I thought Sirallun famously abhorred bullshitters but he seems to be pretty good at it himself.
One minute I’m listening to The Apprentice’s Alan Sugar telling us BBC listeners how utterly fantastic and in control Gordon Brown is (but only after Gordo promised to ennoble him in pursuit of temporary glory while The Apprentice is still on air. He didn’t come out and say it before that). Then I turned to the Guardian’s politics liveblog to find this post:
1.09pm: A Tory press officer has just been round with a photocopy of a letter Alan Sugar (as he then was) wrote to the Financial Times in March 1992. This is how it starts:
Sir, I have noted with disgust the comments of a certain Mr Gordon Brown who has accused me of doing well out of the recession after reading the letter published in the Times from 40 top industrialists.
I do not know who Mr Gordon Brown is. Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t. Whoever he is [shadow trade and industry secretary], he has not done his homework properly. The man doesn’t know what he’s talking about. How he has the audacity to say that Amstrad or Alan Sugar has flourished in recession is a complete mystery to me.
Hahaha. Poor old Gordo, he really is a disaster area.
UPDATE
1 Apparently that quote was broadcast on last night’s Newsnight, so I’m well behindhand with it. But I didn’t watch Newsnight, it’s on the same time as Question Time so again maybe I’m not.
2 Shuffling continues apace – the latest is that Hoon’s resigned and Tom Watson, self-described digital MP, has Twittered his goodbye; it reads like something addressed to Kim Jong Il:
However spitefully your character is traduced and your triumphs degraded by Labour’s enemies, they can never erase these towering achievements to your name. To have had the opportunity to serve the public as one of your Ministers has been an honour, for which I thank you.
Pass the sickbag, Mother.
3 And another one gone, another one gone, another one bites the dust…. Margaret Beckett’s going too, to spend more time with her hanging baskets.
4: I was right: next goes Caroline “I am staying in the Government. I am very proud to be in the Labour Government, I am very proud to be part of Gordon Brown’s Government” Flint, who actually spoke in support of Brown this morning. Now going, she’s saying he treated her like so much “Female window dressing’. This from the woman who recently appeared glammed up in a flame coloured frock and killer heels, posing coyly on a chaise longue for one of the Sunday papers.
5 Ha! One of my most loathed Labour MPs, Employment Minister Tony McNulty, is off too. The trickle’s becoming a flood. The brass-necked, greedy dishonesty and sheer hard-faced gall of Employment Minister Tony McNulty, who’s been highly visible in the Guardian’s pages and elsewhere demonising non-existent cheats and scroungers with his hateful ‘no ifs or buts’ anti benefit fraud campaign, beggars belief. Talk about rubbing the faces of the 2 million unemployed in it. What an asswipe. His constituents think so too – someone graffitied “that’s £60,000 you owe me Tony” on his constituency office door.
