PARLIAMENTARY GOSSIP.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3927, 30 July 1881, Page 2

PARLIAMENTARY GOSSIP.

[By Telegbaph.] ♦ (fbom oue special correspondent.) Speight Caught Tripping. Said a Little Too Much on one Occasion. Wellington, This day. A very unpleasant affair took place in the House last night. Mr Speight denied having used excessively offensive words with respect to Mr Brown, member for Taupeka. The matter can be best explained by sending you the following leading article from this morning's Times :—" Mr Speight yesterday, to the astonishment of every one in the House and gallery, rose in his place and took exception to this, saying, in plain terms, it was untrue, and that he had said nothing which, by any possible construction, could be made to convey such a mean ing, and cited from what, apparently, was a Hansard proof in support of his denial. Few persons pay much attention to what the member for Auckland City East may say on any topic, and after his bold denial of the purport of what he had openly said in the House on a previous occasion less regard will be paid in tlie I future, and also to what he chose to say or how he attempted to explain what he intended to say in the instance under notice. The matter however concerns not only our immediate readers, but the public throughout the ! colony, and it may possibly surprise Mr Speight that what appeared in our columns in reference to his very ill-advised remarks concerning the member for Tuapeka—his senior in Parliamentary experience by many years—was substantially the same report as that telegraphed to the papers of colony by all press correspondents, and this without any comparison of notes. Every press representative in the gallery avows that Speight did use the words imputed to him, and that he used them in an offensive manner, and several members of the House have expressed corroborative opinions. Derisive exclamations were heard in the House yesterday when he made his denial, which must have convinced him that honorable members heard his words'and remembered them. Mr Speight has certainly a most fickle or a convenient memory if he forgets that after the adjournment on Wednesday night, his uucourteous remarks ou a member of his party was made the subject of much discussion, and that he was rebuked by some of his immediate associates for being bo indecent. And then what about his correspondence with the member for Tuapeka on the subject, if, as we are very creditably informed,the member for Tuapeka wrote to Speight demanding an explanation, and in reply Speight wrote that he had only used the expression in a jocular sense, or words to that effect, and again what does he mean by getting up in the House and asserting that he never used such words at all, or any words that can be so construed. It is all very well for Speight in his assump tion of injured innocence to quote Hansard, but that avails nothing with those whose daily experience shows them how much Hansard reports are manipulated by hon. members ; but assertions of the kind he made yesterday, if intensified a hundredfold, will hive no effect on those who actually heard his words, except to confirm them in their opinion that the member for City East is a most unreliable person, and that in this particular instance he has acted contemptibly."