So long, Kate Hoey! It’s been a blast. In the way that being hit by shrapnel might be. Labour’s MP for Vauxhall has (finally) announced she will not stand as a candidate for the party in the next election. Hoey is an ardent Brexiteer and has voted consistently with the government on Europe. Vauxhall constituents voted almost 78% remain. Thank you for the memories, Kate. We will do our best to forget them.

Flotilla fun

I do feel that with the name Hoey it isn’t particularly prudent to put yourself about a lot, but she made a hobby of hanging out in random parties. She especially liked socialising with Nigel Farage (“I really don’t think Nigel Farage is a racist,” she has said of a man who literally once blamed traffic on immigrants). Perhaps the nadir was when she joined him on that infamous Brexit flotilla – which at the time I thought was the most absurd thing we would ever see in British politics, but which since seems the equivalent of looking through a pinhole camera, ie we actually only glimpsed a snippet of the full, damaging fury of it all.

Kate Hoey ‘resembles one of two neighbours screaming at each other across the road about an issue with the bins’. Photograph: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images

The one good thing about this trip was that it gifted us some great pics. In particular, the one above, in which Hoey resembles one of two neighbours screaming at each other across the road about an issue with the bins. “COME ON THEN, COME AND PUT YOUR KNOTWEED IN MY FOOD BIN RIGHT NOW, SANDRA, I SWEAR TO GOD.”

And this one, in which her and Farage resemble a couple on a retirement cruise, in which the only sound that has passed between them in three weeks is the scrape of cutlery on plates as they dine in otherwise deathly silence.

Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Partying

Talking of Hoey and parties, please enjoy this snippet of intel about Hoey getting absolutely wild at a bash Jacob Rees-Mogg held.

A source told the Daily Mail: “Labour’s Kate Hoey [a leave supporter], who was invited for all her hard work on Brexit, led the charge as people got a bit peckish and a bit more p****d and discovered a stash of digestives.”

I can but imagine Hoey coming out of a k-hole, smashing through a six-pack of Kit-Kat Chunkies. Please note that in this same article, about this same party, Rees-Mogg is (I am not joking) compared to Jay Gatsby.

Gunning for it

Good to know that Hoey was anti the handgun ban that was introduced after the Dunblane massacre. In an interview she gave to Sporting Gun magazine in 2001, she bemoaned her Labour colleagues’ “very unfair attitude” to handguns, as though they had jumped ahead of guns in an ATM queue, and weren’t in fact speaking out against mass murder.

Hoey also once took a bunch of school children on a shooting trip, which, as far as I’m aware, is not a part of key stage 3. She is also famously pro foxhunting.

Photograph: Tom Hevezi/PA

Legless

If you have forgotten the time that, during the 2017 election campaign, Hoey photoshopped out a Liberal Democrat candidate who was attending an event with her, but left his legs intact, I am here to remind you.

The Lib Dem candidate George Turner quoted Hoey’s tweeted picture (which was removed – unlike Turner’s legs) with the comment: “Wow. Just wow.” To be fair, it probably was a member of Hoey’s team who was responsible, while Hoey was in the office loos, sitting on the closed lid of a toilet, dealing with the comedown from an intense ERG members-only warehouse rave, shovelling Maryland cookies into her mouth.

Why let facts get in the way?

A recent beautiful moment was when Andrew Neil asked Hoey whether she could name a study that showed that the country was better off leaving the European Union. “Probably not”, was the key segment of her answer, and then she made a noise that sounds a lot like when you try to answer a question with a mouth full of toothpaste.

My favourite Kate Hoey moment has to be her reply to the simple @afneil question "Can you name any reputable independent study that show us better off if we leave?". Textbook Farage @katehoeymp pic.twitter.com/OWNHJ91NRB — Kris Griffiths (@KrisGriffiths) July 8, 2019

When Kate Hoey didn’t discover Google

Recall when Hoey tweeted the following:

Must find out exactly how many Syrian refugees have been taken in by other Muslim countries particularly in the Arab world ? — Kate Hoey (@KateHoeyMP) January 28, 2017

Apart from being the sort of thing your granny muses as she’s passing the potatoes, this is also something that having a cursory knowledge of current affairs or, say, the internet, could answer. Muslim countries in the Arab world have taken in the majority of Syrian refugees. Turkey, for instance, has around 3.5 million Syrian refugees; Lebanon 2.2 million; and Jordan 1.2 million.

The little rump

The one time Hoey has made me laugh is when she referred to the Independent Group for Change as “that little rump”. Heidi Allen, quick off the mark and in good spirits, replied: “I don’t think ‘that little rump’ is the name we’re gonna go for.”

Not proud

Despite representing Vauxhall, home to one of London’s gayest institutions, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Hoey has a worse record on pro-gay rights than 120 Tory MPs. Should she ever decide to move back to her home nation of Northern Ireland, I am sure she’d fit right in with the DUP. But I think we all know she’ll be soon turning up at the Brexit party HQ, in one of those scarves she loves, thrown over the shoulder like Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, hair sprayed to the height of the Shard, a bottle of bubbly in one hand, and an entire night’s supply of Hobnobs.

• Hannah Jane Parkinson is a Guardian columnist