Another brouhaha around Eric Joyce, the Falkirk MP who resigned from the Labour Party last year after fisticuffs in the Commons bar. Except this time it’s not him throwing the punches.
An artist called MK Hajdin did a painting of Joyce and sent her work to him. In return, she received an email from India Knight, Sunday Times columnist and the MP’s partner.
“Hello MK Hadjin [sic], it’s Eric’s partner here. My name is India Knight. I read your Twitter account with increasing alarm. Obviously you’re both not well and horribly lonely. You’re also boring. I have more than once suggested that Eric take out a restraining order but he seems to pity you ...” She goes on to refer to “your 18 months’ worth of texts and your odd, stalkery painting of a man you’ve never met”.
Hajdin has since posted the correspondence on her blog and claims Joyce seemed to want the artwork, which took her five months to paint. “Maybe I’m just unimaginative but I can’t find anything odd or stalkerish about sending a gift to someone who was interested in my art and wanted the gift. I do have the emails from him to prove that he wanted it,” she writes.
“He told me what colours to use and what size to make it. If he changed his mind, why didn’t he tell me?”
Knight has form on Twitter, with a torrent of abuse last year against her former friend, author Liz Jones. “Perhaps all those deplorable Twitter bomb threats have got to her,” says internet clairvoyant Madame Arcati, who flagged up the story to the Londoner.
Over to Knight. “I guess some people need hobbies that don’t involve sending strangers paintings (and then, incidentally, muttering about payment for the unsolicited ‘art’),” she says. “He [Joyce] reported her to Twitter for harassment and is reporting her to the police but it’s hard when the person has no Google trail and claims to be in Croatia.”
