Industry | 2010.02.20
Hugh Muir's diary
They won\'t know it yet, but in Whitehall they\'ll miss Siôn Simon now he\'s gone
• So farewell then, Siôn Simon , whose ministerial career – he\'s something to do with creative industries at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – ended yesterday. He steps down to spend more time with the people of Birmingham, whose mayor he aspires to become. Civil servants at the culture department will be sorry, indeed, to see him go. They particularly enjoyed his demand to have a Mini for his ministerial car, a flight of fancy that played well with any officials taller than Ronnie Corbett who had to travel with him in the back seat to ministerial events. Also recalled with fondness will be his insistence on having a black "red box". The four-figure cost of producing this hybrid raised a smile among staff, still chuckling over the decision to remove the tea and coffee sales point from their headquarters "to save money". They loved him dearly. First the shock. Then the pain.
• Lots to think about now questions are being raised about the science behind the claims of climate change. And at the Financial Times, a plea to staff from editor Lionel Barber, keen to ensure that the paper can\'t be accused of kowtowing to the proponents of global warming. Well done, belatedly, on Climategate, he says, but "we are still letting editorial judgments cloud our news coverage. Too many polar bear pictures, whatever the storyline." Some readers would say you can\'t have too many polar bear pictures. They\'ll be upset.
• And with the scientists on the back foot, is it any wonder that the sceptics are feeling happy. "Climategate" has them emboldened, energised. That doesn\'t mean they are liked. "In today\'s Conservative party, it seems that it is easier to \'come out\' as a homosexual than to come out as a climate sceptic," whinges Roger Helmer , Europhobe and Tory MEP for the East Midlands, on his blog. But a change is gonna come, and Tories in Europe will lead the party to the mountain top, because even now a majority "would tend to take a sceptical line", observes Roger. The task at present, "clearly not in the weeks before an election, but soon afterwards – is to reconfigure our policy". That seems clear enough. Amen.
• And yet one wonders, looking at recent events, whether the Tories will be in any shape to reconfigure anything. Look at Westminster North, where the Cameroon candidate, barrister Joanne Cash , is back as the official candidate, having very publicly resigned during an emotionally charged spat with her former chairwoman and half the party. She flounced out of a meeting, hurried back to quit and then un-resigned with a manic posting on Twitter. And what do we make of the re-emergence of ousted Euro Tory Edward McMillan-Scott, whose letter to Conservative MPs condemning the party and Cameron\'s link with extremists has reached us. "The reputational damage to the party is already considerable: Keira Knightley\'s contemporary West End Misanthrope opens with a speech about David Cameron\'s \'grubby fascist friend\'. The party is more important than any individual, but principles trump the party, and I will not let matters rest." Squabbles here. Enmities there. The mountain top seems far away.
• But that\'s politics. Ill feeling never quite goes, it just lies dormant. And so it seems to be with those titans of administration, Jack Straw and Lord Birt. "What did you think when Tony Blair appointed John Birt to engage in \'blue skies\' thinking about the causes of crime?" Straw is asked in tonight\'s first of Michael Cockerell\'s BBC series, The Great Offices of State . "Not a lot, in truth, and I groaned," said Jack. "I dutifully co-operated with these \'blue skies\', and the thinking. John Birt began life as an engineer, and he\'s famous for wiring diagrams, technical drawings ... I\'m sure he was very good at school ... so we had loads of wiring diagrams and end-to-end solutions and stuff." What of Birt\'s report on crime? "I remember remarkably little about it," said Straw, blade now unsheathed. "Except thinking that we\'d study it with great care."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/11/hugh-muirs-diary
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