Events | 2009.04.16
Duncan Campbell's political diary
This scurrilous Red Rag couldn\'t have held a candle to its Seventies feminist predecessor
• Out of the shoddy little New Labour email "smeargate" scandal, it has emerged that there were plans to run a scurrilous website to be called Red Rag, with the aim of exposing Tory hypocrisy. They have no history, of course, these spin doctors, otherwise they would have known that, way back in the 70s, there was a revered feminist publication called Red Rag, whose contributors included such feminist luminaries as Sheila Rowbotham, Beatrix Campbell, Alison Fell, Sue O\'Sullivan, Anne Scott and Margaret Edney - who would all doubtless have been appalled to be associated with the current juvenile little venture. "We had no tittle-tattle, only socialist feminism," a suitably appalled Professor Rowbotham assures us from Manchester.
• Not that there isn\'t a gap for a website that aims to expose Tory hypocrisy. There has been much Conservative "outrage" over the Damian McBride affair, but memories seem to be short. It was only last year that their own parliamentary candidate for Watford, Ian Oakley, was convicted on 75 charges of harassment and criminal damage against Lib Dem opponents for which he received a suspended sentence. Among Oakley\'s little stunts was the spreading of the false rumour that a political rival ran a paedophile ring, a lie that he peddled to neighbours of his victim. He was also caught on CCTV painting the words "scum perv" outside his opponent\'s house. His Lib Dem parliamentary opponent, Sal Brinton, was sent pornographic material and told to "go back to Cambridge, you evil bitch". Iain Sharpe, the Lib Dem group leader on Watford council, says that, so far, the Conservative party has held no investigation into Oakley\'s criminal activities, despite repeated requests that it does so, and no word of sympathy for Oakley\'s victims has been forthcoming from his former colleagues in Watford Conservative Association. "After seven months of stonewalling, David Cameron eventually expressed regret for Oakley\'s behaviour," notes Sharpe. "But his remarks stopped short of being an actual apology, and came in circumstances where he was put on the spot by a member of the public and could hardly avoid saying something." Come on, Watford Tories, time for that difficult "sorry" word.
• And talking of party leaders and Lib Dems, Paddy Ashdown, writes in his autobiography (published this week) that, on starting an early job in his career, "I undertook a lifetime obligation never to reveal in public either the name of the organisation nor anything beyond the barest outline of what I did." He then acknowledges that he has been on the "more shadowy side of Foreign Office activity" and that he trained in a "faceless building in south London" where he "learned of our failures: Philby, Maclean and the rest of the Cambridge Five". The headquarters was "an anonymous 12-storey tower block south of the Thames". He also divulges in the book, A Fortunate Life, that "the road to Westminster was not straight, however. First I was a spy." While we appreciate that Lord Ashdown would rather die under torture than reveal that he once worked for M16, might not some of the brighter elements of the world\'s intelligence community be able to crack the identity of his former employer from just some of those clues?
• As part of the Diary\'s Slow News campaign, we asked for headlines from slow news days. From the Watford Observer website comes "\'Big cat\' seen in Kings Langley".
• And very slow news day. Police Professional magazine presumably went to press sharpish after the G20 demonstrations of 1 April. Its headline about the policing of the event - which was codenamed Operation Glencoe - is: "Operation Glencoe makes G20 a success for the MPS [Metropolitan police]".
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/15/duncan-campbell-diary-mcbride
