Tory gets bullet over guns

How did a party of sabre-rattlers like the Tories come to get so nervous about guns?

Prospective parliamentary candidate Robert Oulds visited a friend who owned a variety of guns. His crime was to be photographed holding them - and to have the photos splashed all over the Sun. There's no suggestion that Oulds was planning to go on a shooting spree, or thinks it would be a good thing for other people to be gunned down. He doesn't seem to have dressed up like Rambo, or hinted at survivalist tendencies. And the guns were all fully licensed.

So what's the big deal? 'He looked more like a terrorist than a prospective MP', one senior Tory told The Sun. Once upon a time, the idea that an 'Englishman's home is his castle' implied that it was entirely reasonable to defend yourself by any means necessary. So owning a gun was a very Tory thing to do. Now, the party of Winston Churchill, who was famously pictured holding a machine gun, is nervous that any association with guns will have its members branded as nutters - or even worse, Americans.

This won't make the world a safer place, but it does illustrate the narrow terrain of political debate today. However, in their efforts to be even more squeaky clean than New Labour, the Tories may be shooting themselves in the foot.

'Gun photo' candidate dismissed, BBC News, 20 January 2005