Training | 2010.03.17
Hugh Muir's Diary
Next stop intrigue, disgrace and scandal. The vengeful Tory and the perils of plotting on trains
• Let\'s give power to the people, Cameron says, and so a plan was hatched to trial a planning initiative in the very Conservative borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. Locals would make decisions. Councillors would rubber-stamp them. Yes we\'ll do it, said party types keen to suck up to Cameron\'s office. Oh no we won\'t, said deputy council leader Angela Knight. Red faces all round. But that wasn\'t to be the end of it. Because while Damian McBride has gone from politics, his spirit lives on in the Conservative party in the shape of one Andre Walker , a party hack who plotted to smear Cllr Knight out of her deputy leader post. Like McBride, Walker was caught, mainly because he chose to boast about his cunning plan on a commuter train. A fellow passenger, apparently with Conservative sympathies but appalled nonetheless, recorded much of the boasting. Next stop: YouTube. "She is on the way out," the recording says. "She\'s dead. No one likes her, total liability. Total liability should come up in all the discussions. We could put that out." The upshot: meltdown. Walker has resigned, mouthing apologies and pronouncing himself unfortunate to have sat so close to a "leftwing" commuter. Meanwhile, relations in the Tory ranks have been laid so low as to be positively subterranean. Politics is definitely broken in Windsor, Dave. And guess what? Your lot are to blame.
• Yes there\'s friction in the ranks to be sure, with party chairman Eric Pickles moving to distance the mothership from Donal Blaney\'s Conservative madrasa for election candidates, the Young Britons\' Foundation . "We don\'t agree with these views," said Eric, four days after this paper first mentioned that the foundation\'s leaders consider the NHS a waste of money and think waterboarding has its virtues. Following our item yesterday , Conor Burns, the candidate in Bournemouth, gets in touch to point out that he appeared at a YBF event as a speaker, rather than a student as we had said, and we are happily make that clear. But these are strange times. Despite the dampening effect of the Pickles statement, others seem more enthusiastic about the initiative. "Why we need more Conservative madrassas," wrote Telegraph columnist James Delingpole yesterday. You can look at Cameron sometimes and feel quite sorry for him.
• Some things are just depressing and here is one. Consider this: just how rich is Lord Archer? Last week the rogue peer attended a party to mark the 90th birthday of his friend, the illustrator Ronald Searle. Searle himself was absent. He rarely leaves his home in France, and in the normal run is only contactable by fax. Archer supplied a gallery in central London with 30 of his Searle masterpieces for the occasion but, reports the scribe from the Camden New Journal , the author\'s enthusiasm for his friend\'s achievements got the better of him. "On two occasions, he insisted: \'I must have it\'," records the onlooker. "Only to be told: \'You already own that one, Jeffrey!\'"
• And what a high old time the kingmakers in the Lib Dems will have this weekend at the party\'s spring conference in Birmingham. Speeches, fringes, the usual exhibitions. There was to be a stall erected by the Citizens\' Commission on Human Rights , but luckily for the Lib Dems, no longer. The party is a broad church indeed, but that doesn\'t include groups co-founded by the Church of Scientology.
• Finally, as Dubya (pictured) re-emerges from his ranch in Texas to ring David Cameron and talk sense about Northern Ireland, Americans are grappling with a question they thought they would never ask: "Do you miss him yet?" The New York Times reports that "signs of his rehabilitation are beginning to pop up". A billboard here, a web posting there. More learned than Sarah Palin. Less sinister than Dick Cheney. One billboard, according to the Times, has Dubya "smiling genially and waving his hand in a friendly gesture". Were Dubya to see it, he would wave right back.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/10/hugh-muir-diary-george-bush
