At a time when dwarves cast long shadows, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoonhave launched a letter to members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) asking for signatures to a call for an alternative leader to take the party into the coming General Election.
Pause to reflect.
- Patricia Hewitt was formerly one of the least competent UK Government Ministers, wasting millions of public money, thown unconditionally into a failing car manufacturer on the very eve of the last election, to protect party votes.
- Geoff Hoon is the great survivor who has always managed to slip away from explorations of his complicity in Tony Blair’s illegal war in Iraq.
Moreover we do not know what Hoon said to Dr David Kelly’s widow, Janice, when he visited her promptly after the scientists much disputed ‘suicide’. There were rumours at the time, alleging threats of witholding Dr Kelly’s pension. Whatever that conversation was, there remains the strange consequent silence of Dr Kelly’s family in the face of a significant weight of medical opinion that the method of his ‘suicide’ could not have resulted in his death.
The doctors concerned with this matter have also noted that the amount of co-proxomol in David Kelly’s system was too small to have been a contributing factor and did not correspond to the ‘evidence’ of empty packets of the drug found with his body.
It is hard to believe that any bereaved family would remain detached from a legal move by these doctors for an inquest – which has never been held – into the death of a husband and father. Hoon’s possible role in this matter has yet to be clarified.
These two former Ministers have been successful only in their parasitical tendencies, are disappointed that political preferment has come to an end for them and are about to retire from Parliament at the General election. They have chosen, as they go to copper-fastened pensions, to destabilise their already troubled party on the very threshold of an election campaign and with no electable alternative leaders in sight.
Of course Gordon Brown has brought the country to its fiscal and moral knees. Of course he is now engaging in Walter Mitty economics, promising spending when the voters know the score and would accept – almost desire – austerity to pay back as much as possible of the unprecedented national debt more quickly.
Of course he should have been removed – but not now. Had those involved in the current move – which include the failed Home Office Minister, the thuggish Charles Clarke – summoned the strength of will to do this much sooner, the party might well have come together around a compromise candidate who would have reduced their coming losses.
As it is, the demands of the Home Office brief have exposed the lightweight Alan Johnson. The Milliband children and Andy Burnham continue to look like undergraduates on work placements and have all the uninformed ‘authority’ of that stage in life.
When successive moments to depose Brown arose and were ducked, any sensible party would have hunkered down, summoned a cohesion every bit as impenetrable as it would have been fictional and fought a damage-limitation election with all it had.
This Labour Party has not only taken the country into uncharted territory of failure, it does not even know how to save itself.
The Cameron Conservatives are not plausible. They really are ‘the heir to Blair’ of their leader’s early boast. The country is ready for politicians to tell it the truth and respect its own maturity. Only the Liberal Democrats have come close to this and they deserve credit for percipience as well as integrity. This, though, is unlikely to do them much good in the growing alienation of voters from the political culture in this country.
Should the General Election result in a hung Parliament and should Nick Clegg choose to sustain a party in government which the country would have rejected, the Liberal Democrats will have written their own obituary in so anti-democratic an action..
One thing is certain: whatever and however temporary the alternative, this country needs a change. Nothing could be worse than the current failed and directionless administration. Any change will do. Vote for it.
Game on. And start thiking how else we might order our political system.