Time to throw the Tory out with the bath water? | Barbara Ellen

It has been my solemn journalistic duty to imagine Tory MP Tim Loughton in the bath, so that you don’t have to. Loughton, co-chairman of a cross-party parliamentary group on mindfulness, has been speaking of how, just like Winston Churchill, he enjoys a long, meditative bath. Loughton considers showers to be “one of the greatest causes of stress” and starts every day “working” in the bath, reading papers and composing his thoughts.

Where the ongoing bath v shower debate is concerned, it seems to me that either you enjoy lolling about in your own filthy water… or you’re sane and prefer to get clean quickly.

Aside from that, there’s already been unpleasant prying into whether taxpayers stump up for Loughton’s watery morning idylls – splashing about with his rubber ducks and a damp Daily Telegraph.

More pertinently, perhaps Loughton could have been a tad more “mindful” of people not wishing to imagine him naked. You have to wonder if there are enough bubbles in the collective public consciousness to cope with such an image. If ordinary British citizens end up being “triggered” by bottles of Matey, we’ll all know who to blame.