I don’t really have much in the way of criteria for CoTD, other than it makes me laugh or go “Exactly!”.
This comment falls into the latter category.
I had been planning a long post on the legal issues surrounding the cash for honours inquiry and arrests but it’s a dismal Monday morning, threatening to snow, and I really need to go and at least stock up on bread and milk before all the shelves are cleared by the waddling, babushka’d, apple-dumpling-shaped grandmas who, with unexpected speed, descend en masse on the shops at this time of day. But battling the sharp-elbowed old dears for bread and milk will at least take my mind off dwelling on the stench emanating from Westminster.
Call me a starry-eyed old legal idealist but every time I think about this enquiry I get angrier and angrier at the way Blair and his circle of sofa-sitting incompetents treat the law as yet another infinitely malleable tool to prop their power up with. Then I become incoherent.
So thanks Downsman. whoever you are, for saving me some angst with your comment to columnist Jackie Ashley in the Grauniad, .
downsman
January 22, 2007 01:27 AM
My own collage of New Labour this week would consist of the following:
1. The entirely normal practice of arresting a suspect on a ‘conspiracy to pervert the course of justice’ charge being met by allegations of ‘theatrics’ from a twice discredited former Home Secretary who knows perfectly well it is standard police procedure. A man whose sensational autobiography sold in pitiful numbers because no-one can tell when he is telling the truth.
2. The same line being plugged by the Culture Secretary, a woman guilty of serious non-disclosure of personal interests, cleared only by the intervention of Mr Blair. A woman whose family wealth is mainly based on setting up carousel tax-evasion measures around various tax-havens, then admittedly lying about it. A woman who then proceeded on Any Questions to state her absolute confidence Ms Turner is not guilty of any wrongdoing, thus placing intolerable and inappropriate pressure on the police during a legitimate investigation. Making you wonder why she did not similarly intervene during the Soham investigation to say that Ian Huntley was “not guilty and should be released”.
3. Reminding myself that a government which supports both ‘extraordinary’ and ‘ordinary’ rendition, and which regards Guantanamo as an “understandable anomaly” is now concerned about a suspect being arrested at home before leaving for work and released by lunchtime.
4. The Attorney-General writing to a select committee to assure it in strong terms that he will be exercising the final discretion whether a cash-for-honours prosecution, of his own close political colleagues and personal friends, will proceed to trial. Who does so despite the opinion of the Lord Chancellor that this obvious conflict of interest requires him to stand aside. Who has some form for similar chicanery, in his Iraq advice and BAE intervention.
Not a pretty picture. But this is the hypocritical, lawless, bandit Britain of Mr Blair and his cabinet in January 2007. It is one more proof of Acton’s axiom that “all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Exactly.
