Just to clarify the heading, Lucy Powell, MP for Manchester Central is not pregnant, nor was she pregnant when she became the focus of a Sun newspaper article. Her son Tom was born in May, he has an older Sister Lucy and step brother Joe, more details of the family can be found in this online article in the Manchester Evening News. When Tom was born the newly elected MP made a decision that she would pair her vote with another MP so she could remain in Manchester and attend to her constituency duties, whilst the pairing ensured that her vote still counted, however all was not as it seemed to at least one person working for Rupert Murdoch.

The story of the young family and an MP making a rational and wise decision is not something one would assume would interest an investigative journalist, but one of the details of the pairing system is that in order to absolve one voter from casting their vote, another voter on the other side of an argument chooses not to cast their vote either. The Sun journalist meanwhile was compiling a list of MPs whose attendance at the House of Commons was notable by their absence. This is not a bad thing, after all part of the important role that an MP takes on if elected is to be in Westminster, speak in debates and vote on behalf of the constituency. Most debates are scheduled in advance so it may be that Lucy Powell even travelled to London for the occasional debate. However what she was not doing was attending Westminster on a daily basis. This was what came to the attention of the journalist who decided to compile a top 10 list of the UK’s laziest MPs based on their voting records and as a result, Lucy Powell made it into the list. Inevitably Ms Powell was a bit upset and when she worked out the reason why she was being described as lazy she made her feelings known. As this story explains, the Sun has now tweeted an apology and withdrawn the on-line version of the story so we cannot find out what the Sun said originally or who else made it onto the list, presumably some of them were not pregnant or on maternity or paternity leave at the time? Accepting that Lucy was not one of the laziest MPs, perhaps she is our most pregnant?

The response by the Sun online, will presumably be followed up by a more credible apology in print, we are after all in a post Levenson era. However this story is probably one of the few where laziness by a journalist (they could easily have checked on Lucy Powells back story) has been outed by someone with the power to ensure that the truth was disclosed. It is also a story that would cause outrage for anyone who has had a small child and understands the challenge of  juggling work and parenthood, let alone the problem of working long hours in Westminster and meeting extensive constituency commitments. However there must be many ‘Top 10 worst…’ that are based on misunderstandings or bad data. The idea that we can write off Schools, Hospitals, MPs, Teachers, Doctors etc. just because they fail on a measure that may simply be a misunderstanding or the wrong criteria should be just as disturbing as the crass failure in this story. Let us hope that a few hundred other journalists who could easily have written this story, treat this as a wake up call, rather than a nice dose of schadenfreude for Christmas.