Two years ago, the Labour MP Dawn Butler got herself temporarily thrown out of parliament for calling Boris Johnson a liar. She knew that longstanding parliamentary rules forbid the use of personal insults in the chamber, but did it anyway because she felt the rules were archaic and needed to be broken. The whole thing could have been seen as grandstanding, given it achieved nothing much in practice (Johnson’s resignation was ultimately only triggered by the old-fashioned due process of a parliamentary inquiry into his conduct). But it wasn’t until I read her new memoir, A Purposeful Life, that I understood properly why she did it.
Dawn Butler was eight years old when she was first called a liar by her teacher in front of her whole class, for telling a (true) story about something she saw on a trip to visit relatives in Jamaica. When she became only the third black woman elected to parliament, and described being mistaken at Westminster for a cleaner, she was called a liar once again; it happened again when she complained publicly about a Met police stop on the car she was travelling in, though this time she had taken the precaution of recording it on her phone.
