Events | 2009.02.11
Hugh Muir's diary
Only time will tell whether our peers are - to quote the great George Carman - "on the make and on the take", but already the newspaper sting which thrust the whole affair into the public domain has had profound repercussions. Baroness Royall has ordered a speedy inquiry and miscreants will face the light of day, but what of the damage to those found to be blameless? Our peers are under attack. They must protect themselves. They might follow the example of Lord Harris of Haringey - the only peer to smell a rat during the sting - for he has since sought to keep snoopers and tricksters at bay by purchasing a device designed to start bleeping the moment he becomes a target for elaborate surveillance. "It has come to this if you are a peer these days," a friend told us ruefully. We taped him, naturally. Madness not to.
Of course there will be a few knaves in the upper house but there are jewels, such as the former defence minister Lord Gilbert, who yesterday applauded the invention of the nuclear bomb. And the best of it, he told a meeting at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, was that the Americans invented and deployed it first, and "not the French". He corrected himself; he meant the Japanese and the Germans. Nevertheless, a point well made.
"If you want to get ahead, get a shapka ... the big furry Russian hat," says the Evening Standard; new prop: A Lebedev, ex-KGB. Just fancy.
Happy days, then, for the Conservatives as David Cameron prepares his team for government. Suddenly there is interest in who\'s up, who\'s down. Suddenly it matters. Certainly it matters to the MPs themselves, so congrats to Richard Benyon, MP for Newbury, who is moving from the shadow whips\' office to become a minister in the team preparing to move in at Defra. "Newbury MP promoted in Conservative reshuffle," he wrote in a press release. Rob Wilson, the MP for nearby Reading East, appears to be on a different course - once a shadow education minister, now on the lowest rung of the shadow whips\' office. Nevertheless he also wrote a release, headlined: "Wilson promoted to whips\' office." But then, in his time, he appears to have supped with Labour and the SDP as well as the Tories. If he is confused now, can we blame him?
We are finding it hard to know where we stand on this issue of Carol Thatcher apparently referring to a tennis star - reportedly Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga - as the "golliwog". There\'s Mournful Mel of the Mail, Lord Tebbit and far-right racist crazies Stormfront on one side of the argument. Everyone else worth bothering about on the other. It\'s a tough one. We need to think.
And one would need a heart of stone not to feel for Jon Gaunt, Sun columnist, one-time TalkSport presenter, Littlejohn mini-me and "antidote to the lefty consensus" now that events have also conspired against him. When last we heard, he was waving his briefs at the radio station because it fired him for calling a councillor, more sinned against than sinning, a "Nazi". He meant to say health Nazi, Gaunt said afterwards, but out the door he went. Some folk just don\'t understand. One would expect the police to understand him because he is the son of a police officer, and he prides himself in thinking what they\'re thinking - but they too seem ready to turn their backs. After internal discussions this week, he seems unlikely to be asked to be the star turn at the Police Federation conference, as previously. A lot of worries there about the Nazi thing. Et tu, Sgt Dixon? Too many PC PCs.
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For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/05/hugh-muir-diary
