Line #14 UsefulNotes/DennisSkinner


1	[[quoteright:200:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dSkinner_4100.png]]
2	[[caption-width-right:200:The "Beast" at his longtime second home.]]
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4	->''"Is my right hon. Friend aware that, in the 1970s and a lot of the 1980s, we would have thanked our lucky stars in the coalfield areas for growth of 1.75 per cent? The only thing growing then were the lines of coke in front of boy George [Osborne, then the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer] and the rest of them."''
5	-->--'''Skinner''' in the House of Commons, in a question to then Chancellor UsefulNotes/GordonBrown, 8 December 2005
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7	Dennis Edward Skinner (born 11 February 1932) is a British Labour Party politician, who served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 until he lost his seat to Conservative challenger Mark Fletcher in 2019. He was one of dozens of Labour [=MPs=] who lost in once-safe Labour seats that had voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum; the upstart Brexit Party, under the leadership of leading Eurosceptic Nigel Farage, possibly acting on the orders of US President UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump, focussed all its efforts on unseating non-Conservative [=MPs=] in 2019. (Skinner himself had supported Brexit, albeit overwhelmingly for opposite reasons to why Farage did.) He was the oldest member of the House of Commons and had the second longest record of continuous service at the time of his departure. He was one of just two remaining [=MPs=] at the time of the 2019 general election who had been in office when the UK joined the then [[UsefulNotes/TheEuropeanUnion European Economic Community]] in 1973 (the pro-EU Conservative Ken Clarke -- who, like Skinner, was first elected at the 1970 general election -- being the other) and was the only one who stood for re-election to the Commons in 2019.[[note]]Therefore, had he been returned to Parliament, [[WhatCouldHaveBeen he would have been the only MP whose parliamentary term encompassed the entire period of Britain's EEC/EU membership]].[[/note]] [[FanNickname Nicknamed the "Beast of Bolsover"]] for his [[DeadpanSnarker acerbic style]] (see the page quotation) and the name of his constituency. He was born as the [[MassiveNumberedSiblings third of nine children]] in a coal-mining town, and he was a miner himself before he became an MP. He's often controversial, and was thrown out of the House of Commons several times for breaches of order (including over the quip at the top of the page, in 1984 when he accused UsefulNotes/MargaretThatcher of being prepared to bribe judges, and in 2016 when he called UsefulNotes/DavidCameron "Dodgy Dave" over his alleged involvement with companies named in the Panama Papers[[note]]This got a CallBack in 2021, by which time both men were out of Parliament, when Cameron was implicated in the Greensill scandal. Cameron was cleared of culpability.[[/note]]). He's also famously anti-monarchy and for the abolition of the House of Lords, among his other left-wing positions, and frequently made snarky comments to the Queen's messenger during the state opening of Parliament.
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9	Ironically given his frequent hammerings of Conservative [=MPs=] caught having affairs, he himself was caught having an affair during the "dirty [[TheNineties Nineties]]" period where British politics lurched between sex scandals every other week. This led some to call him "the Beast of [[UsefulNotes/BritishEnglish Legover]]."
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11	In 2017 a documentary film, ''Dennis Skinner: Nature of the Beast'', was released detailing his life, supported by interviews from his surviving brothers. Filmmaker Daniel Draper explained that he had recently joined the Labour Party and thought of Skinner as the personification of its values.
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Context UsefulNotes / DennisSkinner