The Sun Says It

Under the heading "Sick Smears" a Sun editorial today has this to say:

HOW desperately sad that William Hague is forced to reveal private heartache [his wife's miscarriages] to silence malicious gossip.

Mr Hague, Tory Foreign Secretary and a politician of immense integrity, is the victim of a baseless whispering campaign suggesting a relationship with a male aide.

It is a miserable sign of the debasement of our politics that such rubbish can be peddled.

We can only speculate on who is delighting in smearing Mr Hague.

The innuendo about Mr Hague and his former aide first appeared on the right-wing Guido Fawkes blog, but "we" can assume the writer is implying it originates from the official opposition. But which publication in 1998, following the 'outing' of Peter Mandelson by Matthew Parris, asked whether the Labour government then in power had a "gay mafia" and was forced to apologise within days. This incident came after years of homophobia from Richard Littlejohn, Garry Bushell and other contributors. Readers will recognise the construction, but other Sun haters may smile at the implication that the rag recognises it has published rubbish.

Shifting Sands

"Once again the Useless Tories are thinking of bringing Ken Clarke back to their front bench, so as to look as if they have some, er, bottom.

"Mr Clarke is without doubt an asset, a quick-witted and human politician who has a life outside Westminster (his love of jazz is genuine, not a pose). He also has plenty of bottom." Peter Hitchens "Will Israel never learn? Each bomb is a gift to its enemies: Devaluing the £ in our pockets", Mail on Sunday, 3 January 2009

"So much for the Tories, then. Surely, this must be the end. Finding that nobody takes seriously their ‘Shadow Cabinet’ of unknowns and teenagers, and unknown teenagers, they have delved into the cupboard of the yesterdays.

"In there they have found Ken Clarke, an unreliable medium-range missile, decommissioned many years back because of its habit of landing on its own troops. Next it’ll be John Major, Lord Heseltine and Michael Howard. That should cure us all of nostalgia. ... No government containing Mr Clarke could offer anything better than a repeat of the Major years." Peter Hitchens "What use is Ken against Mandy? They agree on everything", Mail on Sunday, 24 January 2009

"But Mr Clarke doggedly keeps on in active politics, a rare grown-up in a government of inexperienced and callow young men. I actually rather like Mr Clarke, as do many people. (He is funny and convivial, his enthusiasm for jazz is genuine, and his knowledge of it real, and he tends to tell the truth in preference to spin. He took it in good part when I once tried to present him with a Labour Party membership card)." Peter Hitchens "What will real Conservatives do about this Torberal Government?" Mail Online weblog, 12 May 2010

"I agree completely with that awful old wet liberal Ken Clarke. Talking about politicians and crime, he says ‘the failure of the past has been to use tough rhetoric and to avoid taking tough decisions that might prove unpopular’.

"Quite. I would much rather have an honest, straightforward mugger-hugger like Ken in charge, weeping and snuffling about rehabilitation and similar rubbish, than a false friend of the people like that phoney hard man and closet liberal Michael Howard, all mouth and no truncheon.

"That way, we all know from the start that we can expect no help from the State against the misery of modern Britain... What unites Michael Howard and Ken Clarke (and the Labour Party, and the Liberals) is that they wilfully don’t have a clue about crime or disorder. They wilfully know nothing about policing. They wilfully don’t understand what happens in prisons. They know that the truth is very Right-wing indeed, so they hide from it." Peter Hitchens "This mugger-hugger knows the truth, just like the ‘all mouth and no truncheon’ phoney", Mail on Sunday, 4 July 2010

Pat Buchanan ... and Neil Clark

"Those of us in childhood during the war years were introduced to Hitler only as a caricature … Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him. But Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." Pat Buchanan in the St. Louis Globe – Democrat, 25 August 1977

[on Charles Lindbergh's Des Moines speech, 11 September 1941] "And then he said the Jewish community is beating the drums for war, but this is going to be a disaster for the Jewish community if we get into war. And of course, that was verboten to say, but frankly, no one has said he - what he said was, you know, palpably untrue." The Political Cesspool Radio Show, 29 June 2006 (streamed on Stormfront and other white supremacist websites)

"I write as a committed, and totally unreconstructed, Old Leftist. Yet if Pat Buchanan announced he was standing for president again, I would be on the next plane out to join his campaign team. But how many of my fellow socialists would join me? Until the Left is ready in its hordes to link up electorally with the old antiwar Right, the brutal truth is that we have no chance of defeating the Bush/Blair axis. Buchanan himself has already called for such an alliance." Neil Clark "Why left and right should unite and fight", New Statesman, 17 March 2003

"In the late 1940’s and 1950’s … race was never a preoccupation with us, we rarely thought about it …. There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The ‘Negroes’ of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." Pat Buchanan Right From the Beginning (1990)

"This has been a country built, basically, by white folks." Pat Buchanan The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, 16 July 2009 (at around the minute point)

"Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism … The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is." Pat Buchanan Washington Times, 18 November 1983

"I agree with you about Pat Buchanan - he's certainly more pro-worker than most Clintonian Democrats." Neil Clark's blog comment ("It's time to be radical, Dave") 9 March 2010

"... the left needs to jettison some baggage and spruce up its thinking. Since the 1960s we have picked up several false friends, who have done our cause no good at all. The first of these is political correctness." Neil Clark "Why left and right should unite and fight", New Statesman, 17 March 2003

There's gratitude for you

The Press Gazette quotes Boris Johnson:

"They [the press] are regulated by a Press Complaints Commission whose luminaries include the editor of the Daily Mail."

He means Paul Dacre:

"I'm sure that he is a fine fellow in many ways but I think it's a bit like putting the regulation of door-to-door salesmen in the hands of Boston Strangler."

Dacre is Editor in Chief of Associated Newspapers which, at the time of the London Mayoral election in 2008, wholly owned the London Evening Standard. For much of the noughties the Standard gained a reputation for being tough on Ken Livingstone, Johnson's Labour rival. Is something affecting Johnson's memory?

Roy Greenslade points out: "Dacre is chairman of the editors' code committee, which has no say in the day-to-day running of the PCC. Its membership does not overlap with that of the commission itself."

Off topic, but last January spin doctor Alastair Campbell relayed a theory of a psychologist friend that Dacre is secretly in love with him.

Peter Hitchens on the Tories

Peter Hitchens has been opining about Her Majesty's Official Opposition again:

I am always telling you that the Cameron Tories are Blairism reborn, but you don’t have to take my word for it.
Take the words of Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove, spoken a few days ago:
‘At its best, New Labour was a recognition that the values of enterprise and aspiration could be fused with a commitment to social justice and fairness. And the party that best exemplifies that view now is David Cameron’s Conservative Party.’ He said it.

We know Hitchens claims the return of grammar schools would be socially just, but does he mean to suggest a government should pursue unfairness?

Gove delivered a speech last Tuesday, the text is reproduced on the Conservative's website and Hitchen's quote was in response to a journalist's question. Gove commended New Labour for not being Old Labour, identifying the later in the main with fringe figures like Arthur Scargill, and positively viewing NLs acceptance of the Thatcher changes. Gove claims Labour is returning, under Gordon Brown, to the 1970s. His speech as a whole was pretty much a standard Conservative response to their opponents. Perhaps Hitchens was present when Gove delivered his speech, or perhaps not, or has read the cited text, or perhaps not.

To err is human

When selecting Liz Truss as the candidate for South West Norfolk, no member of the Conservative Association in the constituency would seem to have used Google. Had they pursued an online enquiry they would have easily discovered this Mail article from three-and-a-half years ago revealing her affair with another married individual. And a demonstration of Cameron's pretence that the Tories are now a modern party, rather than a reactionary one, might have remained unknown.

Instead they have openly displayed themselves at their worst, and she is under the threat of deselection for what is a safe Conservative seat. Unsurprisingly, the sitting MP is standing down after the expenses scandal revealed he is a tree hugger at public expense.

According to The Sunday Times, Liz Truss was a radical Lib Dem while at university and attacked the monarchy at that party's annual conference. One cannot help wondering what happened to change her. Those old sentiments though, from more than a decade ago, have been enough for one nominally non-conservative blogger, possibly still writing online for the Telegraph, to finger her as a "Trot". While some Tories, such as Iain Dale, are responding sensibly, one can finally only agree with Tanya Gold's comments.

Tripe

Simon Heffer has been writing about unfashionable foods:

I must admit I have never been able to bring myself to eat tripe, though I did once have the honour of watching the late J Enoch Powell demolish a plate of it in a restaurant about 20 years ago. It had been a much-prized dish in the Black Country in Enoch's childhood, and he never lost the taste for it.

That figures.

Peter Hitchens and death

Peter Hitchens, in his Mail on Sunday column, contrasts David Cameron's put downs of Tory MEP Daniel Hannan and MP Alan Duncan. In defending Hannan over Duncan, "a keen supporter of the sexual and cultural revolution" (he is in a civil partnership), Hitchens makes the following point:

I happen to think that we make too much of a fetish about health care, here and in America, because we’re all anxious to keep death at a distance and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Well, we would! Understandably, most people want to live for as long as possible, and usually feel for those who do not enjoy a healthy life. I think Hitchens wants to leave it all to god.

The truth is that doctors can patch us up if we injure ourselves, cure a rather limited number of diseases with pills or surgery, and comfort us if we feel rotten – but most of our ills are caused by the way we live, and many are the inevitable results of age.

Politics has no answer to this.

Really? Medical science is fixed forever, and the allocation of resources across the country and throughout the population is not an issue? A fortnight ago, Hitchens objected to the Asquith government being "pioneers of the welfare state". So in fact politics has a solution Hitchens' dislikes, but he is trying to avoid admitting he thinks in this way. In fact, some of the Asquith government's policies on welfare were motivated by the shocking physical health of recruits during the Boer war, rather than from basic human decency or 'left-wing' politics.

Nadine + John

Although his political journey is not that different to mine, I do not warm to John Bercow, the new Speaker of the House of Commons, but I thought the article by Nadine Dorries in the last Mail on Sunday was particularly ill-considered:

There is a strong view among Conservatives that John came within a whisker of ‘crossing the floor’ and joining Labour when Gordon Brown became PM.

People in a better position than me to know what was going on say that John considered defecting at the same time as another Tory, Quentin Davies. John denied it, but I vividly recall his reaction when Quentin took his seat with Labour for the first time.

Oh dear. So someone who vacillates between the two main parties is not a credible candidate for a post in which he has to be impartial? (The article was published the day before Bercow was elected Speaker.)

Dorries, whose sanity is often questioned, really asks for derision here:

His mystifying journey from the far Right to the Left after his marriage to a Labour activist begs the question of stability, as does his lack of almost a single friend on the Tory benches.

Less common than the other way around, it is not altogether unknown. Tam Dalyell and Phillip Whitehead are two Labour politicians who made the journey. Not being a paragon of mental health myself might demonstrate Dorries point, if one knew nothing of scientific method. Never as right-wing as Bercow once was, thirty years ago my politics were probably quite similar to Andrew Neil's, I thought then of joining the Young Conservatives only to join the Labour Party a decade later.

Hat tip: Harry's Place