SWIVEL-EYED LOONS ROW: Why James Kirkup, Paul Goodman, James Forsyth and Nigel Farage have some serious questions to answer

Did a Gang of Four set out to create Swivelgate?

Not a swivel-eyed loon, as such

The Tory Party Co-Chairman Andrew Feldman is vehemently denying that he was the person who made the “bunch of swivel-eyed loons” (BOSEL) crack about Conservative grassroots workers. He is, I’m told, considering legal action if anyone repeats the rumour. Analysis by The Slog suggests that four key players may well have been behind the alleged insult becoming infamous now…despite having been first uttered by Cameron himself some time ago.

Somebody – or more accurately, body of men – have worked very hard to inflate the swivel-eyed loons row. For starters, there are those who think Boris Johnson’s younger brother Jo is far more of a cuckoo in the Camerlot nest than the Prime Minister realises. Boris has said on several occasions in private that he and his brother Johnson “are indivisible on policy”. Within days of being appointed, Johnson the younger urged Cameron to seriously reconsider building a new hub airport in the Thames Estuary. This is, of course, his Mayoral brother’s pet project. Previous pamphlets from Jo also suggest he is at odds with his new boss.

However Downing Street tries to spin the appointment, it was a serious U-turn by David Cameron. Previously he’d employed civil servants in the role, but this time he chose a former Whip with a degree of clout within the Party. And although some see JoJo as pro-Europe, he certainly isn’t pro-Brussels: if anything, he is something of a Commonwealth loyalist with a passionate belief in the UK trading more with Asia in general – and India in particular. This is a view he shares with Nigel Farage, as well as his brother.

Before we go further by the way – because there seems to me to be deliberate obfuscation going on here – the Top Tory said local associations were swivel-eyed loons, not Backbench MPs. But some MSM on the Borishunt Fallongove wing of the Conservative Party have been blurring that distinction…with obviously mischievous intent.

The story about the BOSEL remark – while known to several hacks – was broken by one man and one man alone: James Kirkup, the deputy political editor of the Daily Telegraph. But of far greater interest to me is who started the Andrew Feldman rumour. Finger someone like Ollie Letwin (as I did yesterday) and Camerlot can just write it off as sour grapes. Finger Cameron’s co-Chairman, and you get Cameron’s biggest fund-raiser sacked….and a major row on your hands. We now have a major row on our hands. The Sundays are all over the story – including the Newscorpers – and Lord Feldman is not being helped by Grant Shapps defending him. I wouldn’t believe Shapps if he said “Good morning” to me: his business career is a trail of proven misrepresentation.

The Sun leads with ‘only 20 backbenchers loyal to Cameron’, something of a canard in that it means only twenty MPs have voted with him on every issue since May 2010. But it does make for a dramatic headline…and blurs the line I mentioned above. Camerlot’s Spin-Horse has issued a careful denial saying that “no member of the Prime Minister’s key Downing Street staff made such a remark”.

For once, however, the Mail on Sunday may be on to something. It notes, shrewdly (and accurately) that Cameron has himself made the remark before – using those exact words. I would go further: I know for a fact that he has used it about Nigel Farage – who in private gets quite excitable on the subject. Also, the respected FT hack George Parker recorded last year that the Prime Minister refers to his backbenchers in this vein at regular intervals anyway. So somehow here, a non-story has been turned into a story – why?

And how? James Kirkup posted the now infamous column at three minutes before 10 pm Friday last. He did not reveal the ‘Top Tory’ name. But Matthew Parrish alleges that the remark was made at an off-the-record dinner. If so, that tars Kirkup with unpleasant intent to make trouble – especially if he knew Cameron himself had made the remark previously.

Friday evening later on has the Guardian hack Nicholas Watt claiming that the Senior Tory made the remark ‘in earshot of journalists’ – note plural. He also wrote two further interesting comments: ‘Farage, who knows the identity of the Tory…’ and ‘…The Times, Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror, who all reported the remarks and who know the identity of the Tory, declined to name the senior member of the prime minister’s circle’ – again, note plural.

So Kirkup doesn’t have an exclusive. But it’s his story that breaks through. And if Farage knows the Top Tory’s identity…as he wasn’t at the dinner, who told him?

The first column I can find saying “I suspect the Top Tory’s identity will be revealed today” was posted at The Spectator’s site at 6am Saturday morning by James Forsyth. It’s hard to miss the sense in his piece that Mr Forsyth already knew the name from somewhere. He’s also relishing what’s about to follow.

At some point after this, the alleged identity of Feldman as the author of BOSEL breaks in the media. However, if you go to what I think is the best site to trace this sort of thing - NewsNow – you will see that no other MSM newspaper said anything about Feldman being the culprit until the denials began. This seems to be confirmed the Independent’s post at 1.09 pm to say ‘the party’s co-chairman Lord Feldman has rebuffed internet rumours that it was him that made the comment’. Did these internet rumours emanate from Tory Home?

 By 5 pm Saturday, Kirkup was tweeting, “I have read Lord Feldman’s statement. I stand by my story. I have nothing to add”.

At 5.52 pm, Top Spectator Tory Fraser Nelson posted a column covering the Feldman and Kirkup statements.

At some indeterminate time – probably late Saturday – Tory Home published a piece by Paul Goodman which stirred the brew bigtime:

‘The key problem with the loons claim, as I point out in the Mail on Sunday today, is that many Tories think it’s what Downing Street thinks.  Three very senior Ministers made it clear to me yesterday that they believe Number 10 has a very low view of Party activists.  James Forsyth suggests in the same paper today that David Cameron should write to each Association Chairman to say what a good job he or she is doing – and how much their work is valued. Lord Feldman should certainly ring each one over the next few days to make it clear that this is his view.’

Let’s examine some of the key players involved in what, I am increasingly convinced, is merely another stage in the continuing determination by genuine BOSELs on the Tory Right to destabilise Camerlot. I think we can safely take Borishunt Fallongove as being sympathisers for granted, and focus on those guilty of propagation here…..if not out and out propaganda.

James Kirkup ran the story without reference to the name. He may have been involved as an initial catalyst with others. Certainly he at least sprained journalistic etiquette by running it.

James Forsyth was egging the pudding as long ago as June 2012 when he wrote in The Spectator that ‘Inside Ten Downing Street, it seems that it is becoming a question of when to announce a referendum not whether to call one’. He is close to Farage, and very much a pro-UKIP Daily Mail Tory. He is also close to BoJo.

Fraser Nelson makes no bones about seeing Cameron as ‘infected’ by pro-EU sentiments. In January, he accused Cameron in the media of lying about Britain’s national debt, describing Cameron’s broadcast about it as “so astonishingly dishonest that it really would have disgraced Gordon Brown”. He always gets a good press at Tory Home, where Paul Goodman makes many an appearance….when he’s not writing for the Daily Mail. But he’s a relatively peripheral player in this one: mainly, it seems to me, he’s doing his job.

But when it comes to Cameron, only Nigel Farage is nastier than Paul Goodman. On April 23rd, Goodman wrote a piece saying that ‘senior advisors to David Cameron are leaving in droves’. Five days ago he told readers that ‘David Cameron is heading for the exit. Enter Gove’. Last December he wrote that ‘the 2015 election is already lost’ with Cameron at the helm. Only yesterday he is reported to have said, “David Cameron has so many problems with his party because he and his entourage don’t like it very much”.

But Mr Nasty becomes Mr Nice when on the subject of UKip’s leader. ‘Many Conservative Party members have a soft spot for Nigel Farage, Ukip’s rumbustious leader’ he wrote in the Telegraph last September. ‘One in ten who voted Tory in 2010 has switched to Nigel Farage’s Ukip’ he gushed last January.

However, this excerpt from a Goodman piece two weeks ago at Tory Home might be highly significant: ‘UKIP activists in essence are, overwhelmingly, Conservatives, and many of them are former party activists.  And the UKIP programme for which they campaign is in large part a Conservative one, too.  Very simply, UKIP is a party of the right, and Mr Cameron ought to be crafting a tent big enough to contain voters from both the right and centre’. This reads like not so much a Freudian slip as Sigmund’s entire underwear drawer on display.

So in the classic Perry Mason manner, let us establish timing, means, and motive….in no particular order. Nigel Farage knows that the only way he can do a deal with the Tories is if its leader goes. He also knows that many Tory activists have strong Conservative sympathies. He dislikes Cameron intensely and is very bitter about the original Dave BOSEL remark which he knows was aimed at him. Nigel was stirring the pot within minutes of Kirkup’s story on Friday night, and claims to know the identity of the BOSELer on this occasion. He has mates throughout the right wing press, and is regarded by many as an insidious leaker against all opponents. So he ticks all the boxes.

Paul Goodman is a confidante of Cameron rival David Davis. He quit Parliament soon after Cameron became leader. He makes a good living as a freelance right-wing journalist for Tory Home, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph – all normally anti-Camerlot publications. He’s been upping the ante on BOSEL since yesterday afternoon, and again this morning. He supports many of UKip’s ideas, and likes its leader. Privately he thinks a Tory-UKip deal is the only way the Right can win in 2015. He has written in the past about the relationship between Tory and UKip grassroots workers. He too ticks all the boxes.

James Kirkup writes an influential column for the Daily Telegraph. He broke the story when others declined to do so…probably because the remark was made at a private dinner alleged to have been off-the-record. He hasn’t confirmed Feldman as the source, but he hasn’t denied it either. Many in both journalism and the Conservative Party would regard him as being a bit of a rotter for running the story at all. Others wonder why recycled old new at this particular time. Just look at some of his tweets and retweets since Friday on Twitter - (He’s made none since):

RT @MirrorJames: Tory activists are “mad, swivel-eyed loons”, declares crony of David Cameron http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/conservative-party-activists-mad-swivel-eyed-1895672 … #spitemonkeywin

Paul Goodman ‏@PaulGoodmanCH 17 May Morning, all. How are your eyes today? Steady in their sockets?

Retweeted by James Kirkup

 

Tim Montgomerie ‏@TimMontgomerie 22h That the Cameroons think Tory members are loons is no surprise. I remember two senior Number 10 aides talking in exactly those terms.

Retweeted by James Kirkup

 

Lord Ashcroft ‏@LordAshcroft 21h Putting “mad swivel-eyed loons” into Google produces 10600 results. Soon be up to Membership levels!!

Retweeted by James Kirkup

 

Damian McBride ‏@DPMcBride 17h If Feldman denies being the figure about which the claims are being made, why does he think journos should have put the claims to him first?

Retweeted by James Kirkup

 

I think it would be fair to say that Kirkup ticks most of the boxes.

 

Finally, James Forsyth looks like a catalyst at a crucial time by pushing the Top Tory identity issue early on Saturday. As with Kirkup – why now? – you have to ask with Forsyth, why move it on to another level?

 

Jo Johnson has the means and the motive, but he wasn’t at the dinner, and despite what BoJo says, he is nothing like his brother.

 

In conclusion, it looks to me like Goodman and Farage are in the frame as having hatched some form of plot. And both Forsyth and Kirkup look implicated. We shall see: but what I’d like to know specifically is how Goodman and Farage explain away one ‘story’ which contains two elments known to be personal hobby-horses: Swivel-eyed loon, and Activists. It all seems spookily convenient, doesn’t it?

 

Over to you, chaps.

Last night at The Slog: The case for not making financial crooks a special case

TORY LEADERSHIP: Why Cameron will come back to face serious trouble this time

“Calm down, calm down…”

The Tory Right senses that its hour has come

The campaign to hoof David Cameron out of Number Ten is gathering pace. Eight days ago I posted to suggest where all this was leading:

‘Mr Cameron cannot win this one. The MSM titles are a tad short on precisely where this pressure for an early referendum is coming from – perhaps because it’s coming from at least two well-known media owners…..At the weekend, a Conservative source remarked to me that “the Right wants the referendum to turn into a giant vote of no-confidence in Cameron”. I think he’s almost certainly right, and I think it probably would.’

Yesterday, Ben Brogan at the Telegraph wrote this in his regular column:

‘No10 says the party is united on policy, when what its critics allege is that it is divided on Dave. This episode has been about his effectiveness as a leader and his ability to command those below him, and what that means for the party’s prospects in 2015. I still hold that up until a fortnight or so ago Mr Cameron was advancing on vote-winning fronts…..But [when] Cabinet ministers are willing to announce that they won’t defend the Government’s programme, things are more serious than the glib optimism from No10 acknowledges.’

What was a week ago ‘a rebellion on Referendum’ is now ‘a Cabinet crisis’. Dan Hannan – who has a toenail in Camerlot and his heart in Borisshunt Fallongove  – spent most of yesterday frantically tweeting that the ‘split’ was being overplayed. Dan’s big problem (and it will cost him dear one day) is that he has verbal diaorrhea, and very poor judgement about when to take some Imodium. It came across as protesting too much.

The Sarkists meanwhile are jumping on Dave’s head at every opportunity. Looking at the Torygraph website this morning, we have ‘The Prime Minister has appeared to be following his party rather than leading it, and has adopted tactics over the Europe referendum that have verged on the naive’ (Telegraph view), ‘The Tory party’s gone crazy over Europe, and it’s Cameron’s fault’ (Brogan), and ‘Cameron and his party conspire to create a European shambles’ (Iain Martin).

But read carefully between some of the lines, and you can see where that Sarkastic preference lies: whereas we have yet another article on BoJo (‘…it fell to Boris Johnson, writing on these pages yesterday, to make one significant point: that not all of our problems can be laid at Europe’s door’) positioning  him as solid, straightforward, and statesmanlike, Michael Gove got ‘Michael Gove has said he wants to be “the heir to Blair” amid renewed speculation that he could succeed David Cameron as Conservative leader’, adding a damning quote (“If you’re saying I’m the heir to Blair or a disciple of David Blunkett (Labour’s former education secretary) then I plead guilty to both.”) and faint praise (‘Mr Cameron was said to have described himself as “the heir to Blair”…..Mr Gove has repeatedly ruled out standing for the Conservative leadership, insisting that he lacks the essential qualities necessary for the job….Michael Portillo, the former Tory defence secretary, has previously said Mr Gove would be “a serious candidate for the future” leadership of the party.)

Blair, Blunkett, Cameron, Portillo and shrinking violets are all pet hates for the Conservative BARMY* tendency, so I think Mr Gove can consider himself stabbed in the front re that one. Boris is the twins’ man – the Sarkist support for him is more formal than many would care to admit – but that’s fine, because the Education Secretary is a dyed in the wool Newscorper who, despite a mountain range of evidence to the contrary, continues to see Muppet Rudeshock as A Great Man – and the feeling is reciprocated.

What we must all remember of course is that, to date, the No Turning Backers in the Party have been one part piss, one part wind, and one part mouth. The missing element appears to be a spine: they loathe Cameron, emit spittle when using the word Coalition, and abominate the strategic ideas of Oliver Letwin. They did manage a major coup in getting Cameron to sideline the bungling Old Etonian, replacing him with Boris Johnson’s brother, but this was not exactly a direct hit amidships heading down to the munitions hold: it’s going to take more than that to dislodge a Prime Minister….even one as directionally brainless as David Cameron.

One thing above all has changed in recent weeks: the UKip triumph, and what any halfway decent psephologist can discern from it: unless it does a deal with Farage – or gets those votes back sharpish – the Conservative Party cannot win in 2015. Before the local elections, the calculation among the Tory rank and file was that, when push came to shove, not many people would stick a cross next to Ed Miliband in the polling booth. There was a general mood of biding time, waiting for the economy to turn, and then dumping Cameron after the election. I must say it always struck me as a profoundly flawed plan, but the sense one gets now is that the Right really does realise it’s sh*t or bust: the timing has changed, and the urgency has increased.

We have two years to go until the next election – almost to the day. Two years to bed in a new leader and Chancellor, spin some bollocks about signs of recovery, wind the Nation up with a clear policy on Europe, and romp home to victory. There is a sense of ‘now or never’ in the air.

To dump Cameron and go full on ‘EU-out’ as a Party would mean losing LibDem support…and being defeated on a confidence issue. Cleggie doesn’t want to call that (he’s smart enough to know his Party would be annihilated in any ensuing Election) and there’s a lot of legislation at stake for the Tories. Losing half the programme – and either going into a forced election or struggling on as a minority Government – does tend to take the wind out of puffed-up sails. Instinctively, it feels like a risk too far.

But the alternative is, for many of the BARMIES, too ghastly to contemplate. A lame-duck Cameron in 2015 – atop a failing economic policy and divided Party as the eurozone implodes – isn’t a great prospect for even the most visceral Shires sociopath. A split electoral Right producing an emphatic Labour majority would be the ultimate nightmare.

Fortune favours the brave. We are about to see what Borishunt Fallongove is made of.

Later yesterday at The Slog: Gold drops again as oil barons caught fiddling

*BARMY – ‘Barclays and Rupert Murdoch Yes’

Globalised madness as Cyprus and Slovenia seek new ways to stun Troika

Smacking fashionistas with red meat is wrong, a new study suggests

Friday dawns to give us another of those days when – for me – the chief debate remains, “Is the media-financial-celebrity complex mad or cunning or both?”

In Atlantic magazine, Stephen Fried, the bloke who allegedly came up the word ‘fashionista’, has apologised for creating a ‘word of terrifying power and controversy’. Until he turned guilty, I hadn’t noticed. Mr Fried will not be writing much in the near future as he requires complex ‘inside-out’ surgery after going up himself.

A study has ‘found’ that smacking does children no harm as long as they know it is for the right reasons and feel loved. The report (published in the journal Parenting: Science and Practice) ‘found’ that the painful effects of harsh discipline – such as verbal threats or spanking – are offset by the child’s feeling of being loved.

Nothing has been ‘found’ here beyond a small sliver of common sense that fell behind the sofa cushions thirty years ago.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron is being urged to move on from modernisation of the Conservative Party and emulate Thatcher by offering “red meat” policies. Accordingly, next week the entire Cabinet will move onto a strict diet of steak tartare, and Chancellor George Osborne is to begin a concerted programme of throwing calves at bond traders, in order to distract them from Britain’s dearth of food, exports, viable banks, jobs and economic strategy. All backbenchers asking questions about the Government’s crackdown on underclass families will be eaten by Eric Pickles, and the ground bones exported to China ready for repackaging as virility tonics. “Sales of white powder are already doing well in Shanghai,” Lord Green commented, “and this new addition to our Chinese Walls brand will at least halve the national debt by 2002″.

Canadian banker Mark Carney, the incoming Bank of England Governor, has described the UK as a “crisis economy”, admitting in turn that the Relief of Mafeking should not be taken as a sign that the worst is now over for Britain. Mr Carney sought to play down hopes that he could ride to the country’s rescue, instead claiming, “Look, I’m just here to convince the markets that we’re doing something. Actually I intend to work pretty hard on my golf handicap”. He added that “until the Pound is worth three Congolese lira, we won’t export anything much beyond undiluted fear. Frankly kiddo, you can kiss yer ass goodbye. Say, can we go again on that question?”

Across the water, Cyprus has ‘stunned’ EU officials by ordering a vote in its parliament on the terms of the EU-IMF Troika bailout for the country. Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades told reporters, “We tried tear gas on the Troika but they didn’t cry, so we brought in some Met Police rubber-bullet launchers and that did the trick. We think they are now paying attention, but if there’s any doubt we shall not hesitate to strap them into seats and play 24/7 loops of Herman van Rompuy’s poetry”.

Stunned into action in due course at the next meeting of the FinMins in October, Troika officials were then dealt a devastating blow when President Alenka Bratušek confirmed that Slovenia is not Cyprus. “This is most irregular,” said EC joint President José Manuel Barroso, “We thought Slovenia was a suburb of Nicosia, but in fact that place is called Kaimaki. It is a mistake anyone could make”. Ms Bratušek said that her country could manage perfectly well without the Troika, and would definitely not be needing a bailout. Until the money runs out, and then it will, but that is an infinity away and there is nothing at all to worry about.

Closer to home – but of course absolutely nowhere near Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, David Cameron or Nick Clegg, his Dad and Leon Brittan – the BBC has finally splashed the news that entertainer Rolf Harris is under suspicion of sex offences allegedly committed before Margaret Thatcher was born, but probably not in the period since her death. Everyone else knew this last November. The BBC has yet to confirm the venue for Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, but a spokesman told The Slog, “Rest assured that we shall leave every stone unturned in our bid to help Parliament distract Britain from the 24/7 care-home child buggery that went on in Elm House Barnes from 1391 until 1998″.

And finally, a snippet from south-eastern Europe. When the Troika comes to Athens, its representatives stay at The Hilton. A single room there costs €320.22 per night. The average for smart hotels in the city is €60-80.

The Slog is in Athens, talking to opinion leaders. Stay tuned.

Last night at The Slog: Worrying times for Alexis Tsipras

OPINION: A Conservative Party out of control means a Britain going nowhere

The Tory Party is descending into an anarchy of plots. But a Labour victory in 2015 would be a disaster.

Although this opener may not seem relevant to the title, bear with me: all will become clear.

Several eminent microbiologists and antibiotic agencies in the West are becoming increasingly blunt about the threat to public health represented by bacteria’s growing resistance to antibiotics. I posted a while back opining that, if in the past we had focused more on scrupulous cleanliness in hospitals – and less on dishing out antibiotics as if they were sweeties – we wouldn’t be in this mess. But we are, and so the situation needs to be faced.

Now Jeremy Hunt, as the Health Secretary, is charged with reducing and preferably removing threats to public health. But Jeremy is a cute little bunny who spends most of his time knocking the public health service from behind an increasingly diaphanous veil of wanting to improve standards. I’m here to tell Jeremy that he won’t improve standards by starving hospitals of money. Nor do you do it by moaning on Twitter: yes, you’re the Health Secretary Jezzer, not us…..this is your problem to solve, not ours chummy.

However, thus far Hunt has not so much as warbled, squawked or peeped about resistance to antibiotics. And some of us are wondering how creeping privatisation of public health is going to result in a better combat strategy being developed re this one.

Yesterday, a Tory Party source I trust implicitly told me that Mr Hunt is bec0me a law unto himself. It seems policy advisers in Number Ten have been suggesting to the Health Secretary that his command of the detail involved in managing public health concerns is somewhat less than 100%. Jeremy’s response has been to ignore them. For he is primarily concerned with handing this (excuse the ironic metaphor) hospital pass to the private sector. Jeremy Hunt no longer gives a monkey’s chuff what David Cameron thinks. For it is his considered judgement that Mr Cameron is dead in the water.

It’s pretty obvious that the Prime Minister didn’t want Hunt in the Health job. But beyond that, it’s equally obvious that he’s pissed off about Theresa May briefing against Number Ten on an hourly basis. He also doesn’t need Liam Fox wittering on about the need to cut taxes. He especially dislikes talk of Boriso Johnsonini trying to recruit Michael Gove to his March on Westminster when the solids finally hit the fan. And he’s less than best pleased about Defence Secretary Philip Hammond telling him to cut welfare, not troop numbers.

The more sharp-eyed among you may well have spotted that all this open debate aka open warfare in the Conservative Party is building up just as George ‘Failed at Sums’ Osborne prepares to squeak his next Budget in the House over the coming days. The cynicism of this pressure-cooking is without parallel, even in the annals of internecine Tory cockfights. The strategy that the Chancellor is following clearly isn’t going to work: but the tactic of those who would like to be even more ruthlessly incompetent than Wee Georgie in pursuing their neocon aims is to amplify the noise of liberal naysayers. Nyyeeece.

There is an extent to which these assassins are following a reverse model of  Sam Giancana’s 1963 Mafia approach to removing enemies. That is to say, the Mob shot JFK because they knew such an action would relegate his brother to the status of an Attorney General without balls. So too – fifty years on – one suspects that demanding the head of Little Osborne is the best way to make the Prime Minister’s position untenable.

On the other hand, the plotters must of course be careful: they may well demand George’s head, but be unwilling to have it delivered on a plate. For the General Election thus triggered would (based on current opinion polls) drive an awful lot of them from their seats. They would much rather render Cameron a paraplegic duck, so that the forcing of an eventual leadership election would appear not divisive, but absolutely essential ‘in the national interest’. The rebels would then have a clear eighteen months or more within which to build a genuine alternative to Fluffy Ed Miliband, and his running mate Toughie Ed Balls.

A lot of Conservative – and Left/liberal – commentators at the moment are (in my view) hugely underestimating the fanaticism of the more doctrinaire Friedmanites in the Tory Party. As I’ve suggested before, what we are witnessing here is a coup d’etat: nothing less than an attempt to privatise and commercialise the British political process.

I genuinely do not have a steer on where the PM himself stands in this battle for the Conservative soul, because he is that ether one simply cannot lasso. I think if David Cameron stands for anything, it is a maintenance of the status quo. But the forces lined up against that are myriad: he faces a Left Opposition wanting to wander back aimlessly into a dark past, and a Right Opposition behind him keen to accelerate at full speed into an even darker iceberg-field in the future.

Ultimately Camerlot can’t win. It is outnumbered by the media, the Thatcherites, the collectivist Left, and a shady group of donors from Ashcroft to Lewis who have a twisted vision of Government being taken over by technocrats. Que sera sera and all that, but we do very badly need a viable alternative to what looks increasingly like the victory of the losers.

On 16th December 2008, US President George Bush uttered this immortally moronic observation:

“I abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

The laissez-faire free-market system is hopelessly flawed. It always was, but there will never be any shortage of pillocks desperate to explain why them getting stinking rich is a vital component of limited success for everyone else. What David Cameron is trying to do represents an impossible aim: the reconciliation of One-Nation Conservatism with Neocon Thatcherite Toryism. Such a marriage sounds like the Dream Ticket when presented in a paper from the PR agency: but in real life, it’s a nightmare of perpetual disunity.

There is a very good reason for this. The Prime Minister finds himself at the head of an Establishment wedded to the reality of an EU corporatist State. But he also finds himself at the head of a Conservative Party which is the mistress of multinational business corporatism – as represented by the Bob Diamonds, Lord Greens, Rupert Murdochs and Richard Bransons of this oddly muddled world we inhabit. That isn’t so much a circle you can’t square, as a square in which ideas will go round and round in ever decreasing circles.

The bottom line is that Mr Cameron has lost control of his Party….and his Party has taken leave of its senses. The result of that could be, perhaps, the triumph of banality in 2015: a win for irrelevant Harriet Harman feminism, peripheral Ed Miliband muddle, neolithic 1970s Ed Balls Unionism, and every other retrograde socio-economic idea you could possibly imagine.

Many on the Left will rejoice at the prospect of Tory meltdown, but that would be a vainglorious celebration. Every major Party in Britain is devoid of creative solutions to our problem – especially Labour. I hold no candle at all for Camerlot: but Britain is a country in reverse gear right now. We desperately need a new Movement to facilitate cooperation at home alongside competition abroad.

A bonfire of banalities would be a good thing. A bonfire of decencies would be incalculably bad. I fear we are going to get the latter unless something or somebody can break through, and break the mould.

Earlier at The Slog: Greece v Turkey v Islamism v Erdogan

PAEDOPHILIA: How one piece of news can kill a novel

There is a paedophile syndicate that runs across the British Establishment at every level. When will it be purged?

This is one of the oddest posts I’ve ever put up.

Yesterday by email, somebody sent me this flashback to an article in the Independent during 2000. Lest we forget, that’s now over twelve years ago. In and of itself, there is the familiar pattern of it referring back to a 20-year period beginning nearly forty years ago. This is a brief set of extracts from it:

‘More than 200 children are believed to have been abused by a network of paedophiles in London care homes. Seven people have been arrested – and 11 council workers suspended – in the on-going police inquiry covering 20 years of sexual and physical abuse….The investigation is examining alleged abuse in Lambeth homes from 1974 to 1994….Links have also been discovered between several of the key suspects. They were found to have worked together in the same homes, given each other references and carried out training courses together….Two key workers at a children’s home were sentenced yesterday to a total of 23 years in prison for a string of sexual assaults on boys in their care. Former Deputy Principal Barrie Alden, 66, from Norwich, and ex-house master John Wright, 56, from Talgarth, Powys, were sentenced at Newport Crown Court. Alden and Wright committed the offences on a total of eight boys at the Ty Mawr residential home, near Abergavenny, South Wales, from the 1960s to the 1980s…’

I’d imagine that, like me, you did a double-take at the end there. Welsh care homes. Again.

I was living in Lambeth (and meeting social workers dealing with distressed-family kids) from 1979 to 1990. I’ve also spent time digging around the disgrace of the Wrexham to Chester axis of buggery over the last two years, as well as delving into the inky darkness of Plymouth since 2007.

Now let me tell you about the dead novel.

It was an idea I had three months ago. It is about a pharmaceutical company that develops an early fertility drug around 1960, bribes its way past the FDA tests over the years, launches the product, and then discovers by accident that the drug has a tendency to produce male psychopath babies with a propensity for public-life power and paedophilia.

The novel was meant to show how sleaze in medicine and depravity in politics came to dominate contemporary life. It was to be pure fiction of course, but I believed it stood a chance of engaging those masses who simply cannot get their heads around just how deep-rooted and pernicious this link is between the desire to control innocent citizens and do irreparable damage to young children. These pulp readers find it so easy to accept the bromides of MPs and the cover-ups of police in their dealings with this, the obverse side of the coin which insists children cannot be charged withe a criminal offence: it seems that the quid pro quo is that they can’t be protected from criminal offenders either.

But there is an obvious flaw in the novel’s central idea, and it is this: how can you blame a pharmco product dating from, say, 1962, for paedophile crimes that were clearly endemic among perpetrators born in the 1930s? We aren’t dealing here with an accident for crying out loud: we are dealing with two grizzly human conditions. The first of these is the twisted desire to make infants the sexual partner of adults without consent. And the second is for the powerful to protect such foul perpetrators without question.

I was talking to a blogger more eminent than I the other day about what a complete distraction the entire Jimmy Savile/BBC/’He groomed a nation’ falsehood has been, and how one dead DJ’s probable guilt has been used to throw people off the scent of the many. A week ago, I was asking a member of the Fourth Estate why we keep on being promised Rocks Lane arrests, but nothing materialises.

But this latest old clip sent to me somehow broke the camel’s back. Dig into Westminster, local government, the schools system, the Secret Courts, the social care system in general, or the Care Home system in particular, and I can guarantee that – under every stone you lift – there will be the unprepossessing sight of low-life scrambling for cover as they plead false harassment and use their judicial friends to dish out gagging orders.

We should all note one especially devastating line from the old Indie article: ‘Links have also been discovered between several of the key suspects. They were found to have worked together in the same homes, given each other references and carried out training courses together.’

I posted last year about the Soham murders, and how a long-suspected (and protected) Humberside paedophile had protected the killer Ian Huntley, enabling him to gain his janitor’s job at the dead girls’ school. That man is an accessory to murder. Only last year, he tried to stand as the Labour candidate for police commissioner. The local Labour Party have yet to shop him; but they did at least have the decency to turn him down. Predictably and without an iota of shame, this bloke went to the media and said how his blacklisting was totally unfair. You couldn’t make it up.

The time has passed when we should any longer accept the blasé reassurances of the police, justice, social care and political élites that these are isolated and unconnected incidents. What we have here is a State within a State: a loosely organised but ruthlessly powerful group of sex maniacs feeding their perversion by corrupting police, Council officials, Secret Court judges, and child psychiatrists, while at the same time infiltrating the care system on a member-get-member basis. A prominent (and concerned) MP I met in January insisted to me that the main motive in most paedophile cases is money. To me this is like saying that the main motive for running a Death Camp is the bonus system. People who supply and thus get paid by sexually ill child-destroyers are in it for the money alright: but they must be somewhat odd to do it and be able to sleep at night. People much higher up who protect the same dangerously violent deviance are doing so to remove any threats to their power….a power which derives from the system they exploit  in order to increase that power.

Let us examine some of the facts in play here. The main suspect in the Rocks Lane enquiry is a personal friend of Nick Clegg. Of late, Nick Clegg has also shown  himself to be a complete humbug on the subject of pests who maul women, and more than happy to put his blind eye to the telescope.

The main bankroller of Jeremy Hunt the Health Secretary’s expenses is JHJ Lewis, the top dog at the Groucho Club. The Groucho was flagrantly displaying a paedophile exchange website until investigative journalist Tyrone Murphy discovered it and blew the whistle. There are no signs of enquiries or convictions in relation to this matter, although it is a matter of Newport Police record that Mr Murphy disturbed a man during 2009 trying to bug his telephone line.

During 2007, David Cameron shared a committee with JHJ Lewis looking into in-Britain tourist development. Lewis is a major contributor to the Conservative Party.

In the early 1970s, Harriet Harman and her husband Jack Dromey consistently supported the Paedophile Information Exchange, an organisation later disbanded under some duress. Harman then became Minister for Women, and embroiled in the Secret Courts saga. She at first vigorously defended the secrecy, and then agreed to open the Courts to the media. Five years later when she left power, she still hadn’t. During that time, endless numbers of already damaged children were handed over to a Care Home system hugely inflitrated by paedophiles.

Also during this period, Ed Balls was Minister for Families. When the second instance of Plymouth’s nursery system paedophilia emerged, Balls expressed himself bewildered and unable to imagine how the problem could be stopped. He didn’t know where to start, so he didn’t. Plymouth’s problems in this area continue to worsen. Ed is the MP for Morley, and a key member of the Rotherham Labour mafia. His wife, Yvette Cooper, is thought by many in the Party to be a serious leadership candidate as and when Miliband finally trips over his sword.

During the Rotherham by-election of 2012, the insane behaviour of one social worker (in trying to ban foster parents because they voted UKip) alerted the media to what that same social care department was ignoring: a massive paedophile network run and controlled by corrupt agreements between the police, the local taxi drivers, and key personnel in the care system. There seemed little doubt that senior members of the local Labour Party were well aware of what was going on. This explains why the Establishment spin machine immediately swung into action, switching the story from industrial scale sexual depravity to ‘This is a seat UKip can win’. UKip never stood a hope in hell of winning it. The sex scandal disappeared from our media. There was no enquiry, and nobody has been charged: to all intents and purposes, the story simply went away.

Last year a prominent Plymouth Judge infamous for soft paedophile sentences (and on one occasion letting two dangerous perverts skip bail) became the most senior Judge in Exeter. Nobody so much as questioned the decision.

In the 1970s, a campaigning MP gave then Home Secretary Leon Brittan a fat file on the Richmond Council situation. It disappeared. In Wales ten years ago, a damning report about Welsh care homes was first of all covered up and then shredded. But one copy escaped. Both the police and the cps have been studying it. That’s it.

Fine, I accept completely the idea that some of the above will be down to innocent coincidence. But all of it?

The death of a barely sketched-out novel is a minor matter in the greater scheme of things. But the death of Justice for our Children is a head-hanging disgrace of which every Briton should be profoundly ashamed. For fifteen years in the US, J Edgar Hoover denied the existence of an organised crime syndicate. By the time he died, America was being run by it. It very probably assassinated John F Kennedy. It still launders drug money through the banking system today. And despite his very long history as the boss of money-laundering HSBC, Lord Green is still David Cameron’s Trade Minister. This is where things go unless somebody comes out of denial and starts purging the system.

Does it matter? Yes of course it matters: During late 2010, David Cameron gave that same Lord Green Trade job to Leon Brittan. Brittan heard about the job via Nick Clegg’s dad, who is a personal friend. As Brittan was his first EU boss, Clegg recommended the former Tory Home Secretary to Cameron as a temporary Trade post filler. Brittan got the job on £170,000 a year. Certain irregularities in relation to diplomatic bags coming into Britain from the EU were conveniently ignored.

What goes around, keeps on coming around. And around and around, in this swirling whirlpool of deviant cess. Guilty parties are known to the police and other authorities. But those Westminster Parties from Edwina Currie downwards who’ve known about this scandal for decades are the most guilty of the lot.

THE SIEGE OF CAMERLOT: IS RELIEF AT HAND, f’nar f’nar?

Economy turning corner very soon probably, PM to tell Nation

The Prime Minister is to deliver a speech West Yorkshire this week, expressing cautious optimism that the country may be emerging from the economic crisis, because there are actually no signs of that at all, and he has to say something, otherwise under the existing Conservative Leadership Rules he will be stabbed to death without mercy. Here he talks live and in person about why he should be given just one more chance pretty please.

“Now look here everyone, there’s been a lot of idle gossip over the last few weeks about everyone in the Conservative Party apart from George and Ollie wanting to get rid of me and I would just like to put the minds of all those who think I’m doing a great job at rest, so don’t be concerned Mr & Mrs Jim Kit of 23 Glenn Close, I’m not going without a fight. There are all sorts of new initiatives in the pipeline, ready to go, up and about to be running and on the stocks waiting for the starter’s orders, so watch this space.

“Let’s be clear about this, we are going to go out there and jolly well give it our best shot in order to ensure that children with access to the internet give the marketing companies leading our export drive every last ounce of information they possibly can, and that the bankers giving so much of their money to the Treasury in taxes are not hampered by having their hard-earned bonuses capped. Throughout my life I have believed in equality, and the importance of everyone getting a leg up which is why I think it absolutely right that we are sending equipment and vehicles – but no weapons of course, none of that nonsense – to the Syrian rebels in order to equalise things when the evil forces of Basher Assad seem not to be giving in like we said they would, which is most unfortunate but only to be expected when dealing with those who plunge pitchforks into babies.

“We want a Britain in which justice always prevails, which is why we are absolutely determined that the whole country should keep being told why Jimmy Savile masterminded every act of paedophilia over the last forty years and committed an estimated 87,503 acts of bestiality on unsuspecting farmyard animals the length and breadth of the country and also that everyone remembers he used to work for the BBC and effectively used Broadcasting House as a paedo brothel with the approval of all the wicked communists who work there which is something that Mr Murdoch will put right when I mean if he finally gets the chance to take it over.

“For this reason I have asked the Metropolitan Police to spare every expense in hunting down every last person ever abused by Jimmy Savile, and not to get distracted by politically motivated reports of senior Conservatives rogering eight year olds in Barnes, a very nice part of West London where I once nearly bought a house and such things simply do not happen. It is particularly vital too that our hospitals are geared up to deal with the number of hard-Left journalists working on this case who are clearly mentally ill, but every day we hear another report from our Mr Jeremy Hunt about how the NHS is underperforming on every dimension possible and simply an evil empire long overdue to be taken over by American health insurers who have done such a great job among the people with whom we have that eternally special relationship through which William Hague waves his buttocks in the air and President Obama sticks something unpleasant somewhere dark. Sir David Nicholson in particular is an absolute disgrace whose refusal to resign just goes to show how brass-necked some of these Lefties can be but I don’t think I should prejudge the issue until we’ve had an enquiry.

“I am of course delighted to announce that our export efforts are beginning to bear fruit, in that we have sold a cartoon TV series to Russia, and David Beckham has generously exported himself to Paris St Germain with the help of 93 officials from the British Council. The week before last, fully seven widgets were sold to China as part of a crackdown on the undervalued Yuan you see these bloody chinks they’re not to be trusted and our failure despite best efforts to pull out of the disaster Labour left us is entirely down to Chinese whispers like the ones that go on in Lord Green’s bank and he never hears because he has been so busy spearheading the sales of widgets to China.

“I’ve always been a great believer in the idea that simply competing isn’t enough, and that we must break records. You can’t make a pancake thingy without breaking eggs and you can’t remould an economy without breaking records. Since I came to power, we’ve broken records right across the board. Under my Premiership, we have set new records for mendacity, intercity, spare capacity, and seen the Premiership won by Manchester City for the first time since 1968. So when it comes to setting records, beating records and breaking records, it is a matter of record that things are moving in a better direction and as to replacing me, well, I stand on my record, thank you very much and now would you mind awfully on your way out asking Grope to bring up a bottle of the ’71 Vosne Romanee from the cellar thank you so much most kind”.

“Calm down calm down calm down”

Last night at The Slog: Dow climbs to record high on news of asteroid vapourising Philadelphia

 

EASTLEIGH ELECTION: Why UKip will smooth the way towards a Borisonian Britain

Commenting on the Eastleigh result, in a classic outburst of slightly daft bombast, Nigel Farage said last night, “If the Conservatives hadn’t split our vote we would have won.” Still, it acted as a smokescreen (albeit dotty) to hide the reality of what I wrote earlier in the week: had Farage himself stood, UKip would very probably have its first UK seat this morning.

In truth, there are four real lessons in this result. First, the turnout was only just over half. Fair enough, it was a by-election – but it was a heavily media-reported one, a by-election created by the previous MP committing a criminal offence, and an obvious chance for disgruntled people to clobber both the Coalition Parties at once. That half of those allowed to vote didn’t bother to turn up shows once again the astonishing level of disengagement from politics in 2013 Britain.

The final-result stats fully support this conclusion. The two ‘big’ UK Parties, Tory and Labour, attracted the support of just 1 in 6 of those allowed to vote. LibDem winner Michael Thornton sees himself elected to Parliament with the support of one in five….about average these days. Despite a reasonably well-known candidate in the shape of comic author John O’Farrell, a minute 1 in 20 turned up to support him. Once again, Labour is seen as having little or no appeal in mainstream southern England.

Second, David Cameron’s position as Leader is now very precarious indeed, teeing up Boris Johnson nicely for a crack at the job possibly before (but probably after) the 2015 General Election. The Slog opined last Tuesday:

‘….you have to ask – as a Tory – whether squeaking in on a recount would be enough to relieve the besieged leader David Cameron. To be honest, whether you were a Tory or a Sutchist, the answer is pretty obviously “No”….. losing it would be a disaster for David Cameron.’

Well, he lost….to both the LibDems and UKip. So it is whatever comes above a disaster – a catastrophe from the Camerlot pov. And yet, the idea of UKip knackering the Tory vote alone is shown to be a myth: The LibDem vote fell by 14.5%, the Conservative one by 14%. UKip got the vast majority of the protest votes on offer – three times more than Labour. Above all, the result says that those people still with the energy left to vote don’t feel close to any mainstream Party. Farage was on much safer ground when he remarked, “What happened here in Eastleigh was not a freak result. Something is changing. People are sick and tired of having three social democrat parties that are frankly indistinguishable from each other”.

He’s right, but of course he is still shown to be at the helm of a Party that lacks credibility as a real alternative.

Third, this isn’t going to do Ed Miliband any favours. While the Labour vote held up, the Party has become irrelevant to Eastleigh voters – a place very far indeed from being Tory shires heartland territory. I doubt very much if it will affect Ed’s authority (of which he has very little anyway in real terms) but for the leadership as a whole, an inability to attract support when the Coalition is in deep doo-doo represents a serious long-term problem.

But I save the most important extrapolation until last, and it goes like this: for the foreseeable future, Government by one Party in the United Kingdom is virtually impossible. It looks as if we are heading into an era of serial coalition government.

I think there are a number of reasons for this. The most obvious one is that none of the four Parties discussed above are anywhere near either leading or reflecting the feelings of Middle Britain. The 35% or so who used to vote but don’t any more hold the key to where the UK might be going on almost every level. The UKip voter in Eastleigh is older, and less than committed to Farage’s vision, such as it is. It is going to take a new and charismatically led organisation to bring in the young en masse, and encourage the rest to re-engage. The damage done last time around by the false dawn of Nick Clegg is, it seems to me, far more profound that most observers realise or accept.

But in some ways, Britain’s divided electorate is merely the continuation of a trend we have been witnessing for several years now. The Greek and Italian elections have produced a standoff, and the US Presidential contests show time and again how divided and confused the American voter is. The Dutch political landscape is lurching to the Right, and pushing hitherto leprous people into colaitions. France didn’t elect a Socialist President in Hollande really, it unelected Nicolas Sarkozy; there too, there is a deep confusion over what’s required in the way of economic ‘reform’, and a classic Gallic distrust of austerity.

Only the Germans have a leader who looks unbeatable, and that of itself is both worrying and quickly understandable: she seems to be running the EU, and her public likes that…plus the Germans have been smart enough to diversify their trade away towards Asia, and so few are feeling the pinch in the Bundesrepublik. With all the other EU members of any weight hopelessly divided ( the possible exception being Spain) German hegemony now looks assured for some years to come. The big question is how Hans and Helga will react when it comes time for Berlin to pay the bill.

This widespread political apathy and confusion reflect (to me at any rate) the obvious cultural interregnum in which the West now finds itself. The old politics look dreadfully stale, disgustingly cynical, and fundamentally dishonest. The socialist model has been found out, and the neocon one is in the process of killing itself. People are bombarded with conflicting information about almost everything from climate change to the econo-fiscal outlook. Above all, nobody in the political, governmental, media or banking elites shows the slightest inclination to do anything beyond clinging on to what they’ve got by all means fair and foul.

Over time, this must of course become a self-fuelling process until something or somebody comes along to give citizens in the West a more realistically inspiring vision of how to move into a better future. Part of that (obviously) will involve a clearer consensus on what is meant by ‘better’.

At the risk of becoming boring on this subject, looking at the British context, the politician in by far the best position to benefit from this is Boris Johnson. A massive purge of the Camerlot camp alongside a lurch to the Right under his leadership would get him support among the old, the young, the UKippers, and the traditional working-to-middle-class Conservative voter. Given his carefully cultivated image of being the plain-speaking chap close to the national pulse, Johnson is also building an image of dynamic renewal through business investment….a process against which he brooks no opposition, and throughout which he actively stifles debate.

The reality of BoJo is rather different to the bluff, straight persona he projects. Under a Johnson-led government, British citizens of every age and social class would see a rapid erosion of their net worth, employment rights, incomes, social mobility, and access to real justice. Johnson is for Murdoch, for bankers, for denial, for cover-up, for media spin and corrupt officialdom: in fact, for economic success whatever the price…and for the gathering of as much power as possible by Boris Johnson.

Pretty much everything I predicted about the bloke has come to pass. The real legacy being left for all of us by UKip’s ability to harass the Government without actually achieving anything much is the likely installation of an anti-libertarian Right wing regime answerable only to (and fully supported by) multinational business. I suspect that, not too far below the surface, this would suit Nigel Farage down to the ground.

ELM GUEST HOUSE: Media teeter on brink of naming former Tory minister

As the ever-ahead of the game Exaro site revealed this morning in the early hours, Met Police specialist paedophile investigators are now preparing the final logistics involved in the arrest of a highly prominent former Conservative Minister who was for some time close to Margaret Thatcher. However, one of the obvious side-effects of Lord McAlpine’s financially enthusiastic (albeit now oddly stalled) legal battle to clear his name is that everyone is terrified of naming who the former Thatcher intimate whose name everyone knows was – and indeed is.

I’ve been trying to establish this morning where former Tory Minister Leon Brittan is at the moment. It’s not easy, to be honest. Last seen working ad hoc for David Cameron (while the PM sought a Trade Minister of Lord Green’s calibre during 2010-11) Leon  – or Baron Brittan of Spennithorne as we must now call his elevatedness – still advises the UBS investment bank, but beyond this there is little to go on.

Who knows what it may all mean? Stay tuned.

Last night at The Slog: The Prime Minister’s penchant for sheisters

A few of those times

“It was, you know, just one of those times” friends often say when they hear somebody say something tooth-rattlingly stupid. As in “just one of those times when I lost it and the National Rifle Association was supremely grateful that I wasn’t holding one of their products at the time that was one of those times”.

I empathise hugely with that emotion, because the problem in the world of 2013 is that I have a few of those times every day. For example, last week I was listening to a discussion on BBC Radio 4 about the demise of Michael Winner. The guests were chewing the fat about Winner’s amazing ability to complain in restaurants, and at the end of the programme this complete pillock opined, “There is absolutely no point in complaining because it won’t make any difference and why not just enjoy the meal, go home afterwards, and keep calm?”

How do you explain to a wafer-thin brain that such thinking is the thin end of the wedge? That if you don’t complain about Blair, you wind up with Cameron?

I don’t know the answer to that one, but here’s another example from yesterday’s Times: the High Court has approved the decision by a Jewish couple to divorce using Beth Din rabbinical Law. In this – the first decision in British secular legal history giving way to the judgement of a minority religious sect – the High Court is effectively clearing the way for utter anarchy in any legal process involving divorce. We can be 100% certain of this because, within minutes of the decision, a Muslim Council spokesman said, “If it leads to the acceptance of Sharia Court divorces, then Muslims will be very encouraged”.

Which part of multiculturalism’s risible track-record do the High Court clowns not get? Which of the blindingly obvious ramifications of this insane decision can they ever, ever rationalise later as having been ‘unforeseen’? Mr Justice Baker cited no less a f**kwit than former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in reaching his judgement. Since when did the British Constitution allow for the opinion of a happy-clappy cleric to drive the Rule of Law?

The unadulterated über-liberal naivety of the decision puts me in mind of the two famous German historians Manvell and Frankel, who ended their definitive tome on the Weimar era with this classic model of clarity: “The Weimar Republic failed because it allowed an overly-large grant of political freedom to those whose avowed objective was its destruction”.

Back again to the political madness of our age, and the completely unethical acceptance by David Cameron that professional skills are more important, when appointing someone to a key post, than powerful evidence of their criminal leanings. The PPI scandal committee’s main champion, Ombudsperson Natalie Ceeney, told a Parliamentary Enquiry last week that evidence given by the banks was “implausible”. As if to rub it in, she added that “I have never trusted any CEO who says ‘I didn’t know’”.

Quite right too: the bugger is paid a humungous salary to know. But Baron Green of HSBC says he never knew about the long-term, consistently-applied money-laundering that went on in his bank….despite the fact that he had personally been seconded to several of the branches concerned during his career there. All of which had David Cameron salivating to hire him. In precisely the way he hired Andy Coulson….and consorted with Rebekah Brooks. This too is what passes these days for ‘unforeseen consequences’.

While I would very much like to see a more liberal attitude to euthanasia prevail in Britain, there is no way I would bring a law about it forward in our contemporary culture, because it is painfully clear that – within weeks – amoral cadres within the medical profession would be facilitating the murder of aged relatives by children who were desperate for their money. Tessa Jowell applied no such logical thought to her decision to liberalise the licensing laws a few years ago – and A&E hospital departments have been paying for it ever since.

The vast majority of the political class are highly intelligent idiots. Unless this changes, we might just as well let them do WTF they want and take the sensible precaution of emigrating.

Yesterday at The Slog: Time to take more interest in interest rates

PAEDOPHILES IN POLITICS: A Beecher’s Brook of a scandal which may yet unseat David Cameron

With the issue of EU membership neutralised for the time being, the Prime Minister neverthless still faces the problem of upcoming Newscorp cases in which he is clearly implicated. But towering above any other obstacle is the emerging depth and breadth of potential paedophile cases linked to the Conservative Party. Is David Cameron about to become the Disappearing Man?

The Daily Telegraph yesterday noted that ‘many of [Cameron's] MPs see a leader who is not a winner, and whose actions – and inactions – are leading the country to disaster and the Tory party to extinction. Away from the public eye, some are actively working to bring him down, while others watch and wait, quietly hoping for his demise’. A little bit of this is wishful thinking by the Barclays of Sark – but not much: as I’ve posted several times since last Austumn, David Cameron is doomed, and the latest he will meet his fate is 2015. But now I can see dark clouds appearing at a faster speed than previously…and hear the sound of thunder foretelling the arrival of le deluge. It’s beginning to look like Dave won’t stay the course.

The Prime Minister has, for the time being, put one major problem – EU membership – on the political back-burner. He did this by saying an enormous number of things all at the same time which amounted to nothing beyond “maybe the day after tomorrow”. Another day, another can….but he seems to have stymied the Ed Miller Band (who now don’t know what to think, again) and largely guaranteed he can go into an election without it being a millstone round his rubber neck. The question is, will he make it to the Election which will be, barring great drama, around May 2015? There are two reasons why he may well not.

The first is Hackgate in particular and Newscorp in general. Although it has been largely (and often deliberately) driven from our front pages, it’s time some commentators woke up to the timeline here. Just seven months from now, Cameron’s former Number Ten media fixer Andy Coulson – along with ex-News International chief executive and horse-riding friend Rebekah Brooks – will face trial over allegations linked to phone hacking for starters, and more besides: Brooks is also accused of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, in that that she allegedly tried to conceal information from police investigating both hacking and corrupt payments to public officials at The Sun and the News of the World. In turn, five other Newscorpers will also face illegal hacking charges: Ex-managing editor Stuart Kuttner, former news editor Greg Miskiw, former head of news Ian Edmondson, ex-chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck former reporter James Weatherup, and near enough inhouse private detective Glenn Mulcaire.

I do find it perpetually staggering that 3,000 looters in Croydon can be banged up in three weeks, but (given the hearing for the Newscorp defendants was last September) it takes a year just to get seven well-heeled folks into Court. Of course this case is more complex, but seven goes into three thousand almost four hundred and thirty times. Anyway, delaying tactics Court procedures are not my concern today. My observation is a simple one: our economic situation will be parlous by September. It may prove to be one rough ride too many for our equestrian Prime Minister…especially if ginger canaries start to sing alongside drink-addled blokes with scores to settle against several people.

But even before then, Cameron may well find himself neck-deep in what will probably turn into the biggest sexual abuse scandal in political history. Those of us who’ve been grubbing about in this awful pit of depravity for six years or more have been rendered weary by a surfeit of false dawns, false flags and false witness: all of us, I think, still fear that the Establishment will yet again cover up this obscenity in its midst. But this week – and notably this weekend – several things seem to be surfacing at once. And as the original Hackgate scandal showed only too well, one of the few things left that will get the Brits up off their sofas is bad stuff being done to children.

I spoke at some length with a LibDem MP three weeks ago who insisted that the main motive behind child trafficking and systemic sexual abuse in care homes and schools is money. This is rather like saying that the main motive for war is munitions sales: as with so many of the observations made by our legislators and their fellow-travelling extremists, it shows a woeful ignorance of social anthropology – and the typical psychography of those in positions of power. The fact is, control is the common driver here: the same folks who like bossing the rest of us about are also have a higher-than-average propensity towards sexual control and abuse.

Thus illegal, life-damaging sexual perversity is as powerful a minority in the Labour Party (especially at local level) as it is in the Conservative Party higher up. However, to date it does seem to be the Tories who are getting the bulk of the heat….which, on top of the Party’s very obvious collusion in myriad ways with City criminality, is in danger of giving them an image roughly on a par with the necrophile serial killer John Christie. This can only get worse. In fact, it already is doing.

This morning, the Sunday People unveils a former Richmond Council care home orphan who says he and his 12-year-old brother were sent by staff to the Elm Guest House, where they were lured into cider and beer-drinking races to get them drunk and ordered to dress in girls’ fairy costumes while their pictures were taken. What The People calls ‘vile sex acts’ then occurred. Prominent Conservative politicians are popping up on the Elm House guest list with disturbing regularity, and not all of them are expat Ministers who were in power under Margaret Thatcher. Some are very closely connected to Cabinet Ministers and Peers in both powerful and controversial posts today.

It’s one thing turning a blind eye to Sir Cyril Smith’s preference for marginally under-age rent boys; it’s another to cover up a form of sadistic sexual bullying that blighted thousands of lives. One in six children aged 11-17 (16.5%) have experienced sexual abuse, and almost one in 10 children aged 11-17 (9.4%) have experienced sexual abuse in the past year. However, the correlation between care home abuse and later suicides among the victims is irrefutable and truly damning: for many decent people, privileged and protected predators should be considered murderers by proxy. Peter Hatton-Bornshin ended up at the Grafton Close Children’s Home, which was run by Richmond borough council in South-West London and supplied paedo-fodder to Elm House. An orphan from the age of eleven, Peter killed himself at the age of 28 as a direct result of the appalling abuse to which he was subjected. His story mirrors hundreds of others.

Meanwhile, Wrexham Council has been sitting on a controversial shelved report into North Wales child abuse. The Councillors have been running the media Around the Houses for Eighty Days, despite acknowledged FOI requests from both the Welsh Daily Post and the site Wrexham.com. Having admitted that yes, they do indeed have the report, there is no way the Council can stonewall for much longer. I’m reliably told the report contains a savage criticism of police collusion, as well as the ‘mystifying’ decision of one senior Tory Minister at the time not to take things further. It also massively implicates the little-known relative of a figure already involved in deep controversy over paedophile allegations. And it might hold further clues as to the business influence this relatively obscure figure allegedly had with Conservative politicians in the 1970s.

Just when it looked like there might be an end to the evidence of depravity, the Independent on Sunday has a piece this morning about trafficking links between the Grafton Care Home run by Richmond Council and Amsterdam’s red light area. Written by Paul Cahalan and Deputy Editor James Hanning (a man with A-level in Hackgate and Hidden Paedophilia to his name) the article confirms that Fernbridge detectives ‘are building a picture of the reach of the network – which allegedly used the property – and have seized a number of files from local authorities’.

Various concerned residents of Plymouth may now also be moved to have another crack at persuading the authorities that, there too, Council care homes have allegedly been involved in a trade whose first destination was Santander….thence onto North Africa. At least one prominent Conservative politician in the city has been implicated by Plymouth-based complainants in the past. Plymouth also has a long history of paedophile abuse in its care system. And one of its justice officers, Judge Francis Gilbert, has an equally long track-record of bizarrely lenient paedophile judgements…for which his reward was the promotion to being resident Judge in Exeter.

If the Conservative Party manages to escape all the consequences of these multiply-surfacing hobgoblins, then it will have been lucky indeed. Or put another way, the British legal and political Establishment will once more be shown to hold the concept of equality before the in contempt. But with this in the mix alongside his many other kicked cans, it’s hard to see how David Cameron can emerge unscathed out of the other end of his self-made tunnel.

Stay tuned. There’ll be another exposure along in a minute. And have a look at Msjenniferjames, a reliably factual and thoroughly professional site often focusing on rarely-seen items such as truth, bent trials, ignored testimony and so forth in this field.

To get the full story on élite depravity in Britain, visit The Slog’s dedicated page The Paedofile

CAMERON DOOMED (2): the lies and pernicious Times of Rupert Murdoch.

Monday gets even worse as Murdoch serves up some HS2 for the PM to smell

Further to today’s earlier post about David Cameron having trouble inhaling while he is head-down in a hill of sh*t, you may not have thought this possible, but things got worse as the day went on. “I don’t like Mondays” sang Geldof’s Boomtown Rats way back in those innocent days of tertiary and post Punk, but one hopes that – as he sits at home tonight in Number Ten munching on Sam’s home-made Doppia Mozarella with extra Humble – the Prime Minister is capable of being philosophical about how his week got out of the blocks.

Shortly after I posted, various backbenchers, Tory-voting constituencies and new stalking horses popped up to say just how much additional excrement they wanted to pour onto Dave’s hill in relation to his pet project, the HS2 rail link. This is the one that will enable business people only on the train for the cooked-expenses breakfast to arrive in Manchester before they leave London. It’s also the one that is about to take the concept of Nimby to new heights of door-jamb biting opposition.

But the main thing to note here is that Murdoch’s Times once again has the spoon out, and is stirring the heady melange of turds, hate and division prior to depositing it on the only bits left sticking up from the hill, the PM’s calves and feet. The front page lead screamed ‘Tories push high-speed rebellion up the line’: yes, it was another Newscorp exclusive about what the HS2 blueprint will actually say, and why the Party’s grass roots are never going to stand for it. Page 5 had more Tory plotters planning to promote the likes of Graham Brady and Adam Afriyi as stalking horses ‘when’ King David of Camerlot comes a cropper.

You see, this is what happens when you’re the sort of ne’er do well who refuses to stand by Newscorp sociopaths who have broken more laws than Ned Kelly: Rupert will get you. Why else do you think that the Labour Party beyond a few brave backbenchers has an urgent bowel movement every time old scrotum-features tweets something unpleasant about Ed Miliband, or offers warm support to Alex Salmond? Why do you think Jeremy Hunt is Health Secretary, when much of the Tory Party and half the Cabinet would really rather he was the Deputy Foreign Secretary with special responsibility for Bolivian shrimp-farming?

A tame Health Secretary in place is a good thing for an ambitious antipodean-American diversifier to have….and the NHS is another potential medium in which things can be sold – even itself. So today’s Times was an NHS As Brand special. Suddenly, Roop decides, the Health Service is not a sinbin of Commies and truculent nurses desperate to become as incompetently deadly and costly as possible: for while once it was a many-headed dragon burning money, today it is ‘a respected brand the world over with the value of commercial gain for the taxpayer’ (Leader, Page 2), ‘a health service with a lot to shout about’ (Health Correspondent, Page 3), and a thing that should ‘create value and not just be seen as an expense’ (Opinion, Page 20).

You have to hand it to Merdeschlock, when there’s even a passing whiff of more power and mega-money, he is never held back by any commitment to moral consistency. The Digger is the isotopic Dayglo Pimpernel of Mammon: a being capable of both shameless and shameful behaviour at one and the same time -  a spinning electron in two places at once, neither of them where you’d expect him to be, because both are where he would never be if the world was sane.

The idea of taking a pale reflection of what the NHS once was sixty years ago – and selling the image of that to an unsuspecting world – is a betrayal of why the world admired us for it in the 1950s. But much worse than that, it is the worst kind of shallow branding bollocks. And I say that as a man who spent four decades at the branding coalface.

On a smaller scale, and with marginally less nefarious objectives, Sir Richard Branson is already powering ahead in the primary care sector of the NHS. Thus far in my neck of the woods – as I pointed out in a recent grumpy post - things can not ‘only get better’, because they are getting worse by the day. Having had my last appointment cancelled at 24 hours notice after waiting ten days for it to happen, I demanded an appointment this morning and was given one that promised a time 53 minutes before I was seen, as such. During this session, the doctor took my bp and found it to be 160/110.  I got a concerned look, but suggested by way of riposte that next time, she should take it when I’ve been kept waiting 3 minutes, not 53. Medical people really cannot cope with irony. I fancy this might have something to do their belief that God exists, and they are his representatives on Earth.

Footnote: For those healthy capitalists who might gain the impression that I am not of their persuasion, let me say that I am for entrepreneurial creativity, and virulently opposed to monopolism – be it State or neocon. But for those things concerning the social weal (and the promotion of genuine ethics) I am a massive fan of mutuality.

 

ELM HOUSE PAEDOPHILES: Cyril Smith named, but Coalition in fear of evidence closer to home about Rocks Lane parties

Brittan worked for Cameron, promoted Clegg

Brittan….speculation about Rocks Lane scandal

As the late MP Cyril Smith was last night named as a suspect in the case of paedophile parties at the Elm guest house in Rocks Lane Barnes, media and Westminster sources close to events broke cover to suggest that “a sense of great unease” permeates senior Coalition Ministers this weekend. The Slog investigates why.

Although most people have now forgotten the event, two and a half years ago David Cameron – unable to find anyone who’d take the job as Trade Minister – appointed Leon Brittan as a consultant to do the job ‘full time for £500 a day’ – or roughly £170,000 per annum. The former Thatcher aide worked in the role from September 2010 until February 2011, taking time off from his Vice-Chairmanship of UBS investment bank to do it.

This is not, however, the only direct link Mr Brittan has with the Coalition. He was also Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s first political boss in Europe, and on LBC recently David Mellor mentioned that Brittan had promoted Clegg: “He [Clegg] got the job because Clegg’s father was a very close friend of Leon Brittan” said the former toe-sucking Conservative Minister. It is not clear whether Clegg promoted Brittan’s cause for the 2010-11 consultancy job, but the LibDem leader admits himself that Mr Brittan first introduced him to Paddy Ashdown.

Brittan first became a controversial figure during the Westland Helicopters affair in 1986. He resigned when he was shown to have leaked a letter critical of the minister at the centre of the scandal, Michael Heseltine. Heseltine stormed out of Cabinet, but was later said by some to have felt ‘framed’ by events during and after the events of that time. Sources told The Slog late last year that Heseltine’s appearance in the ‘little black book’ of American paedophile pimp Jeffrey Epstein was “a plant designed to discredit him”, but to my knowledge nobody has ever accused specific individuals of the frame-up. (The Daily Mail rang Heseltine at the time, who told them he had “no memory of even meeting Epstein”.)

However, what is clear is that several photocopies of what purports to be an Elm House ‘regulars’ guest list have been circulating around the internet over the last two weeks. They clearly feature the name Leon Brittan. Shortly after the Westland affair, Whitehall and Westminster openly gossiped about Margaret Thatcher “banishing” Brittan to an EU bureaucratic post. Clouds of accusation have followed the former Trade Minister ever since, including on one occasion rumours about “irregularities” in the contents of a diplomatic bag coming from the EU into Britain.

Last November there was speculation in media circles that the ‘senior Tory politician’ accused by Steve Messham might have been Leon Brittan. Then the entire episode became clouded by a BBC supplier wrongly hinting that Lord Alistair McAlpine was one of the men concerned. In 2000, a £13m investigation by Sir Ronald Waterhouse QC made a series of recommendations after finding ‘systematic abuse, a climate of violence and a culture of secrecy’ existed in Welsh children’s homes. The Elm House ‘parties’ are thought to have been regular affairs in the 1990s. The enquiry took statements from 240 people abused as children in 40 homes, and mentioned 200 people who thought to be paedophile child abusers. Many of the names discussed were never released.

Also during November last year, The Slog posted an extended piece running through the names of senior MPs suspected by some of having paedophile proclivities. At that time I specifically offered the strong view that Ken Clarke (one of the accused) had quite definitely been wrongly accused. Earlier this week, a senior media contact close to the issue confirmed to me that the Clarke accusations “are complete tosh”. This in turn raises a question mark again over soi-disant ‘whistle-blower’ and former child actor Ben Fellows, who continues to accuse Clarke of things that appear to be obviously false. Six weeks ago a Smoke Signals piece here suggested that Fellows might be working for a third party in this regard. This has never been substantiated.

The abuse trail first exposed in the Commons by Labour campaigner Tom Watson seems at times to be an unfathomable spaghetti of plot, rumour, stitch-up and cover-up. But strong suspicions of ‘a paedophile ring with close links to Ten Downing Street under Margaret Thatcher’ remain. The raid by police two weeks ago on the premises of those batting for the abused has raised further concerns about a potential Establishment desire to seize any damning evidence of active paedophilia among Britain’s political class.

Related: Richmond Council ‘supplied Elm House kids for money’