I predict, right here and now, that Alan Johnson will be the next leader of the Labour party. I’m even willing to put a fiver on it, as I did on John Major, and I was right about him too…
….who would this likely new leader be? Harriet Harman? Dawn Primarolo? Cooper herself ? Those cooing martinets of incompetence offend women and men alike. Straw? Iraq – enough said. Hillary Benn? Not unless technocracy gets sexy all of a sudden. One of the Millibands? Surely they can’t’ve finished their work experience already….
You see what I mean. Who’s left that hasn’t pissed everyone off, but Alan Johnson?
Jackie Ashley, recently-turned former Brownite, in The Guardian this morning:
… If the party gets the kind of historic shredding the polls suggest then all bets are off.
…Stopping that kind of meltdown is focusing many minds and explains why Alan Johnson has become such a fashionable figure. He is genuine, genial, moderate and working class. He has spoken loyally without sounding greasy – and without closing the door on his own emergence as a unity candidate leader. Yesterday, defending Hazel Blears, he emphasised her roots as a working-class woman. “Blokes and blokettes, keeping calm and carrying on” would be the message.
What did I tell you? Sometimes even I’m shocked at my own prescience. Anyone willing to stake a fiver against Johnson now?
Zimbabwean election monitors could oversee the next British general election:
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The Pan-African Parliament is in talks with the EU on sending monitors to the European elections in June, in a project that could see Zimbabwean politicians oversee voting in the UK.
Pity Labour’s decent left, poor loves; reduced as a result of Smeargate into trying to Uriah Heep themselves into another glorious 12 years of Labour rule. Frank Field MP:
Darkness at the Heart of the Labour Party
Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.Labour supporters are left bewildered and wondering what happened to the moral crusading side of our mission.
Poor old Labour party.
So very very ‘umble.
Nothing’s illustrated New Labour’s complete lack of clue about the wired world – and their own legislation – more than the way they still think they can hide things they’ve done online.
A bogus applicant using the name “Ollie Cromwell†paid £8.99 to set up The Red Rag as a campaign blog. The buyer had to provide only a name, address, telephone number and e-mail to create the site on November 4 last year. The address given was the House of Commons, The Times has been told. The site was registered for two years, ensuring that it would be in place throughout the general election campaign, which must be called by June next year.?
I’d laugh if it wasn’t so fucking tragic: a discredited PM and a corrupt cabinet are teetering on the edge of implosion, not because of one of the any number of other, more substantive offences they might’ve been convicted for, but for internet cluelessness.
Meanwhile the traditional political media are off with the fairies, self-obsessing (as is their wont) about the way Smeargate illustrates their own imminent demise -“Why wasn’t I in the loop? Why was I scooped by a blog? Oh shit, will I have a job tomorrow? I’d better get a blog…” – rather than using their leverage as the fourth estate to help oust a dangerously incompetent and deceitful government that those of all political persuasions loathe.
No help there then.
And public trust in government, the police and in civic life in general continues to erode almost to invisibility. The authorities are scared shitless of public anger.
Declaring a Civil Contingency event looms. But hey, that’s just civic society falling apart as a result of Chicago School economic policies, as filtered through Brownian endogenous bloody growth theory. Brutality’s a feature not a bug.
Pity the decent left. They’re in a terrible fix – wanting nothing more than to get rid of this shower of incompetents, not least for their own political ambition, but reluctant to let go of a jot or a tittle of power despite recognising their party’s government is a shambles. They surely must recognise that they’re first up against the wall when it all goes to shit. After all, they’re party members too, they enabled these people. But no, they still think they can recover a shred of credibility, hence the mass outbreak of humility this morning.
We see and hear a trio of Blairites making ‘I are serious elder statesman’ expressions at the media and condemning this dreadful, shocking behaviour in outraged and unimpeachably moral chapel elder tones. Frank Field’s spreading oleaginous humility – it’s the best butter- on his blog just to pound home the point that it wasn’t us, guv, it was those nasty Brownites, and Alex Hilton written a condemnation cum mea culpa for The Scotsman:
Politics is the means by which a country is run and good politics means a country is run well.
But politics is also the name of a silly game played by silly boys in the Westminster bubble.
It’s a fun game, I fully admit, and sometimes it just has to be played. But when playing a game is your ambition and your daily motivation, it’s time to grow up.
Mr McBride and Mr Draper suffered from being in the Westminster bubble where all they saw was the game; where a lie here or a smear there are just bishops and rooks on a chessboard.
Somehow they had lost sight of that other politics – that which is concerned only with delivering a secure, fulfilling and sustainable society for its citizens.
Pass me the sick bag, mother.
I know many Labour figures who shun these silly games. There are many more who, like me, enjoy playing a game from time to time but who don’t let it get in the way of more noble, long-term objectives. But this week, until this embarrassment dies down, every single one of us will look like a duplicitous, power-mad fool.
If Labour party members are still able to believe that despite everything they’ve done, every illegal war, every torture, every police murder, every fake enquiry, that Labour has any right or mandate to govern Britain, the ‘decent left’ are duplicitous power mad fools.
I’ve had a think about the No 10 email smear affair, aka Emailgate, since yesterday’s post. What I must remember not to forget as I get carried away with loathing Labour is what really matters is that the scurrilous gossip about the Tories and their family members is out there now. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s in the public domain.
Wasn’t that worth the loss of a special adviser who’s undoubtedly still on the PM’s contact list and who’ll surely find a comfy job in a convenient thinktank right up the street anyway?
Job done thinks No. 10; so far for Brown the positives outweigh the negatives. So far. Like many my first google yesterday was to find out what the allegations against the Tories were and it was the allegations that occupied the headlines all day.The machinations behind the scenes in Downing St, although reported, were paid secondary attention, but things are changing. Even the normally slavishly loyal Jackie Ashley of the Guardian is fingering Gordon as guilty.
Although we’ve seen at least one of Labour’s buttmonkey wannabes, Damien McBride go down over Emailgate (he says resigned, Gordo says fired), yet the man who’s chosen to surround himself with a troop of viciously loyal simian spinnersstill denies it has anything to do with him.
The whole reason McBride was employed at public expense and for political purposes was to destabilise the opposition with lies, mislead the media and divert attention from Gordo’s own flaming red monkey butt. Gordon Brown still denies all knowledge and as usual, responsibility for McBride, although McBride has been his poo-flinger in chief since forever :
He caught Gordon Brown’s eye in 2000 as the official responsible for leading the Treasury’s response to the first wave of fuel protests. According to one insider: ‘His hardline stance impressed Brown because he eventually stared out the truckers and forced them to capitulate.’
[…]
McBride took over from Ian Austin as Gordon Brown’s adviser on political press issues after the 2005 General Election.
Despite having to be replaced at one point he saw off his rival and continued poo-flinging for Gordo. Here’s a more polite sample of McBride’s output:
I just wish for once you’d try to get past your cynical, Tory, halfwit Harold Lloyd schtick to try and be a genuine journalist.’ read Damian McBride’s text message to the outgoing chief political correspondent of The Times.
‘It’s presumably cos of your inability to do so that you’re off to earn a crust at some Tory think-tank instead. Pathetic.’
Brown liked McBride and his methods so much he put McBride in charge of his wife Sarah Brown’s personal PR. How’s that working out for you Mrs Brown?
‘Journalists who then found themselves walking beside Mrs Brown struggled to avoid being tripped up as party members muscled in, trying to form a protective phalanx.
Then came the most extraordinary piece of control freakery of the day. “I want you guys on the green,†said the man from the Labour Party. “There will be six or seven guys with guns who will keep you away from her. You may be shot and then it won’t be my problem.â€
It’s not as though the PM or other Labour ministers can claim that they don’t know their responsibility for ‘rogue’ advisors, either; in 2007, Labour minister Lord Davies of Oldham confirmed that ministers must answer for the actions of their advisers, telling the House of Lords:
“The responsibility for the management and conduct of special advisers, including discipline, rests with the Minister who made the appointment. The Ministerial Code makes clear that individual Ministers will be accountable to Parliament for their actions and decisions in respect of their special advisers.”
As if. That hasn’t ever stopped them letting SpAds like McBride off the leash. The PM knows fine well what his aide was up to. When he says he didn’t know about the planned Red Rag blog or the smear campaign he’s lying. Again.
But still. It’s out there. Proper job.
UPDATE:
Yes, that is Drapers’ proposed Red Rag blog linked to up there – there’s nothing on it yet, but it is taking (moderated) comments.
Go on, you know you want to. I did:
“Is this thing on, Dolly? No?
Ah well, I suppose you can always use it for selling menstrual products if the politics and psychotherapy don’t work out and your famous wife dumps you.”
For negative campaigning, duh. As I’ve said before, New Labour’s studied Karl Rove’s methods very closely. But not quite closely enough.
Like pushpolling and fake leaflets a classic Rovian ploy is to buy up all your opponents’ potential domain names and park them, with page of misleading information – or just plain lies, it doesn’t matter, by the time they get it taken down the campaign’ll be over – about your opponent put up as a placeholder. A lie’s halfway around the world before the truth’s got its boots on, has always been the Rovian motto.
He may have studied Rove’s methods and he may be equally porcine, but Charlie Whelan‘s no Rove and he missed something vital that Rove never did.
Deniability.
Rove knew to hide GOP dirty domain-name tricks behind interlocking puzzles of holding companies and consultants – his hands were never actually seento be dirty. Unlike Labour, which registered smear domains in plain sight for any idiot blogger to do a lookup on, and put its name and address at the bottom of the pages too.
No doubt No 10 spins such stupidity as ‘transparency’.
The Republicans also had an army of flying butt monkeys, insane wingnut commenters, who spammed and trolled opposition blogs and launched DOS attacks against anyone posing a threat online. Again deniability; all were independent commenters, see, no connection to any party, no sir. What email lists and talking points?
Labour doesn’t have anything approaching an army of even pedestrian buttmonkeys; at most it has a few spotty, ambitious youths with Blackberries and a handful of loyal, ageing party apparatchiks with lots of time on their hands trolling the Guardian’s comment section. Labour MPs do look as though they eat plenty of Cheetos though, and most do appear to live in Mom’s basement or at least claim a second home allowance for it.
They failed at blogs and Labour’s efforts at online dirty tricks are an epic fail too. If you want to see quite how epic take a look at their spin doctor scripted, Cameron/Osborne ‘livechat’. They’re just incompetent at everything, even at being evil.
