…..AND CHEMICAL ALI IS AT THE CENTRE OF IT
Tony Blair spent most of yesterday trying to look humble. Somehow, he managed to say that he had tried to do the right thing over Iraq, that he’d been proved wrong, and that intelligence had let him down….but he would do the same thing next time. As illogically dissembling as ever, what Blair failed to mention is that he and his partner in crime Alistair Campbell are up to their necks in a plot to stick a second yardbrush up the Labour Party’s posteria. Their goal: to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn.
You can never tell with The Canary whether you’re going to read truth or tosh, but it’s never less than lively and professional. They have a post up today – an extremely well-researched piece, actually – that continues the series proving a conclusive link between the PR agency Portland and all the usual Blairite suspects.
I’ve no idea who’s paying the Portland Bill, but it’s pretty obvious that, for the people working on the Régime Change account, it’s a labour of love. The agency – originally set up in 2001 by Tim Allan, a former adviser to Tony Blair – its senior echelons include lots of familiar names: the (executive) advisory council is made up of three members: Alastair Campbell, who needs no introduction beyond, “This is Alastair Campbell and he’s a shit”; Jimmy Leach, Blair’s former head of communications and a former executive editor at the Guardian in its sillier pc era; and Kitty Ussher, former Labour MP for Burnley, parliamentary private secretary to Margaret Hodge…and a writer for Peter Mandelson’s “Policy Network”.
So all those people between 1997 and 2010 who squandered the best opportunity for genuine neloiberal reversal, peace and health investment are there or thereabouts. All the truth-benders, BBC bullies, lie inventors, warmongers, NHS technology wasters, Attorney General throttlers and alleged accessories to ‘suicide’ are today engaged in overturning the biggest leadership landslide in Labour history….as the precursor to overturning the democratic majority who voted for Brexit. Because funnily enough, at the top of Portland sits Sir Stephen Wall, former EU adviser to Tony Blair.
The Canary has lots of smoking guns on offer: Portland has a wrecker mole in Jeremy Corbyn’s Whips Office. He rang shadow cabinet members and ministers, co-ordinating the resignations to try to cause maximum impact. Seemed orchestrated at the time to me: now we know it was, and who did it. Portland partner Kevin McKeever, who uses Twitter to slag off the Corbyn rally with stuff like ‘Went down to Parliament Sq to see the rally for myself. I saw a protest dominated by SWP, SA and others outside Lab’. And all told, 47 Portland employees are officialy Labour-affiliated employees. They coordinated the “Yvette for Labour” leadership campaign, were behind the Mirror’s front page calling for Corbyn to go, and associated with the website set up to campaign for Fabian Angela Eagle to become leader.
Many of us have doubts about Corbyn: he does have some unpleasant hard Left associates: those who always carry placards wanting to smash this and overrule that. I had a tweet runin with two of them last Monday: significantly, I was locked out of Twitter on a trumped up charge of ‘abuse’ the morning after. But Mr Corbyn was elected by a huge majority of Labour supporters sick of metro-Miliband bollocks, Burnham blather and the infantile manners of Ed Balls. This Campbell-driven Portland campaign is just another example of Black Arts skullduggery aimed at neutering the electorate….of creating an alternative narrative based on lies: like David Mellor shagging his lover in a Chelsea shirt; and of course, Weapons of Mass Destruction.
‘Remorseful Tony Blair’ is a contradictory impossibility: he’s still at it, he’ll never change, he has no ethics, and he is a magnet for other morally directionless beings like Campbell and Mandelson.
But all in all, the Labour Party is a series of oil-and-water psychiatric wards now: the remaining staff – still tolerated but no longer in charge – are thin on the ground. The Party is full of people calling themselves Labour who’d much rather be called things like Red Sky or, at the other extreme, Left Tories, Blue Labour and all the rest of it. Their sole commonality is a certainty of rectitude, and a rigid intolerance of any alternative ideology.
The Conservative Party is no better: it remains split over the EU and riven by grudge wars – from Gove’s revenge on Cameron to everyone’s intense dislike for Theresa Maniac. Yet they too seem to want the nastiest candidate to win.
Both Parties have been scheming to create the largest possible Establishment majority for overturning the Referendum result. Neither of them represent anything remotely resembling the mainstream of British sentiment: they are interested only in personal ego-inflation, and basking in the reflected glory of championing tiny minorities within a demcratic majority political system.
Only starving them of money and forcing them to adopt proportional representation will reformulate the archaic Party duopoly. Today, both solutions seem further away than ever.
The Slog 