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Will Boris Johnson Slay the 'Beast of Bolsover?'

Jamie Dettmer

   BOLSOVER, ENGLAND -- Dennis Skinner is a no-nonsense, unchanging
   socialist and the only British MP ever to heckle the Queen's Speech
   Ceremony, when Britain's lawmakers process from the Commons annually to
   the House of Lords to hear the monarch's address outlining the
   government's legislative program.

   Nicknamed the "Beast of Bolsover," a reference to the Derbyshire
   constituency he has represented since 1970, the 87-year-old Skinner has
   traditionally occupied the seat of the front bench below the gangway in
   the Commons, where invariably wearing a tweed jacket and red tie, he
   has harangued those he deems "class enemies," earning himself a dozen
   cooling off' suspensions for what was deemed "unparliamentary
   language."

   The son of a coal miner -- his father was sacked after the historic
   coal strike of 1926 -- and a former miner himself, his first brush with
   the Speaker of the House of Commons was in 1984 when he dubbed the
   leader of a group of Labour defectors a "pompous sod" and was ordered
   out of the chamber when he agreed to withdraw only the word "pompous."
   In 1992, he incurred another suspension for describing the then
   Conservative agriculture minister as "a little squirt" and "a slimy
   wart on Margaret Thatcher's nose."

   Skinner's working-class constituents, many of them former coal-miners
   or the sons and daughters of miners, have been relentlessly behind
   their pugnacious tribune with the snappy bark, and they have been loyal
   to the Labour Party. The closure of local collieries by Conservative
   governments in the 1980s and 1990s only deepened Bolsover's allegiance
   to Labour and to their MP, who took a pay cut himself in support of the
   miners during a ferocious 1984-85 miners' strike.

   But the times are changing and the country's oldest serving MP may
   became next week a casualty of electoral war thanks to the scrambling
   of British politics by Brexit and a makeover of the Labour Party, which
   has become more focused on metropolitan issues pushed by progressive
   urban recruits, irritating older and more socially conservative
   traditional Labour voters.

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