Day 10: Amess

[Silent Hunter]

Con, Southend West.

I don't know a thing about him.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One word: Cake

Edited extract from Cake, finally broadcast Feb 5, 1997, postponed from Nov 1996 following concerns over taste and decency.

The episode opens with Morris as reporter Ted Maul explaining the evil threat of a new drug.

Maul: It's a new Czechoslovakian drug called Cake. And luckily the story involves these people: Free the United Kingdom from Drugs and British Opposition to Medically Bi-sterbile Drugs. [Morris holds up a T-shirt with the acronyms F.U.K.D and B.O.M.B.D and a series of interviews with concerned celebrities follows]:

Bernard Ingham: ...this is a piece of Cake [points to enormous yellow disk in his hand]

Bruno Brookes : ...we all like to party, right? Absolutely. But only the fool would say, 'Yeah, I'll enter the nightmare of Cake.' [points to large yellow disk in hand] And this is it.

Rolf Harris: This colour, that they thought would be a good selling point, is put in using an industrial dye which in itself is a pollutant and is causing in Czechslovakia something called 'Czech neck'. It causes enormous water retention so that the body swells up ... until the person that is on the trip dies from not being able to breathe at all.'

Bernard Manning: One little kiddie on cake cried all the water out of his body. Just imagine how his mother felt. It's a ing disgrace.

Noel Edmunds: What is cake? Well, it has an active ingredient which is a dangerous psychoactive compound known as di-mesmeric ansonphosphate. It stimulates the part of the brain that deals with time perception so a second feels like a month. Almost sounds like fun, unless you're the Prague schoolboy who walked out into the street in front of a tram. He thought he'd got a month to cross the street.

Brookes: You know they've even tested this stuff on rats. Turned them into bloody Space Hoppers.

Manning: And if you're sick on this stuff, you can puke yourself to death. One girl threw up her own pelvis. What a ing disgrace.

David Amess, then MP: You've heard what Bernard Manning's said: Cake's a Bi-sterbile Cradabolic Anphetamoid - which is a made up psycho-active chemical. It comes from Prague, with its own culture of Boon raves, where kids wolf down vast quantities... Look at that [gestures to huge yellow pill of Cake in his hand] £100,000 in the pocket of the filth that sells it, a big yellow bullet in the head of some user.

And also: http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm199596/cmhansrd/vo960723/text/60723w10.htm

[merseysider]

He is the MP for Southend West, which he has held since 1997. He was previously the MP for Basildon which he won in 1983. He used minor boundary changes in '97 as an excuse to go on the chicken run (even though the changes were moderately favourable to the Conservatives).

Basildon is an Essex marginal which in days gone by (before we started holding general and county council elections on the same day) used to be one of the first constituencies to declare on the night and was always a reliable guide to how the election was going to go.

I remember Amess's surprise victory in 1992 (when I was just starting to get interested in politics), and realising that we were headed for another five years of Tory government. His grinning countenance is something which is seared into the memory of every serious Labour supporter aged 30 or over.

[Michael Z]

Ah yes, the "cake" incident.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwylBRucU7w

[Serenity Now]

I think he's anti-abortion (I'd say pro-life but i think he supports the death penalty). However I think he might have been in favour of the fox hunting ban.. Other than that he pretty much has the full slate of nasty stances, similar to a conservative Republican in many ways.

And yes, the whole Cake thing is hilarious..

Also, I'm not sure where I heard it but I think his son might be a violent offender..

Anyway.. The man is a complete tool, one of the worst MPs today.