Events | 2010.02.02
Hugh Muir's diary
If you\'re a billion down, \'cos the advice was bad, who you gonna call? Trading Standards
• After the shock, the reflection, and then the inquisition. Little wonder, then, that MPs have been trying to find out how local councils ended up £1bn out of pocket following the collapse of the Icelandic banks. Why did they put their money there in the first place, asked the communities and local government select committee. Who was advising them? Well, the councils were advised by specialist treasury management companies, Butlers and Sector being two of them. And there was a lot of money at stake – public money. So whose role was it to regulate this kind of adviser, MPs asked the Financial Services Authority\'s Hector Sants. Was it his flawed but undoubtedly high-powered organisation? No, he told them. It was, in fact, the job of local authority trading standards departments. Exactly the right task for the right people, don\'t you think?
• Even we can\'t blame Doncaster\'s madcap English Democrat mayor Peter Davies for that mess, and we can\'t blame him for the torture tragedy in Edlington. But he\'s in charge there now, and one might wonder how he is supervising the response. It falls to Tim Leader, the interim chief executive, to rally the troops now that the spotlight is harsh and inspectors from the audit commission are going in. So it is obviously a good time for our favourite mayor to destabilise the ship by launching a bid to get rid of him. This, from a memo written by Leader to the mayor last Wednesday: "[you said] you intended to apply for judicial review of my appointment with the intention of quashing the decision," notes Leader. That "neither you or your cabinet has any confidence in me … that I am not to attend any formal meeting of the authority at which you or your cabinet are present, and that if I do so you or they will \'walk out\'". It all, says Leader\'s memo, "amounts to bullying and an abuse of your power as an elected member". Davies urged him to resign. He is staying put. Enough there to keep the inspectors busy.
• More on Suresh Kumar, the former Tory councillor and ex-parliamentary candidate jailed for seeking a £10,000 bribe to smooth the path of a planning application. How were we to know he was dodgy, locals in east London are wondering. Perhaps, one says, there was a clue when "he summoned me to meet his great hero Lord Archer". Hardly one for Poirot, really, was it?
• So Michael Wood, the former chief legal adviser to the Foreign Office, thought the war in Iraq was illegal. And so did Lord Goldsmith for a while but, as we will hear when the former attorney general gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry today, he changed his mind. And why was that? Perhaps he will elaborate. But already some have noted that in 2003, Lord Goldsmith visited the Pentagon. And that was about the same time that Donald Rumsfeld seemed to be behaving strangely, asserting first that the US had prepared "workarounds" for the eventuality that the UK did not join an invasion of Iraq, then changing tack to publicly banish all doubts of UK support. Now Donnie (pictured) was a persuasive guy, but one wonders how he might possibly have been able to change the attorney general\'s mind. Was it his soothing tone, a dim light, a click of the fingers? Did Lord Goldsmith come over all sleepy?
• Finally, just five months until the World Cup in South Africa. Some will automatically root for England. Others seek alternative outlets for their support. The debate among correspondents to the Morning Star is over whether readers should support North Korea. No, says one. What about the human rights abuses? Yes, say others. "Democratic People\'s Republic of Korea World Cup has always resisted world imperialism led by the US." Forget the "lies, half-truths and half-baked assertions from the pro-imperialist Amnesty International". As that reader Dermot Hudson tells it, life there seem pretty brilliant. "So let\'s support the DPRK at the World Cup. Go all out for victory, DPRK!" Yes, let\'s.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/27/iraq-war-inquiry
