Training | 2009.06.18
Hugh Muir's Diary
The Gordon plot. What did we know and when did we know it?
• Does it bother the Daily Mail whether wise heads at the Guardian support Gordon Brown or not? Apparently it does. Yesterday Stephen Glover, the paper\'s urbane hitman, suggested that we orchestrated the attempted putsch against the prime minister, the dominant figures in the background, barking orders, pulling strings. The BBC was in on it too, apparently. Interesting and amusing in its own surreal way. But then, we do indeed live in interesting times. Whoever thought we would see a Labour prime minister cut adrift by large sections of the Labour establishment and relying for support on the Daily Mail, whose editor-in-chief is a personal friend. In 2007, Gordon appointed his friend Paul Dacre to lead the review into the 30-year official secrecy rule. Last year, with Downing Street\'s blessing, a plan was hatched to offer Dacre a seat on the board at the Tate. The editor declined that possibility citing pressure of time, but he is one to remember all the little kindnesses. He is a friend, and doesn\'t Gordon need all the friends he can get?
• "It\'s all extremely fishy," thundered the Mail commentator Edward Heathcoat Amory, writing about the expenses investigation that cleared the new communities minister, Shahid Malik. No room on this occasion to rehearse the claims made by his brother, the Tory MP David Heathcoat-Amory, who, according to the Daily Tel, claimed for a gardener and hundreds of sacks of manure for use at his second home. This is fishy? That was horse shit.
• It was a day of hell for commuters in the capital, and when the tubes stopped running on Tuesday evening, a man stumbled wearily into a public house in south London, his journey uncompleted, his throat dry with thirst. Within 20 minutes his two pints of IPA had gone. "We\'ve made it this far," said Geoff Hoon to his companion as they regrouped around a table. Somewhere less public, Gordon was saying the same.
• Though every day should perhaps be Sir Bobby Charlton Day, it\'s good to know that, in his youth at least, this virtuous national treasure was capable of a little skulduggery. Barry Fry, one of football\'s louder and more colourful personalities, tells the latest edition of FourFourTwo magazine how Sir Bobby sought to help him through the driving test when he was an apprentice at Manchester United. "I\'d failed so many tests and I was talking about it one day at training - and Bob said: \'Baz, what you want to do is wear your United tie and blazer when you turn up for the test,\'" recalls Barry. "So I went for this test, wearing my club shirt and blazer, and I did the test. And as I pulled up at the end, the instructor said, in this solemn voice: \'Well, Mr Fry, I\'m afraid you\'ve failed to reach the standard required.\' Then as he gets out of the car, he turns round, smiles, and says: \'Oh, and by the way, I\'m a City fan!\'" One of the few times on record that Sir Bobby got it wrong.
• Finally, a word from Thomas Paine. "While royalty is harmful from its very nature, hereditary royalty is, in addition, absurd and disgusting. Just think of it. Yonder is a man who claims that he has a hereditary right to rule me." So wrote the father of the American revolution and author of The Rights of Man in his 1792 work, An Essay for the Use of New Republicans in Their Opposition to Monarchy. And so, as we mark the bicentenary of his death, as they did the other day in his birthplace of Thetford, in Norfolk, let us remember not to begin proceedings with a toast to the Queen - as did Thetford\'s Tory mayor, Cllr Pam Spencer. He wouldn\'t have liked it. Neither did quite a few of the assembled company in Thetford\'s Guildhall, who declined to drink from their glasses during the strange preliminary. Poor Tom. Didn\'t he journey 3,500 miles to get away from this sort of thing?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/11/hugh-muir-diary-gordon-brown
