criticised his former Reform Jersey comrades as “Stalinists”, saying he hasn’t had a fair hearing; noted that women sometimes fake orgasms; questioning whether Deputy Moore has been pressured into standing against medical advice; and justified his Tweet by saying it was a political attack, not a personal one.

He began his comments on the VFC blog saying: “[The tweet] has been misinterpreted as a personal attack on Deputy Kristina Moore. It was never intended as such, and if it has been taken that way I fully apologise to Deputy Kristina Moore, her family and her supporters.”

But he said he didn’t regret the remark: “I do not intend to take it down as somehow embarrassing, it has got a valid political point.

“[She is] probably being pressured by the political establishment, the one-party state that runs this Island, to stand for election so that they can keep that seat in St Peter. Now that may not be doing justice to the voters and electors of that parish. They would need to think hard, I would have thought, about whether she is capable of performing her duty, and do they actually want another right-winger?”

The Deputy – who has been in the States for six months and who, like all other Members, is up for election in five weeks – went on to say that the media were out to get him. He said: “The intention is clearly to discredit me so that the voters in [St Helier] district one will not vote for me.”