×
This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
DISGRACED MP Simon Danczuk faced demands to quit Parliament yesterday as a former partner spoke out about his drink problem.
Around 30 Rochdale residents demonstrated outside his constituency office, holding placards saying: “It’s time to go Simon. Rochdale has suffered enough!”
Hitting back in a statement, Mr Danczuk branded the group, which included local Labour Party members, an “opportunistic and politically motivated mob.”
“This protest has been organised by my political opponents, who have formed a bizarre alliance in an attempt to use problems in my personal life as an excuse to try and intimidate me into resigning,” he claimed.
The protest took place after Claire Hamilton, a Labour councillor who dated Mr Danczuk for three months, lifted the lid on the MP’s “nasty” side.
Ms Hamilton, who dumped Mr Danczuk at Christmas, told the BBC: “Simon hasn’t got a stop button when he starts to drink. He will just keep consuming. If it’s there, he’ll drink it.
“He can be a very charming, funny, lovely person, and then sometimes when he’s had a drink and he was stressed he would be very nasty and grumpy and someone you wouldn’t want to be around.
“It was getting harder and harder to be in the relationship, to the point that when he did confess to texting a teenage girl, it was definitely over. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I knew there was no going back to him.”
She spoke out a day after Mr Danczuk’s first wife, Sonia Rossington, alleged that he would drink a bottle of whisky a night and have sex with her while she was asleep.
Mr Danczuk, who has been suspended from the Labour Party, has also admitted sending sexually explicit text messages to a then 17-year-old constituent who had contacted him about a job.
But he rejected suggestions yesterday that the allegations made him unfit to be an MP, saying: “It is not for ex-girlfriends or ex-wives to determine who the MP for Rochdale is.”
Self-styled “selfie queen” Karen Danczuk also stuck up for her estranged husband in an interview with LBC.
She accused his previous ex-partners of “making a quick buck at the expense of a man who’s worked so hard to be an MP.”
