From the Archives

All hacks and bloggers overestimate their ability to get the guilty brought to justice. The curio below from early 2010 displays all too clearly how, as Chilcot unfolded, many of us thought it could uncover the illegal and unconstitutional actions undertaken by Blair and Brown over the Iraq War.

January 30, 2010 · 9:53 pm

SHORT SHARP SHOCK: NEW SENSATION AS CLARE OPENS THE BROWN/BLAIR PANDORA’S BOX

The Slog’s long-heralded Dark Lady Clare Short took the lid off the Brown/Blair succession revelations last night, when she told the Sunday Times of Gordon Brown’s personal career fears during 2003.

She told The Sunday Times: “Gordon said that the Blairites were hoping for a quick and victorious war, after which they would be much strengthened. He would be offered a job which he couldn’t accept and he would be joining me on the back benches.”

The Slog exclusively revealed the timing of Clare Short’s Chilcot slot last week. There were hot denials from Labour MPs last night that Short was also the colleague to whom Robin Cook allegedly revealed during 2006 that he had radioactive information on Blair’s secret roles and agreements surrounding the Iraq war. (Another Slog exclusive in the last week)

Short was close to Brown in 2003. She claims Brown ‘listened sympathetically’ to her grave doubts about the War. It’s therefore not surprising that she has chosen to dump on Blair not Brown: she has always -like Sir Roderic Lyne – felt betrayed by Blair’s perfidy on the issue of the Government’s WMD dossier.

However, Ms Short knows perfectly well that – assuming she enlarges on this claim at Chilcot next Tuesday – she has done exactly what Nick Clegg’s cabal want: to get the Brown/Blair relationship firmly on the Chilcot agenda. For this could pave the way for Brown (along with several re-interviewees) to be questioned about what Iraq ‘sleaze’ may have been used by Brownites to oust Tony Blair as Prime Minister. I understand that high on the list of at least two Chilcot panellists for further questioning is Geoff Hoon.

Senior Libdem sources last night refused to comment on Short’s role in their growing conviction that both Brown and Blair have much to hide about the preliminaries and aftermath of the Iraq conflict. But an FCO informant continues to insist that, if pushed, anti-Brown plotter Hoon would happily be ‘forced’ to reveal Gordon Brown’s central role in starving British troops of vital equipment.

Meanwhile, The Mail on Sunday reveals today that four out of five electors did not believe Blair’s Chilcot evidence. Clare Short gives her evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Tuesday morning, 2nd February.

Last night at The Slog: Camerlot on the verge of being sacked by the Barbarians

From the Archives

The following post is from June 2010. In October 2012, I see no reason at all to change any of the conclusions. Interestingly, this piece evoked not one single comment.

June 30, 2010 · 6:30 am

ANALYSIS: BRITISH BANK DEBT IS A QUARTER OF GLOBAL TOTAL.

The reason we’ve got ultra-low interest rates made clear at last

For banks in the UK, according to the Bank of England Financial Stability Report, the refinancings due to be repaid to Threadneedle Street amount to about $1.2 trillion by the end of 2012.

The global total owed by banks to their Central counterparts last night stood at a fraction over $5 trillion.

You may ask why a small offshore island is in this position, and the answer is the same one as to my 2008 question, why did the UK banking-system bailout cost more than the US one? It is that we are so hopelessly overdependent on financial services here – or so amazingly good at being mad, whichever way you prefer to see it – that while others will get flu over the next few years, the UK could very quickly succumb to double pneumonia.

Once again this week, the Government (because civil servants do spin as well) has been rattling on about how our banks are ‘far more robust’ than they were 18 months ago. It’s true of course – but they’re still broke. If they weren’t, they’d be lending.

Richard Barwell, an economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in London, yesterday told Reuters, “If rates rise and banks are unwilling or unable to roll over funds, that would trigger forced deleveraging, there would be a sharp contraction in credit conditions for those within and outside financial markets, putting considerable downward pressure on activity and asset prices.”

This is moneyspeak for ‘Bank lending will stop totally and there’ll be a property crash….and by the way, we’re going to keep interest rates down for another year’. But it has (perhaps rather late in the day) made The Slog wonder if this was the reason for interest rate barminess all along.

Back in early 2009, Slog mother-site nby was virtually alone in suggesting that we should put interest rates up, not down – to get people saving again, and banks into the black via deposits, and lending to business in trouble on the move under government direction.

Oh hahaha, dear me, what a silly idea oohoohooohohohahaha they all went. How would business then afford higher rates, they asked? To which I replied, “95% of business doesn’t want credit at any price, because they know what’s coming”. (Hence the tendency of corporate entities in the West to store up cash-piles over the last 18 months).

As we saw, business didn’t want or get any money….and that 27% of the population partly or wholly dependent on investment income went through the biggest salary cut in UK history. Now there’s more than my own moaning self-interest at stake here: over 55s are the biggest credit-free spenders on durables, gifts, electrical goods and entertainment. To keep them spending would’ve made the VAT cut look like a drop in the ocean.

But there’s more: not only would the banks have much healthier balance sheets today had this policy been followed, the Government’s tax income would’ve increased hugely.

So why did we do it? And the answer, as always, is political.

Cast your mind back to late 2007. At that point, Mervyn King told the banking system in general – as the disaster at Northern Rock became more obvious – that the BoE was “not in the business of bailing out people with imprudent business strategies and lending policies”. This was precisely at the moment when Gordon Brown was planning a snap election, the thought of which had later never occurred to him at all. The collapse of a bank in Labour-held territory could not be tolerated. The Treasury was ordered to do whatever it took.

Secondly, rising interest rates would’ve stopped Brown’s everlasting boom in its tracks – and caused unemployment to rise rapidly.

And third – a self-fulfilling reality – once having rescued lots of banks (and loaned them vast amounts of money) any rise in interest rates became unthinkable – otherwise the banks would go bust trying to manage the debt. Vicious circle now closed, Ithangyoo.

This case history contains all of the three great lessons of our time: put off pain, and it’ll be much more painful later on; at the bottom line, everything comes down to banks; and above all, vote-centric politicians will themselves vote for anything that wins them votes.

The US fiscal deficit is down to saving Wall St banks. The eurozone crisis is down to saving Franco-German banks. Britain’s debt is down to bailing out banks. Britain’s unwillingness to go further into EU federalism is about not wanting to bail out Eurobanks. And idiotically low interest rates became a trap from which nobody could escape – to save indebted banks. ‘They must be saved’ was a cry that first came (natch) from bankers…but it was the political class that did their bidding – virtually without a whimper of opposition.

‘Naive’ is the insult normally thrown out by highly educated but blinkered economists and fiscal ‘experts’ towards any observer suggesting such contrarian ideas. Far from being naive, they represent a practical reality. There was absolutely no need in 2008 to save the institution Northern Rock, any more than we needed to save Icelandic Banks to recompense UK savers. It was done to make a collapsing financial mirage constructed by New Labour look safe.

To compound the crime however, the Rock’s perfectly sound deposits book was sold to….JPMorgan, a US company. And the intermediary employee who facilitated this was Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

In my view, even in the case of HBoS, the savings book could’ve been acquired by other banks (HSBC and Barclays would’ve leapt at it) and the corporate entity quietly closed. The result in all these cases would’ve been a short-term steep rise in unemployment…in one sector where just 47,500 are employed in the UK. Hardly the stuff of which Jarrow Marches are made.

I am on the record as saying in 2006 that, had Greenspan called a halt to the US boom in 2004 – including a good old-fashioned credit squeeze – the withdrawal from retail therapy would’ve been unpleasant, but the bloodbath of 2007-08 avoided. But that didn’t play well with the Republicans’ Noo Paradigm, and so instead Big G printed a bit more money and allowed credit to become insane. This was in turn encouraged by pc lunatics desperate to ensure that no ethnic, gender or class ‘isms’ were involved in the lending. Thus was Sub-Prime created.

The human desire to avoid painful reality, banks and politicians: they explain almost every snafu in history: and their influence will never be reduced until a new culture of material life arises to render it as anti-social as smoking is today.

The conclusion of this piece, however, is more immediate: the next time someone tells you Britain’s plight is being exaggerated, tell them about bank debt.

The Saturday Essay

As a decade of depravity draws to a close, the guilty men are not being brought to justice. The only way to change things forever is to stop the flow of monied influence into politics.

It’s been a helluva week, but when you think about it, it’s been an eye-opener of a decade. The sixteen paragraphs below are a potted and somewhat over-simplified summary of life since around 2002, but even allowing for simplification, it makes for wince-inducing, head-shaking stuff.

Advised by a media mogul often referred to as “the 21st Cabinet member” to get stuck into the threat of Islamism, Prime Minister Tony Blair concocted a case for war against Iraq, lied about it to Parliament, and had his press secretary Alistair Campbell rig the dossier in favour of war. Blair also ignored the negative legal advice (with the full knowledge of Jack Straw) and went into alliance with a chimp of a President out to avenge his Dad and do the oil sector’s bidding. A civil servant who blew the whistle on this was hounded and smeared by Campbell, and wound up dead in short order.

Soon afterwards, Blair perverted the course of justice by ordering the police (an apolitical branch of the Constitution) to stop investigating Arab bungs in return for selling weapons and fighter jets to the Middle East. Tony would’ve tried to stay on in Downing Street forever, but he was blackmailed out of the job by Gordon Brown in murky circumstances that have never been fully explained. While planning an early election and denying any intention of having one, Brown heard that Northern Rock was going under. It would’ve been easy to protect the investors and dump and/or sell off the bank, but as three Labour constituencies surrounded it, Brown ordered it nationalised. The only exception to this was the plum bit of the mortgage book, which was brokered on to JP Morgan by its new consultant….Tony Blair. During his period as Chancellor under Blair, Brown mysteriously sold most of Britain’s gold very cheaply. This was to help bail out failing international banks who had made bad bets on the gold price. Britain lost its inheritance, and so Brown got into bed with the bankers, but got nothing in return for it.

While all this was unfolding, Britain’s press media were illegally tapping mobile phones, blagging into vital emails, bribing the Metropolitan Police, and getting deals from Labour in return for a good press. The Sun, the Daily Mail, the News of the World, The Mirror and umpteen others were at celebrity voice-mail on mobiles from about 2002 inwards. The practice was common knowledge, first surfaced in 2006, and became a national scandal three years later. A decade on, not one member of any newspaper’s management has gone to jail.

Just before that scandal reared its hobgoblin head, it became clear via documents obtained by the Daily Telegraph that some two-thirds of Westminster MPs were fiddling their expenses bigtime. Much hoo-haa and demands for an enquiry resulted in just three MPs being arrested, and two going to jail. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, a much bigger heist was taking place, as some 15-20,000 senior local and Whitehall mandarins bumped up their pension entitlements without any scrutiny by Parliament. MPs simply will not talk about this, although the figures are there for all to see, and dwarf the MP embezzlements 200-fold. Fully one third of the UK’s national debt obligations in 2012 relate to these completely illegally obtained Civil Service emoluments.

These same civil servants went on to choose G4S, and pay them ten times more than the original quote given by the Olympic Games security company. The commissioning shell Locog consisted of some experts, and a lot of other very odd appointments; as a whole, its commercial naivety was staggering – as was the case in the Private Finance Initiative under Brown, which cost taxpayers £55bn and left them with a heap of shoddy hospitals and a further National-Debt fuelling credit bill. (Gordon simply moved the amount off balance sheet and forgot about it: had he been the CFD of a plc, he wouldv’e gone to jail. Maybe).

In the seven years since London was chosen as the Olympics 2012 venue, the budget has almost trebled. It is now at a level only £2bn short of the entire austerity savings effected by George Osborne since he became Chancellor in May 2010. But George’s savings are dwarfed by the £103bn (and counting) that Bank of England Governor has thrown at bank liquidity – to zero effect – over the same period. This in turn is completely dwarfed by the £1.16bn of write-off and liabilities accruing from the 2008-9 Bank bailouts and unwise merger cockups.

Those bailouts were needed because of insane gambling by the banks, undertaken in the knowledge that the taxpayer would make good any losses while senior staff at the investment banks paid themselves seven and eight figure bonuses. During this period in both the US and the UK, small businesses were starved of money but costly multinational mergers were underwritten with ease. When they realised how easy it was to massage the Libor rate, multinational banks exploited it criminally to make vast profits. When it was obvious their casino-days were numbered, they lowered the rate to save themselves, with the connivance of central banks. This week Paul Tucker, the Bank of England’s Deputy Governor, denied any knowledge of it, just as the outgoing Barclays CEO had done the week before. They were lying, and yesterday the Geithner New York Fed papers proved it. These newly-released documents are now implicating most of the political classes and central banks on the planet.

To counter the banking crisis and cut debt, the political elites introduced zero interest rates (Zirp) that slashed the incomes of retired people throughout the West, doing so solely to allow the banks access to cheap money. This was also used by large multinationals along with QE (from our taxes) to create bumper paper profits for those companies, and so keep the stock markets high – that is, rig them in what should have become a massive Bear market. They also persistently capped and sold gold to defend the stock markets by heading it off as a safe haven. When they stopped doing so for a year after Obama’s election, the gold price rocketed past $1800 an oz. The gold price is now falling, despite record prices being paid for gold coins, and bullion only being sold to punters in rationed amounts. Several EU countries have passed laws to enable them quickly to make all gold purchasing illegal.

When Obama claimed “Yes we can!” in 2008, the chances are he meant that we can do WTF we like and get away with it. Two years later, David Cameron’s coalition came to power in the UK, and promised that the NHS would be safe in its hands. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley then immediately embarked on a policy of obvious hospital funding starvation in readiness for The Big Sell-off. The South London Trust went bust two weeks ago: Lansley’s plan is working rather well, and the only losers are those who are ill and old and unable to afford private care.

Before this, New Labour’s obsession with surface gloss saw them throw billions at a digital comms network for the NHS. Called Connecting for Health, it has never connected anyone to anything. The Government claimed a £12.4bn write-off, but this too is a lie: the actual amount was closer to £23 bn…I know, because I have seen the Treasury tabulations.

But the one thing enabling Lansley to quietly get on with the job of dismantling the Health Service was the explosion of Hackgate onto the scene, and the growing awareness that Camerlot had completely sold out to Murdoch. For nearly a year, every day brought new allegations and increasing mountains of evidence to show that the PM’s own press secretary had been centrally involved in it, that his security clearance had been a shambles, that Rebekah Brooks (a senior Newscorp manager) was more or less telling Cameron who to hire, that while supposedly investigating Newscorp for wrongdoing, the Met Police’s senior brass had been dining with senior Newscorp staff almost every week, that policemen were being routinely bribed in return for rival-scooping information, and that the entire Murdoch family – plus Number Ten itself – had almost certainly known about it. It had been, almost literally, a coup d’etat in which power temporarily drifted away from Parliament to Wapping-by-Scotland Yard.

In the midst of this, Business Secretary Vince Cable (a known enemy of Murdoch’s desire to buy the rest of BSkyB) was illegally recorded by journalists and then gleefully fired by David Cameron…..to be replaced by a known Newscorp fan and business associate in the educational sector, Jeremy Hunt. Hunt went on to lie to Parliament about his relationship with Newscorp, and obviously work hard to get the bid approved. A week after Cameron condemned tax-avoidance, Hunt was found to have avoided £100,000 worth the previous year. He stayed in his job. Shortly after George Osborne criticised closed-shop quangos, Hunt was revealed to have made his fortune by supplying just such a quango in very smelly circumstances. He stayed in his job. The Prime Minister declared that Hunt had shown no favour to Murdoch, but by this time public disgust with Newscorp had canned the deal anyway. Jeremy Hunt is still in his job.

As Hackgate rumbled on, however, the Labour Party predictably turned a blind-eye to the previous activities of the Mirror in general and Piers Morgan in particular. Attention was now turned by Labour leader Ed Miliband towards the Libor banking scandal. He did so because the involvement of very senior Tories and their supporters in it was quite mind-boggling – even to the extent of infecting the Treasury Select Committee, which heaped disdain upon Bob Diamond – although one of their number at leatst. Michael Fallon, is a Libor broker, and must have known about rate-rigging for years.

Miliband may regret his eagerness for this fight, because his former boss and mentor Gordon Brown was also clearly inolved at some point, as were two of his senior advisors. But even as everyone tried to call the scandal a British Barclays event, it was obvious that Euribor had also been fixed during 2009-10, that another company Iswap was rigging the interbank derivatives rate on both sides of the Pond, and that Geithner had warned the Bank of England about crooked fixes in 2008. In fact, the BoE’s senior men had known about it since 2005 at the latest. As this last week proceeded, Thomas Pascoe in the Daily Telegraph confirmed the suspicions held by many financial writers for years: that the Gold market too was a sham.

Yet all this may yet be overshadowed by events in the EU. We now know that at least three ClubMed countries did shady deals with France and Germany to get a eurozone memership they clearly didn’t deserve; that Germany traded corruptly with Greece for years; that without being strongarmed into munitions deals with Germany and France, Greece would be more solvent than they are; that at last three French and two German banks are disastrously exposed to ClubMed debt; that the US tried to get Greece amputated in order to create ‘a firewall’, but that the Germans scuttled it – seeing what the Americans really wanted: military bases in, and the raw materials of, Greece; that Goldman Sachs illegally taught the Greeks how to lie to Brussels and thus borrow more money; that Mario Draghi illegally subordinated the Greek bondholders, and created the Greek ‘bailout’ from worthless paper; that Britain will wind up having to cough up yet more to help a currency it said from the outset was doomed; that the ECB has been rigging the bond markets by buying sovereign and bank debt; and that David Cameron’s supposed veto last December was a pointless bit of showboating that backfired almost immediately.

During this three year saga of mincing incompetence, the Brussels autocrats have ignored every election result they didn’t like, made the EU Parliament more of an irrelevance with every year, created a small unelected cabal to push forward a disastrous politico-fiscal Union, and illegally tried to influence the electoral processes of three EU members – Ireland, France and Greece. But still David Cameron shows no inclination at all to move away from an EU whose membership costs us around £80bn per annum, and within which we are now doomed to be second class citizens – if it survives, which remains very doubtful. The PM in fact has spent more time trying to appease his useless and truculent Coalition partner Nick Clegg, whose Lords Reform Bill is a dog’s dinner of no constitutional use whatsoever, and in which barely a single elector is interested.

—

What this history represents is a cavalcade of fraud. The police, the media, every major financial market on Earth, MPs, bankers private and central, sporting organisations, security companies, senior Civil Servants, most of our media, and a large proportion of the UK Cabinet are utterly covered in the malodorous filth that results from swimming without remorse in a veritable Olympic pool of sleazy mire.

This decade of depravity has ended – as such eras always do – in what I have called elsewhere the new Decade of Denouement. Gradually, we are all – left, right, apolitical and radical – discovering that almost everyone in a position of power wants to exploit that power in a venal manner, but evade the responsibility for doing so. But a coming age of media (especially internet) revelation will achieve nothing if we cannot rely on Judicial, police and political systems to bring the guilty to book.

For many years now I have argued that the most important equality of all is Equality before the Law. In fact, all other liberties and forms of fairness stem from that.

What this last decade has shown beyond any reasonable doubt is that the Rule of Law in Britain and the US (and in most EU States) will be suspended for those of influence – unless the Establishment chooses for Machiavellian reasons to throw one of its own to the wolves. The obvious impunity of its membership is evident in the continuing apathy shown by the West’s fame-obsessed electorates, and the consequently brazen manner in which the influential simply walk away from enquiries, feeling hard done by because they have lost a bonus or been forced to resign. It never occurs to the likes of James Murdoch, Piers Morgan, Bob Diamond, Lord Mandelson, Paul Tucker, Hank Paulson, Christine Lagarde, Tony Blair, Freddie Goodwin, or Michael Spencer that they might wind up in jail. Jail – me? No mate, jail’s for rioters and welfare cheats and the like. It’s not for me. Oh no. On discovering she would be put on trial, Rebekah Brook’s outburst outside the Courtroom was a gem of shocked aggression aimed at those with the audacity to accuse her of something criminal.

Two years ago a mentor and friend suggested a website idea to me called Trial by Internet. It was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to some extent, based on a revival of the old News of the World chestnut-headline, “We name the Guilty Men”. In 2012, you can name as many guilty folks as you like, the chances are there will be shown to be guilty, but never found guilty.

The central importance of this is lost on David Cameron (and most of Camerlot, actually). They come from the unearned privilege of an archaic class system that lauds the leg up and the funny handshake. But it is lost on the Opposition too, who would very gladly return the Trade Union movement to its former position above the law if it suited their book. Miliband’s rejection of Union funding for the long-term is a shrewd move based on the simple reality that, within a few years, the TUC will be neutered bordering on extinct. As we saw the last time they were in office, nobody apart from Clare Short gave a moment’s thought to the obscene degree of influence handed to Rupert Murdoch in return for a good press and a shedload of money.

From the start of The Slog three years ago, the same words have continued to crop up as the things we most need to get rid of: unaccountability, privilege, graft, lobbying, realism, radical reform of our Constitutional norms, Friedmanite globalism, State ownership, and unpunished Establishment crime. The last ten years have shown to anyone with two eyes and a brain that our current political system will never get rid of them. It’s why I long ago eschewed the idea of forming a political movement. The sole windows on the world of wide-boys left available to us now are the media in general, but above all those parts of the Internet still uncontrolled by politicians and moguls. And the only people we can make uncomfortable enough to ensure change takes place are those in business.

Unlike the political classes, they must sell in large quantities and avoid infamy to survive. Dissuading them from giving money to politicians is, to my mind, the best way to destabilise the major Parties and achieve real, root-and-branch reform. I recognise that most people either don’t know what I’m on about or think me completely wrong, but I really don’t care: for the foreseeable future, monied power will be the most pervasive and perverting force in our culture. Stop the flow of it towards Whitehall and Westminster, and you change the whole game overnight.

LEVESON: An enquiry into the truth about press standards has created a new collective noun for dishonesty

Being matter of fact about distorting matters of fact

Former Chancellor suffers devastating attack of African sleeping sickness

While the following comment might seem a completely random start to this piece, it’s highly relevant to the point. This morning on BBCNews, I listened as a morally and logically challenged Conservative lady MP told the interviewer, when asked about the LibDems abstaining on the Jeremy Hunt vote, “Well, if Vince Cable hadn’t been so irresponsible in the first place in expressing his feelings about Mr Murdoch, Jeremy Hunt wouldn’t be in the situation he’s in now”.

Where to start on the process of deconstructing such an air-headed, ruthlessly stupid, morally invalid comment like that? When did the British people first start voting for Wombat Woman just because, underneath her name on the ballot paper, it said ‘Conservative’?

And that does segue right into Leveson; because what this enquiry has been – pretty much since Day One really – is a steady stream of almost completely repugnant people; a foul torrent of lowlife daring to insult the British public with blatantly untrue, vapid and amnesiac evidence which, taken as a whole,  has not suggested the lack of a moral compass at all. On the contrary, it has suggested that the vast majority of the political class and Fourth Estate owns a highly-tuned digital compass pointing in one direction only: going West to the maintenance of either power – or what they fancifully imagine is still their ‘special’ reputation – via a process of systematic lying.

I say fancifully, but having heard the self-consciously slow and deliberate Gordon Brown perjure himself at least seven times during his evidence on Monday, I was staggered to find the Left – even the intelligent Left – tweeting about what a fine man he is afterwards. Even the BBC (so often accused of being Liberal-Left biased, which it is) broadcast an extended conversation between its political reporter and the studio anchor, in which the lobby correspondent spake thus:

“When Brown said Charlie Whelan had only ever acted properly through civil servants – and never to his knowledge in a way designed to smear the innocent – there were gasps of disbelief from every political correspondent in the room. That he could so obviously mislead on such a question effectively made it immensely difficult for those attending to take other parts of his evidence seriously”.

That is by far the most damning summary I’ve ever heard from a BBC correspondent on a recent Prime Minister, but then Brown has always been and always will be a pathological liar….and the comment was entirely correct. Like a methodical hitman using a silencer on his fibber-gun, Our Greatest Ever Chancellor spoke calmly – and with a masterful show of feigned dignity – as he sat before the enquiry and quietly fabricated his entire recent past. Only one man can better him at this culture-f**king game, and that man is Tony Blair.

But his evidence was no different to that of Rupert Murdoch (“I have never knowingly used my newspapers to further my business interests”) Jeremy Hunt (“I never behaved in any improper manner at all throughout my management of the bid process”)  or Rebekah Brooks (“I really wish I had my diaries with me, I really do”). They make Slick Willy Clinton (who didn’t inhale or have sexual intercourse while stimulating an aide’s genitals with a marijuana cigar) seem a paragon of plain speaking and unimpeachable honesty by comparison. Dick Nixon? He must be due for sanctification soon, surely. His secretary Rose-Marie Woods no doubt sits at the right hand of God in Heaven.

A truly unfortunate thing for all Britons tonight is that the one man Brooks, Hunt, Murdoch – and a hundred other dissemblers – all have in common as a willing colleague is the Prime Minister David Cameron. He lied about his real feelings on the European Union, he lied about the closeness of his social relationship with Brooks, he lied about his plans for the NHS, he lied about his intention to do away with all spin if elected Prime Minister. And soon enough, Mr Cameron will be giving his ‘evidence’ to the Leveson Enquiry. Never in the field of human endeavour was on Holy Bible so horribly abused by so many.

The Leveson Enquiry is now so devalued by perpetual perjury, I hereby offer – to anyone willing to run with it – a new collective noun for mendacity: a leveson of lies.

This week, the Sun (owned by Rupert Murdoch, the man who never ever wields economic and political power through his newspapers) broke a story suggesting that David and Samantha Cameron were parents on a par with the worst of the Underclass. The Left – ever willing to present itself as the decisive voice of morality in our society – has been making hay with this on Twitter, even though it knows (1) the story is in and of itself a classic example of press standards in the sewer and (2) it has been in invented for purely vengeful for reasons by the man the Left sets up as Satan on Earth.

For the record, Cameron was travelling with heavy security cover to and from his local pub in two vehicles. For obvious security reasons, he and his wife were in separate cars. In the scurry of fear that so often accompanies our politicians these days (whyever might that be?) his small daughter was forgotten for all of eight minutes…because she’d gone without notice to the loo. In the light of this, I read a comment in the Daily Telegraph (oh how the Sarkistas hate Camerlot) by some Social Working gargoyle to the effect of it being a signal failure of social services that the unfortunate Cameron offspring was not being held by now in a den of controlling, all-too-often paedophile carers. The likes of Tom Watson would doubtless applaud such a thing…but have nothing to say on the equally obvious tissue of lies that emanated from Piers Morgan’s privately educated mouth earlier in the enquiry…because he once worked for the Labour-supporting celebrity turd-factory Trinity Mirror.

I wonder, how might one equal the aggregate of highly concentrated, criss-cross quizz hypocrisy in those two preceding paragraphs? Well….by looking round the world, unfortunately.

So then, moving abroad (in every sense) the European Commission is a leveson of lies; so too is Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, Putin’s Russia, China under the squabbling Beijing control freaks, the Australian government graced by Wayne Swan, Berlin beneath the Merkeschäubles, and the Obama-supporting Huffington Post  – which bans genuine criticism of its sharp-suited (but clay-footed) Black Dude hero, and whose original proprietor netted $34m by not paying all those talented young journalists who wrote her way to riches.

So here we are at full circle: press standards dragged through the slime by press proprietors, senior politicians taking it up the backside from those proprietors, and almost all of them lying about each other afterwards. I guess one might call this ‘tabloid kiss and tell’. And yet, even that doesn’t anywhere near capture it. ‘No honour among thieves’ gets closer. But ‘sink of iniquity’ pretty well nails it. And if I may repeat once more – despite the odd cynical comment thread about my real commitment to this – politics is no longer about choice, because there is nothing to choose between red, orange or blue: each as a group is a veritable (ho-ho) leveson of liars.

As if to prove the point, our Parliament of Whores today voted not to have an enquiry into the blindingly obvious fact that Jeremy Hunt is a money-grubbing little weasel who abused a position he should never have been given in the first place. The Prime Minister in the Mother of Parliaments puffed out the mother and father of all smokescreens by observing that his advisor Sir Alex Allan had written to him to say that he could not “usefully add to the facts” in the case. I’d bet a Pound to a piece of sh*t that when the Thirty Year Rule reveals the full content of Allan’s advice, the wording will probably say something like, ‘Given the blindingly obvious fact that Jeremy Hunt is a money-grubbing little weasel who abused a position he should never have been given in the first place, there is nothing I could usefully add to the fact of this case’.

The country I love is getting more like Greece every day. This is to be rude about the Greek elite, not the Greeks I’ve always found resourceful, funny, and honourable to those they respect. I am in another country I like at the moment. It’s not the one I love, but the one I love isn’t any more either. Discuss.

Apologies if you find this piece unpleasant in relation to Mr Hunt. For full details of why, go here.

About The Slog

A little levity on Leveson

Johnson…major contribution to make to the Leveson Enquiry

As Rebekah Brooks thought it was amusing to give just a hint of wit and glimmer of smile during her Leveson evidence – betraying the fact that she still thinks this is all a merry lark – I don’t see why The Slog shouldn’t get into the act on the side of the Good Guys.

In his evidence, Rupert Murdoch referred to Gordon Brown in 2007-8 as “not of sound mind”. As Roop has no axe to grind about this one (the Laird having returned to his cave) I thought I would remind the MSM that, when I revealed via evidence and testimony in 2009 that it was highly likely Brown was taking MAOI anti-depressants and clearly mentally unwell, I was hounded by the Left  – and was eventually forced to change my blog identity to The Slog we all know and love today. Ben Bradshawe said about my post on Question Time, “But it’s a lie”. Turns out that Ben was the one lying. Andrew Marr asked Brown about “prescription painkillers” to help Brown deny something of which he wasn’t accused. Turns out Andrew too did A Bad Thing.

Brooks herself referred to “an extraordinarily aggressive” telephone exchange she had with Brown at the same time. I had a contact in Number Ten at the time insisting that the PM was “ghastly and uncivilised” in the way he yelled at secretaries and threw phones around the place. Charlie Whelan, on reading that piece, went on radio and called me a “Far Right liar”. Turns out Charlie did A Bad Thing as well. (Nothing new there)

So when it comes to standards in the media, perhaps we should get Gordo, Charlie Boy and Andy in front of Leveson and ask them about it all in the context of media standards. It could be fun.

But while the Newscorp nihilists are busy ruining the career of Jeremy Rhymyng-Slange, they may at long last be doing A Good Thing on behalf of the decent folks. As the initial molehill of suspicion about The Cheerleader has turned into a mountain of hard evidence, both the lad isself and Dave have been trying to magic it back to molehill proportions again.The process is pure Tommy Cooper, with bottles refusing to disappear from inside canisters, and long strings of snotty handkerchiefs emerging from both ears without warning. I’m waiting for the first sign of squawks and feathers the next time Mr Hunt says “Observe – nothing up my sleeve”.

This is what makes the Hunt for Jello Jeremy funnier every day, and so most of us can’t wait for his evidence…if only because he’ll probably be out of a job by then. But in brief, these are a few of what are likely to be his least favourite questions when that day dawns:

1. Do you think you got the job because of the slavish adoration for Murdoch plastered all over your constituency website?

2. Do you think tits, hamster-eating fiction, hacking dead people’s mobiles, falsely accusing Elton John of being a paedophile, and editorially supporting the lies of bent coppers represents a rise or fall in the standards of UK journalism?

3. When the Newscorp driver told you about the brown envelopes he took to bribe coppers, why didn’t you go the Home Secretary about it?

4. Was this the point at which you decided some private advice from these goblins about handling sensitive stuff was in order?

5. Why did you lie to the House of Commons about ‘full disclosure’ of all the correspondence between your Ministry and Newscorp?

6. Given you avoided £100,000 in tax this year, why does David Cameron still “want to be associated” with you?

7. Can you just give us a brief resume, Mr *unt, of how you made a fortune between 2002 and 2007, and the role played in that process by senior people at The British Council?

Another chap I’d like to see up before Leveson is Boris Johnson. First of all, he is a unique figure in that he not only courts publicity, he often writes his own in the Daily Telegraph. Secondly, as it’s pretty obvious he’d like to stab the Prime Minister in the front at the earliest suitable opportunity, Mr Johnson would be jolly good grist to that overworked mill churning out damp flour to throw at Dave on a daily basis. And finally, he’d be an excellent witness on the subject of shadowy proporietors who pay no tax and yet feel quite at ease trying to destroy governments. If nothing else, it would give Bojo the chance to thoroughly repudiate all those malign rumours circulating about the nature of his relationship with the Sarkistas, and whether it is in any way financial, which no doubt it isn’t. Allegedly.

Like an increasing number of people in the UK, I’m tired of enquiries. Not because I want to let all the perjurous witnesses off (perish the thought) but because, as I’ve posted before, I’m all enquiried out. It’s high time we got into the Criminal Trial-Jury-Verdict-Banged up axis of action. Time we stopped arresting, questioning, summoning and publicising. Time we let real justice take its course.

If there’s still enough to go round, that is. After all, those pointless gnat-bites of political showboating wicked Tory cuts have probably reduced the CPS budget to zero by now.

Is there any such thing today as a resigning matter?

‘The head of an experiment that appeared to show subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light has resigned from his post’.

(BBCNews website)

Are we surprised that Professor Antonio Ereditato has fallen on his collider on this issue? Not really. He has single-handedly set back the plan by Mario Monti to persuade sovereign debt investors that Italians know WTF they’re doing. In another age, he would’ve been hung upside down from a Milanese garage forecourt, and all his mistresses shot.

But resignations are rare things these days. Ever since Nixon resisted it until the very last chance he had to bag immunity in the early 1970s, it has become increasingly difficult to get proven pillocks to resign. Let me illustrate by example.

George Osborne continues to reside at No 11 Downing Street. He set out as UK Chancellor to reduce the UK’s debt by the end of this Parliament, and wipe out the annual deficit along the way. Nobody forced him to suggest he would achieve such an unlikely outcome: on the contrary, throughout the May 2010 General Election, he so often freely volunteered the promise to do so, the Shadow Chancellor resembled a Speak Your Weight machine – a Dalek determined to insist that his will would prevail: “I will exterminate the debt I will exterminate the debt exterminate exterminate exterminate”.

Last week, Little Osborne delivered a Budget whose opening admission (given the content) was that he would not achieve those ends. But not only did the Draper not resign, he didn’t even have the common decency to admit that he’d failed. Well, I ask you: wasn’t that, once upon a time in Blighty, a situation demanding a service revolver pointed squarely at the temple?

During the New Labour era, a standard not-resignation speech developed. It always began, “While it would be my instinct to resign, I feel that, as this [global pandemic/slaughter of the firstborn/avoidable train disaster/declaration of war on China] happened on my watch, it is my duty to see it through”. Note that this bollocks never closed with the phrase “and then I shall resign”. Which was incrediby truthful really, because they never ever did. Over the years, I watched in amazement as Patricia Hewitt squandered 20% of the NHS budget, Gordon Brown presided over the first major runs on banks for over 150 years, Peter Mandelson sat atop a disgraceful influence scandal at Business, and Tessa Jowell mislaid both the Olympic Budget and her husband. Every last one of the buggers had to be eased out or voted out: none of them did the decent thing.

Before he made his entirely disreputable promise to deliver the UK from its millstone of debt, George Osborne had brokered a meeting between David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch, encouraged Dave’s relationship with Rebekah Brooks, and firmly recommended Andy Coulson for the job as the Leader’s press secretary. Yet Ozzie is still there next door to the Prime Minister he landed in the mire. Very few ordinary electors understand the profundity of George’s incompetent guilt…but George does. Do we see any sign of Osborne putting the asp to his own throat? We do not.

I was comprehensively tickled to read the utter bollocks put out by Tory Treasurer Peter Cruddas last weekend: “I blustered a bit, but having given the wrong impression, I must do the decent thing and sign this resignation letter I’ve just been handed.” But really, the bloke’s double-thickness brass neck sums up what all these gargoyles are about: an addiction to Gravy Now, and a fervent desire that it should never end.

Il professore Antonio Ereditato himself managed to wait two weeks before leaving the sinecure that had allowed him to claim a spurious superiority over the great Albert Einstein. So I suppose the only thing left for me to wonder about is, what might God resign about?

He (or She) – if such should exist – is far from blameless. The Black Death. Tetra packs. The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. Al Q’eida. Lawyers. George W Bush. Hitler. Belgium. Simon Cowell. Krakatoa and Vesuvius. Zips. We could spend 1,001 Arabian Nights going down the list.

Part of me thinks God resigned after the Holocaust – albeit under the duress of public opinion. But most of me thinks there is no God. There is, however, a cold intelligence watching everything we do: of that, I am certain. And I think that intelligence has marked the cards of all those who refuse to resign.

At the End of the Day

Of conspiracies, incompetence, lavatory cisterns and Alistair Darling

There’s a comment threader at the Daily Telegraph called Chelyabinsk. He’s very keen on Scottish Independence, and is ingenious at turning every discussion/column about leek nurture or tooth decay into a rallying cry for Caledonian Freedom. There’s another one called Shakespeare, who poses as an unhinged europhile batting off everyone’s wailing about the EU going to hell in a bucket. That is, I think it’s a pose. Sometimes you never quite know. Our own dear Erika, for example, has an admiration spectrum that ranges from Vladimir Putin to Mahmood Ahmadinnejhad. I think it’s really Quentin Letts horsing around, but she may be real: it’s a funny old world.

Out of a blue sky three weeks ago, Chelyabinsk appended himself to one of my Telegraph threads and – referring to me as The Slug – made some passing swipe about me being “a promoter of superficial conspiracy theories”. I’m relaxed about being thought superficial, because deep down I am; but ‘conspiracy theorist’ is rapidly turning into the new ‘extreme Right blogger’ as the slur of choice among the Establishment.

As I’ve written many times before, I’m only interested in what sounds like conspiracy fact. There are conspiracies everywhere, but 99.9% of them are designed to disguise or re-brand a cockup. And 99.9% of conspiracy theories are, in turn, just that: an assemblage of random facts made to look like some kind of plan.

I could trace DNA back a thousand years, for example, and ‘prove’ that there is a Hun gene incapable of seeing a frontier post without wanting to drive a tank through it. They emigrated to America in droves after the First World War, infected their genes, and led to the interfering American Way between 1949 and today. Now they’re teaming up to create The Grossdeutsche-Amerikanischer Bund….look at all the joint investments and Bourse takeovers they’ve tried to of late…look at the joint plan to push Greece out of polite society.

That’s all bollocks of course, because neither events nor genes nor people operate like that. I do happen to think it very likely that there has been a rather silly hubris-fuelled plan hatched by the White House and Geithner to enlist American and German banking in a half-baked conspiracy to ‘amputate and cauterise’ Greece, with a chosen date of close of play before a long weekend, Friday March 23rd. But I think this because three people in three different theatres of global finance talked about dates and clandestine meetings with a degree of authority; because I know from an absolutely rock-solid Washington source that Geithner was incandescent for months about “the EU’s inability to find its ass in the dark”; because he arranged a covert dollar/euro swap in December with the ECB’s Mario Draghi to ‘fulfil his side of the bargain’; and because an alarming number of these players on both sides of the Atlantic used to work for Goldman Sachs.

One puts together the motive afterwards: Barry wants to be re-elected, the Fed doesn’t want its banking system to melt down, and yes, the Aegean seabed is a geologist’s wet dream, and the US wants nice cosy bases there with the minimum of fuss. Most conspiracy theories are put together the other way round.

In an average month, I receive around twenty emails alerting me to conspiratorial vendettas involving The Zionists (I get that one so many times, in my mind they’ve turned into a sort of kosher reggae band, Moishe & the Zionists), Jack Straw, Alex Ferguson, Nicolas Sarkozy’s American genetic connections, and Prince Edward among many others. Almost none of them check out, and the ones that do remain theory – nothing more.

But there are real examples. The day after DSK got banged up in New York, I got an email from somebody very big in that town saying ‘this is a  fit-up’. So it proved, and I gained thousands of new readers by having the inside track on some of it. But again, motive appeared later…and even then, remained bafflingly unclear. My best bet today is that Strauss-Kahn knew his phone was being hacked by the Elysee, so a caper was conceived to nick it. (It has never reappeared). Part of that was to distract him with Nafissatou Diallo (her movements just prior to the event defy explanation) and there are very clear phone records linking the Sofitel to the Elysee. But the Elysee cocked up and then lucked in: I think it was all done on the hoof in the end. The possible role of Christine Lagarde and Tim Geithner in the saga remain intriguing, but nothing more in my view. (You can decide for yourself by going to the dedicated pages here).

Sexual corruption in the social care system unquestionably exists. I spent five grubby and frustrating months delving into it, and that in turn led to helping in a tiny way to unearth the cover-up at Stafford Hospital, plus the scandal of psychotherapists’ fees paid by bent social workers to get small people into their clutches. There are major centres of it in Plymouth, Liverpool and Bristol, and it is driven by the obsessive compulsion of a few senior people. In one or two cases, it is linked to an adoption racket. In one specific instance, there was clear evidence of police involvement in it.

But the actual scale of it is minute in the greater scheme of things. I believe it exists, because I witnessed police surveillance, saw leaked documents, spoke to widows, and understand the bizarre cunning of the motivated serial paedophile mind. The problem is that every dysfunctional single mum believes she is the victim of a paedophile conspiracy to take their kids away – whereas the truth is, they are almost all gullible baby machines whom nobody in authority quite knows how to handle. I know, trust me: between 2006 and 2009 I spoke to most of them.

The main hat-tip on that subject must go to Christopher Booker, who has been a tower of strength against the controlling instincts of the Harmanite social care and Secret Family Courts disgrace. But with Christopher too, you will find all his pieces contain an avalanche of disturbing facts and statistics, all calmly presented and then rounded off with immaculately controlled indignation. He and Andrew Gilligan are, I think, about as good as it gets when it comes to ‘injustice journalism’.

For years, the British Establishment in its myriad forms dismissed Hackgate as conspiracy theory. I took an interest in early 2010 because I overheard two pissed celebs railing about it in The Groucho Club. I can’t say who they were, but I’d imagine some of you can guess. The point is, until then I’d never heard of Hackgate. I thought of Rupert Murdoch as a piece of multinational anti-matter, but that was merely a spur to action.The idea at that stage of the Prime Minister being implicated I would’ve regarded as ludicrous. But by December of that year, it was obvious he had either blundered into, conceived, or at the very least exploited part of what was going on.

Until one sees, hears, finds or reads something compelling and real that checks out, following conspiracy theories is a mug’s game – unless you want to make a business out of it. If you do, it’s a very lucrative one involving massive paperback sales and millions of site hits. If you don’t, then there are a million cock-ups not yet covered up every day to keep any genuinely concerned hack or blogger happy.

One such is the design of contemporary ‘conservationist’ water closet loo system. I realise we are perilously close to sewer journalism here, but I can maintain my silence no longer.

Up until about fifteen years ago, lavatory systems came in various hull designs, but the principle was the same: a very simple lever and returnable ballcock system that worked every time. Somehow since then, the Green maniacs have turned the elegant simplicity of ballcocks into duo-flush plunger bollocks.

Do not get the wrong impression: I am (genuinely) a believer that water will, within thirty years, become the most pressured natural resource of all. Failing inclement weather or the lack of suitable ground, I will always urinate in the garden. You save gallons – literally – of water every week. But we all – even James Bond – need to daefecate sooner or later, and this is where the cistern ‘designers’ have screwed things up bigtime. Or rather, unscrewed all the important bits.

On buying our French house fourteen years ago, we installed two of these new conservation lavs. When you do the same, one or more of the following will happen: (1) the woefully inadequate small plunger mechanism atop the inner tower will break (2) the  inner tower itself will shear in any one of a dozen places where cheap plastic has been used (3) an inexplicable Outer Limits effect will turn the long and short flushes the other way round (4) the tower goes down, but refuses to come back up again, and (5) the refill gets out of sync, thus wasting whole reservoirs of water as the loo continues to flush long after one’s business is finished.

We’ve since unwisely purchased another one for our UK dwelling. We are having exactly the same problems with it.

In short, the Greens have a reasonable idea that winds up creating more infill rubbish and water loss than ever existed before they had it. Just like computers and the paperless office, if you follow.

Sometimes progress is progress, and sometimes it is the work of dweebs who should never be allowed out during the hours of daylight. These people write mobile phone manuals and decide the features to include. They compile the ticket tariff systems for rail companies. They design the structure of denationalised industries. They specify and procure weapons systems for our game squaddies. And occasionally, they make it to Number Eleven and design tax relief systems nobody can understand.

My very first usable source as a blogger worked in the Treasury. Now retired, this delightful and amusing former client from my advertising days said on one occasion, “Gordon sends down scribbles of diagrams and flow charts and rationales. We have a team working day and night to decipher them”. Brown and far too many like him equate complexity with intelligence. The near ubiquity of impenetrable things in the contemporary world demonstrates very clearly that they have this one completely arse about face.

A propos of not very much before closing, the Slog’s Treasury mole had me in stitches the week after Northern Rock added a ‘y’ to its name. A trio of Sir Humphreys walked into Alistair Darling’s office, and the exchange went roughly like this:

H’s: Chancellor, we need to talk to you about Northern Rock.

AD: I’ve got a mortgage with them.

H’s: That’s nice Chancellor. Actually, the situation there is rather grave. I’m afraid the bank is basically insolvent. It doesn’t have the funds to meet even a fraction of withdrawals. We fear the news will leak quite soon.

AD: Oh. What do you normally do under these circumstances?

(SFX coughing)

H’s: Well Chancellor, as this hasn’t happened on quite this scale since 1760, I’m afraid there isn’t much of a precedent.

There was more, but it would be too cruel an exercise to repeat it here. However, I sincerely hope that this snippet has cheered you up a little as we segue from the pleasant intoxicated uplands of Sunday towards the stark valley of reality, and plunge into the cold stream of sobriety called Monday.

LIBYA & THE UK: Oh how they laughed when The Slog said Moussa Koussa was a double agent…..

Tony Blair…nothing as it seemed in Libya

The Independent on Sunday’s sensational revelations offer further insight into what Libya is really all about.

Today’s IoS story of close and warm cooperation between Gaddafi’s security thugs and MI6 is yet another episode in the slow unravelling of what the strategic story behind UK/Libyan relations have been over the last twelve years. As well as going some way towards vindicating the Slog’s ‘Moussa Koussa double-agent’ scoop of the Spring, it remains highly likely that everything from the Blair/Brown rivalry to Hackgate impinge on the full story of this extraordinary example of murky espionage.

When The Slog alone ran a story last April 1st fingering Libyan ‘defector’ Moussa Koussa as an MI6 double agent, a well-known former Fleet Street figure emailed me to ask whether I thought many people would get that it was an April Fool stunt. An online magazine publisher rang me with the same line later the same day, and this time I asserted vigorously that the story was bona fide. “I think you make this stuff up,” he said. I’ve not heard from him since.

But the story I offered – that Moussa Koussa was an agent coming ‘in from the cold’ – was well-sourced. Not BBC, three-snouts-without-collusion sourced….but based on the assertion of a former diplomat who had only one agenda that I could fathom. Following this weekend’s revelations from the Independent on Sunday newspaper, my source looks as reliable as ever.

I was buoyed at the time by Huffington Post’s decision to censor all my comment threads relating to the Mouusa Koussa saga there at the time. The reason, I suspect, was simple: the revelation stood every chance of being acutely embarrassing for long-time US ally and banker’s best friend Tony Blair. If so, then this was only a stay of execution: the IoS this morning makes it clear that Teflon Tone was, to say the least of it, capable of a fair amount of double-dealing himself.

‘Britain helped to capture one of the leading opponents of the Gaddafi regime before he was sent back to be tortured in Libya, according to a secret document discovered by The Independent on Sunday in the offices of Moussa Koussa, then Muammar Gaddafi’s spymaster,’ the paper writes this morning, adding, ‘So close had the [UK/Libya security] relationship become that several Western European intelligence agencies were using the services of MI6 to approach the Libyans for help with their own terrorist suspects. The Swedish, Italian and Dutch services sought the help of the UK agency in liaising with Tripoli. A sign of the warmth of the relationship between British intelligence and their Libyan counterparts is shown in the stream of letters from London to Tripoli, headed “Greetings from MI6″ and “Greetings from SIS”.

My source continues to insist that Moussa Koussa had long since convinced Gaddafi of the importance of ‘appearing to be friendly’ with MI6, when in fact he was already working for the British security agency. In the history of espionage coups, this sting may yet go down as one of the all-time Greats.

The anti-Gaddafi agent identified by the IoS as Abdel-Hakim Belhaj was, it is alleged, sent back to Libya to be tortured. It seems likely in fact that he was a pawn in the game by which British intelligence had to convince the Libyans that they were ‘for real’ in helping the Libyan dictator. This is supported by the fact that Belhaj miraculously survived his ordeal….and was then sent back into Libya by the Americans as a sort of Lenin to Gaddafi’s Tsar Nicholas.

Tony Blair, says my source, wanted this rapprochement with Gaddafi purely to get a War on Terror ‘result’ with George W Bush. But I remain unconvinced about this. I think my source’s one agenda was to dump on Blair, for whom he has nothing but disdain. (Blair cut the FCO out of much espionage work during his Premiership, because he quite rightly regarded them as incompetent. This has been largely reversed by Hague and Cameron….with disastrous results.)

Gaddafi’s subsequent renunciation of WoMD was seen as something of a breakthrough at the time, but Blair and MI6 were almost certainly playing a longer game wherein the main goal was geopolitical. I’d be lying if I said I know more than hazily what that game was: but I am certain that neither Blair nor his spooks took Gaddafi’s non-violent stance seriously for a moment. My suspicion is that their main aim was to dilute Russian influence.

Lest we forget, other events that came later are also related to (even part of) this riddle. There is the as yet unclear subject of Gordon Brown’s blackmail of Tony Blair in 2006 in order to grasp the Crown from his ‘partner’. There is the ‘discreet’ sending of al Megrahi back to Tripoli that turned into such a PR disaster for Brown himself once he had gained power – and revealed him (for the umpteenth time) as a liar. There is the closeness of News International employee Andy Hayman to Blair at the time. There is the continuing suggestion of a security element to the Hackgate affair. And there is the very severe ‘hands off’ warning given to the Met Police (by Downing Street and MI6) when Moussa Koussa turned up in London.

I’m also sure (again from sources) that Hague, the FCO and MI6 were caught on the hop by the emergence of a Libyan rebel movement earlier this year. Blair’s ‘realpolitik’ was based on the low likelihood, in his view, of Gaddafi falling from power.

I have little doubt that further developments will follow…until it all gets too near the Blair/Murdoch relationship. We shall see.

Related: Arab Spring turns chilly   Russia the big loser in Libyan revolution

At the End of the Day

Lines on referred and inferred blame

Andy Coulson having resigned last year as David Cameron’s cypher to Essex Man because of something he had nothing to do with at the News of the World, his self-sacrifice has been trumped by the closure of the News of the World for something of which most contemporary newsroom employees are entirely innocent. In politics, the normal procedure is for people not to resign about something of which they are entirely guilty. So perhaps this key difference between the Fourth Estate and the Greasy Pole is worthy of closer examination.

I think the connecting factor here is what we corporates call referred blame. In fact, both walks of life use this method quite freely to avoid the worst fate either of them can imagine, inferred blame. Thus Coulson resigned twice to present a sort of weaving target that would be hard to follow, let alone hit. Whereas the Screws newsroom has been closed in the hope that its occupants might seem guilty of everything – as opposed to their boss Rebekah Brooks, who had several times expressed shocked outrage that she might be guilty of anything.

In a different tactic applied to the same desired end result, David Cameron has taken complete responsibility for hiring Coulson the perjurous crook, but inferred via lots of top columnists that it was really Osborne’s idea to hire him all along. Here, the trick is to refer journalists directly to a long-time friend and fellow-member of the Bullingdon Club, should they by chance have blame in mind. Were I in Jeremy Hunt’s cement overshoes at the moment, I’d be inclined to keep on taking advice and consulting with the proper bodies from now until Hell freezes over or Newscorp goes bust – whichever comes first. With a boss like David Cameron, it doesn’t do to take a judgement decision which can, as it were, be judged by others later.

Ed Miliband, of course, has inferred that the blame for all this phone hacking lies with the Conservative Party. But he has failed so far to refer to Tony Blair having rung Gordon Brown in 2009 to request that Labour MPs should lay off the hacking scandal. And he hasn’t inferred that his comms head, ex-Newscorp staffer Tom Baldwin, had anything to do with telling Labour MPs the same thing. As with Cameron and Hunt, I think Baldwin might also find himself surplus to requirements in the new post-Murdoch politics. Especially as most Labour MPs find him a referred pain in the neck.

But Nick Clegg is the expert sans pareil when it comes to referred blame. Offering little or no public support to Vince Cable when he announced his intention to “get Murdoch”, Cleggover is now employing his own personal system of inferred credit. He never sucked up to Murdoch, he now says – inferring that Rupert ‘Grotesque’ Murdoch might have been even vaguely interested in him doing so. Give it a week or so, and Slick Nick will be pulling off the trickiest stunt of all: referring blame from Vince to himself for having called Murdoch out in the first place. A few months more, and the LibDem leader will be referring at every opportunity to the fact that he’s never met Murdoch – and thus no contagion can be inferred. One of the more convincing bits of evidence in support of this is Clegg’s Head of Communications James Sorene, a man to whom Rupert Murdoch has never referred, and about whom nothing at all – good or bad – has ever been inferred.