The statement was the same as had been earlier published on the website of Dominic Cummings, the former Vote Leave campaign director. Sanni’s sexuality has absolutely nothing to do with his volunteering for Vote Leave, or the revelations he disclosed to the Observer. The implication of Parkinson’s statement, and Downing Street’s, is that Sanni’s whistleblowing was a revenge-of-the-ex move. Or as Sanni put it in an interview over the weekend: “The only reason that this was brought to light was just to make it seem that this was a vendetta, when it is not about me.”
And that’s where Parkinson’s phrase “I thought amicably” comes in – as though Sanni was speaking out in spite, not because he was genuinely troubled by the practices of Vote Leave. The statement has since been removed from Cummings’ website after a letter from Sanni’s lawyers. [...]
It beggars belief that a government that is supposedly an ally of LGBT people (the prime minister appeared at the PinkNews awards last winter, “vowing to support LGBT rights”) would think it appropriate to announce an individual’s sexuality without their consent and to imply somehow that it was part of a deception (Theresa May, by the way, defended the statement outing Sanni). Stephen Parkinson should know how painful it is to be outed against one’s will, when something similar happened to him during his 2010 parliamentary campaign (something Nick Timothy pointed out to me on Twitter, though in defence of Parkinson). Parkinson felt pressured to come out after criticism of his stance on Section 28, elements of which he is on record as supporting – which is rather different.
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