No, it’s not wise to wind up the very officers able to put you in jail by effectively cutting their pay while a police investigation is pending against you and your civil servants, from whom the police wil get the evidence against you, are on strike,
But then it is all of a piece with New Labour’s general incompetence that they’d commit suicide without even realising it.
Guido Fawkes reports that this morning Chancellor of the Exchequer and El Gordo’s BFF, Alistair Darling, is co-hosting a New Labour fundraising ‘power breakfast’ with international financiers Deutsche Bank at their City HQ in London – cost 80 quid a plate.
That New Labour and Darling are still shilling for money (only public opprobrium made Harriet Harman cancel her own proposed fundraising comedy ‘n cash night this week), after admitting criminal offences and while the funding scandal rages on amd more and more senior Labour figures are implicated, is bad enough.
That the party’s supporter base is now those who can afford 80 pounds for breakfast is bad enough.
That the supposedly objective Chancellor, whose job is to to manage the public purse and economy in the best interests of the country, rather than short term party goals of the Labour Party, is going cap in hand to a foreign bank for party political reasons is bad enough.
That the Chancellor is essentially promising influence for cash ( and cheap at the price) is bad enough.
But Darling is begging for handouts at the Bank that is, with Richard Branson’s Virgin, one of the preferred bidders for failed building society Northern Rock, over the eventual disposition of which the chancellor has not a little influence.
How much more openly corrupt can this government get?
UPDATE: Channel 4 has made more specific allegations that appear to have been the trigger or Hayman’s resignation.
Andy Hayman was already under pressure over his expenses claims and criticism of his conduct after the killing in Stockwell of Jean Charles de Menezes. But he made the decision to step down when confronted by suggestions that he had improper contacts with an employee at the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).
Channel 4 News reported that Mr Hayman rang or texted the woman 400 times in two months while the IPCC was compiling a report on the death of Mr de Menezes. In a breach of guidelines for senior police officers, these contacts were not disclosed.
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Metropolitan police anti-terror chief Andy Hayman has resigned, following serious allegations about excessive expenses charged to his police credit card for drinking with fellow senior officers at posh hotels and restaurants (to the extent of fifteen thousand pounds) and about expensive trips abroad taken with a female sergeant colleague:
Hayman is being investigated after an audit of Metropolitan police credit cards found he had spent about £15,000 – considerably more than other senior officers.
How much? Hardly a monument to probity is it? It’s not just the expense:
He has been asked to explain at least £15,000 expenses that included claims for “inordinate amounts” of drinking with colleagues. “Apart from the money, what happens if they are all out drinking when a bomb goes off?” said one Met official.
The married father of two has been quizzed about his relationship with Sergeant Heidi Tubby, his former staff officer. Tubby is said to have accompanied him on foreign business trips at public expense but is not herself under investigation.
She worked as Hayman’s staff officer when he was chief constable of Norfolk police and followed Hayman to London in 2005 after Blair, then newly promoted to Met commissioner, offered his former protégé the job of assistant commissioner in charge of specialist operations.
Hayman has also been questioned over why he claimed expenses for staying at a hotel at Heathrow when he has a publicly funded “grace and favour” apartment in central London.
Senior sources say Blair’s decision to tolerate Hayman’s spending shows a “lack of control” at the top of Scotland Yard. The commissioner has faced criticism over corporate spending after a separate investigation into Amex card use by 3,000 officers.
[…]
There is no suggestion that Hayman has broken the law. But officials say the inquiry has raised serious questions about his judgment. One official said: “Andy can be very charming but he has been reckless with his professional standards. He has been spending thousands of pounds of public money consuming inordinate amounts of alcohol with his staff.
“He thinks he should be allowed to do this. But there are questions about whether this breaks Met rules.
“The Heathrow hotel matter has also raised eyebrows. He is in a highly sensitive post running all Britain’s counter-terrorist operations.”
Another said: “As a former head of the Met’s professional standards directorate, Andy should know more than others that questions could be raised about such behaviour
[…]
Tubby is said to have stayed at the Heathrow hotel before they both took an early morning flight abroad. Blair and Paul Stephenson, the Met’s deputy commissioner, have also challenged Hayman about why he takes Tubby, in her early thirties, on foreign trips.
The sources said that Hayman had been questioned about a two-week trip to the United States last year. One said: “Stephenson discovered that Hayman had taken Tubby on that trip and called him in to explain himself. Andy insisted their relationship was entirely professional and that nothing untoward was going on.”
To be fair there are those who doubt the original Sunday times expose: Tory blogger Ian Dale, for instance, has his doubts about the story and thinks it may’ve been Ian Blair and other senior figures looking for a sacrificial lamb.
But these latest allegations are merely the lateast to mire Hayman in controversy. He’s no unimpeachable Dxon of Dock Green. Here are some recent Hayman career highlights :
Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, broke down in tears as he described being wakened by his younger brother’s screams as 250 police stormed his house in Forest Gate, London, on 2 June.
“I thought, one by one they’re going to kill us. At that time, I thought I was going to die,” he told a news conference.
He said he was shot and kicked in the face, before police officers dragged him downstairs and outside, slapped his face and told him to “shut the f*** up”. He was then taken to hospital where he was given morphine and where he said surgeons were “pressured” by police to release him.
Speaking about his ordeal for the first time, Mr Kahar, a Royal Mail driver and part-time supermarket worker, described being hit in the chest by a bullet as he and his brother set off downstairs to investigate what they thought were armed robbers.
“I saw an orange spark and a big bang,” he said. “There was blood coming down my chest. The first words I said to them was ‘I can’t breathe’, and the first words they said to me were ‘shut the f*** up’.”
Mere days later Hayman was given the CBE.
Even after that catalogue of malfeasance Hayman never resigned. No, brutalising innocent citizens in their beds is all fine and dandy with the Met. No, it’s the accusation of adultery that appears to have really finished him off:
It is thought Hayman was concerned about the effect his increasingly high-profile public role was having on his wife and two young teenagers
Oh, I bet. Not nice to find out from the papers that your dad is accused of being greedy, a liar and an adulterer, rather than the pillar of the community you thought he was.
Of course Hayman could easily have protected his family from any unpleasant fallout by not doing anything to cause it in the first place, but he categorically denies any allegations of wrongdoing:
Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman said the “time was right” to leave the high-profile job, after facing “hurtful” accusations.
He said in a statement: “Recent weeks have seen a series of leaks and unfounded accusations about me, which I have and will continue to refute strongly.”
So. It’s not hurtful to be called a liar and a scheming incompetent by every paper in the country, but having an affair with a colleague (allegedly) is a resigning offence?
Speaking of which, I note that the Inland Revenue boss, who supposedly resigned following the loss of discs containing the details of 25 million child benefit recipients, has been given another job in Whitehall, at the Cabinet Office.
Integrity really is a very flexible thing.
Note: edited later to make grammatical sense,
Nah, not really, though the announcement of the members of the panel Gordon Brown’s appointed to make yet another ‘inquiry’ with yet another inevitable, predetermined outcome, this time into the Labour Party funding fraud, does sound as though it could be the beginning of a particularly lame joke
What the bishop and the judge are actually walkiing into isn’t a bar, it’s a steaming pile of horseshit.
They may as well not bother with the enquiry and save their reputations. The Lib Dems and the Electoral Commission have at last called in the police.
Maybe Yates of the Yard will get some co-operation this time. Maybe.
At least we can now guess what it was No. 10 were being so obstructive with Yates about in the Cash for Honours investigation. That makes the Crown Prosecution Service’s decisiion not to prosecute anyone in Blair’s government for selling peerages much more understandable – they must have known, or at least suspected from Yates’ investigation, that New Labour corruption is much deeper, widespread and systemic than a few dodgy loans from social climbing businessmen.
You go for weeks, nothing but the usual daily outrage, then bam bam bam, it all happens at once and typically I’m forced away fropm the keyboard. It’s a bloody conspiracy I tell you.
The pustulent boil of real estate development corruption ripening beneath this latest fraudulent funding scandal, and about to erupt as a result of the fraud’s exposure, iwill show the public a New Labour venality that’s way beyond any parody Armando Ianucci could come up with.
A commenter at the BBC’s Have Your Say pretty much sums up New Labour and why it is that they are so corrupt:
This is typical of the Labour party, most of them like their leader are C list lawyers(the most dishonest profession there is) or creepy little civil servants from murky Labour town halls who don’t have any principles at all or they wouldn’t get to be M.P’s in the first place. All of those involved in perpetrating what is in fact fraud should go to jail for a spell of reality training.
L Telfer, Scottish Borders
Writing as a former C-list lawyer myself and as a former pre-Blair Labour Party member, I can say with some confidence that’s an absolutely accurate description of New Labour politicians. Cunning, small-minded, petty, not as clever as they think they are, their ambition and and greed so outstrips their competence to function at the level to which they aspire that it’s a miracle they’ve survived in power as long as they have without being found out.
The North east has always been a problem area for Labour politicians when it comes to real estate, party funding and personal ambition. Remember T. Dan Smith? Abrahams’ donations show that the, shall we say, interplay between the Labour party and big money developers in the northeast still carries on in the traditional way, decades later.
Mr Abrahams, a single man who has homes in north London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in the north-east where his father, Bennie, was a prominent figure in Labour circles.
“A larger than life character with a name that could open doors,” said one former colleague of Bennie Abrahams, who joined the council in the late 1950s and decades later became the city’s Lord Mayor.
Mr Abrahams’s mother, Marion, was also a Labour councillor and some who know him suggest that her son has spent his whole life trying unsuccessfully to emerge from his father’s shadow.
His first venture into Labour politics came in the 1970s, when he represented an inner-city Newcastle ward on the now-defunct Tyne and Wear Metropolitan County Council.
“It was the safest Labour seat on the council. Or at least it was, until he managed to lose it four years later,” said a former party colleague.
Undeterred, byIn [sic] 1991 Mr Abrahams had set his sights on representing Labour in Parliament. He arrived for the selection meeting, a former member of the constituency Labour party recalls, for the North Yorkshire seat of Richmond accompanied by a “a blonde-haired lady and a young boy” who were introduced as his wife and son. Mr Abrahams, who claimed to be 41, duly won the nomination. and personally approved a press release which stated that he lived with his wife and son in Newcastle.
All was fine and dandy until a woman called Anthea Bailey approached a regional newspaper to reveal that she and her 11-year-old son had posed as Mr Abrahams’s family “to boost his image” in the selection contest. The former marketing executive explained that she had met him when she was unemployed and looking for somewhere to live.
It’s at times like this I bitterly bemoan that Private Eye hasn’t put it’s archive online: through it you can follow forty years worth of local authority and regional corruption in the northeast (and elsewhere, to be fair) – it’s a region that’s always been a stronghold of Labour MP’s, not least the former PM Tony Blair and his deputy John Prescott. the story above is typical of those featured. There’s probably more there for a reporter who likes to dig. I await developments with interest.
But in the meantime what the hell are we to do for a competent, functioning government? Even if there were to be a vote of no confidence and a snap election tomorrow, the alternatives to the current gang of fools and blustering incompetents is to vote in some more, different incompetents.
Christ, what a bloody mess.