Thanks to Neil Parish, now journalists in Westminster have to suffer too

Noisy protesters have been assaulting my ears from outside parliament’s gates for as long as I can remember, back through the Brexit wars to endless shouts of “45 minutes Mr Bliar”.

They’ve been turning up the volume recently, since a character named Steve Bray was permitted to blast out amplified music from the traffic lights on the corner of Whitehall.

Some of my fellow reporters have taken this very badly, even calling Westminster Council to demand the pesky activist is unplugged – without success. But, hey, I’m a liberal kind of guy who did a bit of protesting himself back in the day, and Mr Bray’s soundtrack is pretty good in the main, I tell the moaners.

“Liar” by The Sex Pistols, “I Fought the Law” by The Clash, “Road to Nowhere” by Talking Heads, “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke, “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum” by Fun Boy Three... what’s the problem?

Then came the resignation of the Conservative MP Neil Parish and his ludicrous claim that, while in the Commons, he accidentally stumbled on porn while looking for tractors on his phone. For Westminster’s No 1 Tory-baiter, this is irresistibly fertile ground, of course, and Bray immediately set out to plough it – with painful consequences for all of us within his orbit.

Admittedly, even spanning all of rock and pop history, his options were limited. There are not, mercifully, too many famous songs about farmers and farming. Perhaps he could have picked “I Want My Tractor Back” by the Aussie country singer Lianna Rose? Or sung over that Radiohead classic and renamed it “Farmer Police”?

But no, Bray had to revive one of the darkest moments of the 1970s, dark even in a decade scarred by the Winter of Discontent, keg beer and TV presenters who turned out to be paedophiles. And so, a seat in the esteemed press gallery now requires listening to... “The Combine Harvester” by The Wurzels, an excruciating 1976 novelty hit you are, hopefully, too young to remember. “I’ve got a brand new combine harvester and I’ll give you the key. Come on now let’s get together in perfect harmony,” booms through my window, all too frequently.

As I said, I’m a liberal and, naturally, I’m outraged by Priti Patel’s new law to stamp out protests deemed to be “too noisy”, which has no place in a democratic country. But we all have our breaking point.

Yours,

Rob Merrick

Deputy political editor