Industry | 2010.01.13
Hugh Muir's Diary
A warm welcome, if you please, to our old friend, the \'dodgy dossier\'
• It went away and we didn\'t hear much about it for a while, but with the publication of Labour\'s analysis of Tory spending plans, we were reunited with the poisonous concept that is the dodgy dossier. And we learned that for the next few months, whenever Labour is reckless enough to critique any Conservative policy, the Tories will seek to blunt the attack by referring to any documentation produced by Labour as a "dodgy dossier". It will probably work.
• Expect to hear a lot more about DDs and indeed WMDs, with both Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair preparing to open their hearts to the Chilcot inquiry. So many things the inquisitor could ask them about that original dodgy dossier. To his credit, he seems open to ideas. And one area he might profitably explore when Blair appears concerns Hussein Kamel, who was the former director of Iraq\'s military industrial programme and who defected to Jordan in 1995. Kamel returned to Iraq a year later where he was assassinated, but before this fatal error he spoke at length to UN investigators about Saddam\'s weapons. The transcript, which entered the public domain in 2003 and thus would have been known to our spooks, makes interesting reading. "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed," he told them. "Were weapons and agents destroyed?", asked the investigators. "Nothing remained," he said. On being asked about all this by Llew Smith MP in 2003, Blair acknowledged knowing the details of the Kamel interviews, but funnily enough none of it appeared in the dodgy dossier. Perhaps Chilcot could ask him why. Who knows? He just might.
• For this is a process being conducted without fear or favour, comfortably meeting the standard set by MPs on the home affairs select committee. Yesterday Chris Sims, chief constable of West Midlands and the Acpo lead on DNA, was the man selected by them for a grilling and he bore it well, helped by the fact that the committee had inadvertently sent him their list of questions. He did complain that they were firing them at him in the wrong order, but then, chief constable, that is their prerogative. Generally, he did OK.
• It\'s cold. How cold? Damn cold. Cold enough for bosses at the Highways Agency in Birmingham to address staff with an alert. "Please take care when using the car park as it is extremely slippery due to a shortage of gritting materials," the email said. And who does the gritting? The Highways Agency. When there is something to grit the highways with.
• We can\'t go on like this, said David Cameron, and certainly it was true of Romford. But now, having had time to digest the third criminal conviction of the local party chairman, Alby Tebbutt , the hard hearts of the national Conservative Board have done the deed and kicked him out. And by doing so, they have brought to an end the strange position we referred to before Christmas, wherein the local champion of the fight against Broken Britain had under his belt convictions for actual bodily harm, a public order offence in 2007, and of course the most recent case, when he was found to have committed common assault by spitting. He told us then he would appeal the latest conviction, and now he may challenge his expulsion. But if his fate is the wilderness, he won\'t go alone. Others are already threatening to go with him. For they don\'t like being pushed around in Romford. Unless Alby is doing the pushing, of course.
• And finally, what can we learn about the way we live from Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 people are crammed into just 520 acres? Quite a lot, according to Grand Designs presenter and property developer Kevin McCloud (pictured). It\'s a model for housing in Britain, he tells the Radio Times, and in particular he likes the way the "women rinse their pots" in the street. "The most civilised, sociable way of doing the washing up," says McCloud, who we note is also leading an initiative to build 200 new homes in Swindon. All mod cons as standard? The wise vendor will check.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/06/hugh-muir-diary
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