I’m loth to post yet again that hurrah, Gordon Brown’s demise may finally be imminent, because yet again it probably isn’t.
For all that backbenchers, junior ministers and whips alike are coming out of the woodwork, I’ll believe Gordon’s gone when I actually see it. Labours MPs are more like their current leader than they think; they bottle it, just like he does. The bottled on kicking out Blair, who essentially went at a time of his own choosing, and they’ve bottled this too and more than once.
The Labour backbench rebellion reminds me of nothing so much as a rackety old car; everybody’s taking a turn at the handle but the engine resolutely refuses to catch. Kicking it might help.
FFS, someone stick the knife in already. If disaffected teenagers can do it why can’t Labour?
The British weekend papers are full (yet again) of speculation and hot air about how dreadful that Gordon Brown is and how entirely useless; all are agreed, everyone hates him and he should go – but they’re also agreed that his MPs are all all too bloody scared, too frit or too attached to their pensions, salaries and mortgage support to actually do anything so honourable as to rid the country of such an obviously festering boil.
How long has this been going on now? But there is a theoretical way out that would let any frightened internal assassin off the hook and end this impasse. Not that I think any Labour MP should be let off the hook for anything – this is purely in the interests of expediency.
However it would mean talking to the Opposition and preparing to lose one’s job:
Once you get over the resemblance of The Right Honourable David Wright Miliband MP to Star Trek’s Commander Data he would on the face of it appear to have all the necessary qualities to be a model New Labour leader, not least because of the blood he has on his hands; he voted very strongly for the Iraq war and he voted strongly against investigating the Iraq war, despite his later protestations of ambivalence.
Miliband went straight from Oxford into a thinktank, to becoming a well paid special adviser, to being parachuted into Parliament via a rotten borough safe seat. You see? Perfect. He’s our very own real life Pitt The Very Very Younger.
But this Minister of The Crown, responsible for foreign policy, didn’t even know until corrected by a civil servant that the government whose interests he represents abroad had given a knighthood to Sir Robert Mugabe. See for yourself on BBC’s Question Time:
(Mind you, former Tory minister Douglas Hurd hardly comes off much better, but he is ancient).
Want more? To show how unqualified Miliband is, when he got the job he had to ask the public for advice he’s so bereft of knowledge and ideas.
Today we learn that despite Miliband’s myriad public assurances, the UK has been proved complicit in the dissapearance and torture of people to Diego Garcia. He was duped, he says:
Miliband ‘duped by US’ on rendition
24 minutes ago
David Miliband is facing fresh claims that the US imprisoned terror suspects on British territory.
Campaigners said the Foreign Secretary allowed himself to be “duped by the US on a colossal scale” following new claims of interrogation on Diego Garcia, a UK-controlled island in the Indian Ocean.
A former senior American official told Time magazine that in 2002 and possibly 2003, the US imprisoned and interrogated at least one terrorist suspect on the island.
Mr Miliband has repeatedly denied claims the US has detained terror suspects on British territory.
But the anonymous source, described as a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings, told Time a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said “high-value prisoners” had been held and questioned on the island.
The official also claimed the US may have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters.
And yet, somewhere here lie a few questions that may deserve to be raised. As Foreign Secretary, for instance, was it right for Mr Miliband to place his private life ahead of his public role in such a high-profile visitation? Would he have delayed the transatlantic trip by just a couple of days had the guest been the head of a less translucently repugnant regime than Saudi Arabia’s? Was he, in other words, using Jacob’s arrival as an excuse to avoid greasing the wheels of arms trading of a kind he might once, in the mythic New Labour era of “ethical foreign policy”, have openly described as stomach-turningly hypocritical?
If so, Mr Miliband sets himself a challenging precedent. Every time one of the world’s unlovelier tyrants pops along, he will have to arrange another adoption. Admittedly this is easier in the US, where babies can be picked up by citizens almost as easily as an automatic rifle from WalMart. Even so, should Assad of Syria reprise his 2002 jaunt, Mr Miliband will need to return to the States to add Abraham (I just love his commitment to the tripartite Jewish patriarchy; those shared values with the Saudis yet again!) to Isaac and Jacob.
He’s “very flattered” to be a gay icon. His blog, mainly devoted to the glories of you guessed it, David Miliband, costs the taxpayers 40K a year. That’s about 50p per visitor. (For contrast this blog’s costs are pretty much nil.)
This is not a man with an overdeveloped sense of modesty. Miliband is New Labour made flesh – well-off, overentitled, underqualified, utterly blind to his own hypocrisy. He’s another who’s convinced himself that his personal ambition is actually zeal for the public good and not just a lust for power for it’s own sake.
But now this glorified work-experience boy, not content with having been promoted way, way above his level of competence, has got the gall to think he can walk into No.10 as PM, as if the imposition of the unelected and useless Gordon Brown wasn’t bad enough already.
The reading public’s uniformly derisive reaction to this notion can be seen in the comments to his flag-planting article in the Guardian this week; the nation, or at least the Guardian reading bits, are as one on Miliband. A representative sample:
alisdaircameron
Jul 29 08, 9:53pm
Davey-wavey, you’re wrong (again).
New Labour doesn’t need to make its case afresh, or present its policies in a new light, with new packaging and sales pitch.
The public actually know your case and your policies perfectly and only too well, and utterly dislike them and your whole apparatus and outlook which fatally combine arrogance, incompetence, authoritarianism and a failure to grasp what goes on in ordinary, real people’s lives.
We’ve listened to your case ad nauseam and understand it, better than you do, and can see it for the tommy-rot it is. Have you listened? No, and no number of rigged ‘consultations’ will change this, as you are all too convinced of your rightness to realise what a catastrophic course you have plotted.
None of your party apparatchiks have done real work, but simply continued your student politics into a career, inflicting your shallow glibs idea experiments on the populace to disastrous effect, and all you can say is 2We are right, the experiment will work this time. It must, because we’re so clver”.
I’m sorry, “the project” has failed, and as it’s run its course it destroyed a once-noble party and completely betrayed all the masses who wanted something other than rehashed Thatcherism. You’ve screwed centre and centre-left politics in the UK for decades.
Go NOW, and thank your lucky stars that there aren’t (yet) baying mobs to string you up from lamp posts.
Quite.
There’s only one thing the nation has to say to Miliband – DO NOT WANT.
Via Guido Fawkes comes a report in the Evening Standard that arrests are about to be made in the New Labour election funding scandal. Oooh! At last they get their comeuppance. Who could it be? David “Friend of New Labour But Not Of Gordon Brown” Abrahams’ ? A cabinet member? Gordon Brown himself? Who?
Mr Abrahams made the payments through his builder, his secretary, a solicitor and a lollipop lady to avoid being identified officially as a donor.
Now, six weeks after Scotland Yard began investigating, detectives are preparing to make their first arrests.
It is believed two of the proxy donors could be among the first to be detained.
Peter Watt, who resigned as Labour’s general secretary, is likely to face criminal charges over his role in the affair.
He signed off the forms sent to the Electoral Commission naming secretary Janet Kidd and builder Ray Ruddick as the donors to the party.
However, the money was actually from Mr Abrahams.
If this report is true, it’s the least important (albeit pivotal) people in the case: the people Abrahams put up as proxies to give money secretly to Gordon Brown and New Labour. Why only them? Why only the proxies and not the principall, Abrahams, or the Labour figures associated with him like Mendelsohn? Gordon Brown’s already publicly admitted that illegalities have taken place.
The CPS’ or the police’s blatant leaking (allowing suspects to know that they’re about to get nicked before it happens, which has got to be a criminal, not to mention a disciplinary, offence) is pretty shocking too, though depressingly usual
What I don’t understand is the cackhanded timing of the leak: it’s not good for the investigation or the government on the face of it.
Its bound to draw further unwanted attention to Brown crony Peter “I was in the ANC once you know” Hain, the Minister for Work and Pensions who’s hot, hot hot on cheats who evade the law (and who’s just announced plans to make disabled people effectively work for the state for free, whether they’re able to or not. Perhaps they could be proxies for private equity barons, yes, that might work….).
Hain the Vain’s neck deep, right up to his permatan in fact, in the proverbial right now for having accepted and not declared a hundred grand in donations to his ldeputy leadership campaign. To put the cherry on top, he’s also allegedl to have taken some of that undeclared money in return for publicly endorsing one of those donor’s dodgy financial product in ads.
Corruption and financial impropriety aren’t something the Son of The Manse would like attention drawn to just now, not in these fragile economic times,
Thiese arrests story couldn’t be worse for the government or the police in PR terms – the public’s immediate reaction to this story, if true, is quite likely to be as mine was, “Bloody typical, Labour gets away with it again.”
