CAP JUST DIDN'T FITZ AT THE WEDDING
March 1st 2010[/align]
Oh no, not another camera up the jumper film by Dispatches, the tiresome and fevered Channel 4 documentary strand. At the risk of adding to its viewership by giving it publicity, I'm featured - or rather ,smeared - in it tonight. The programme is a pop by Dispatches at Muslims - like the previous tales they have put out about the supposed enemy within plotting to turn Britain into some rainy and windswept Islamic republic.
Stop chuckling. According to Jim Fitzpatrick, a New Labour minister and, coincidentally, my opponent for the seat in Poplar and Limehouse in the forthcoming election, the Islamic Forum of Europe has infiltrated his party and become a secret party within the party.
A sort of Militant Tendency with the Koran and keffiyehs who believe in jihad and sharia law. Fitzpatrick has a substantial bee in his bonnet about this and a track record, to boot. Last year, he had a much-publicised row with the East London mosque when he walked out of a wedding there after he and his wife took objection to being segregated by sex. As if he didn't know that was custom. Now it seems he wants to alienate the few remaining Muslims who might vote for him in a constituency where they are 40 per cent of the electorate.
A speech I gave in the mosque after my last election victory was secretly taped and has been obtained by Dispatches almost five years on. The IFE were, in fact, one of several groups who helped in my successful antiwar campaign and I credited them for their help - as I did to all of the other groups, from Greens, Liberals, Tories to Trotskyists, who helped my defeat of a pro -war MP.
I don't know who is or isn't a member of the IFE, and I have only the haziest knowledge of what they stand for, but the organisation has never approached me for help or attempted to influence me. Again, my lawyers are watching.
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Is it the most expensive dish?
March 1st 2010[/align]
Is it the most expensive dish yet, not to mention the most pointlessly tasteless? A passenger on a Ryanair flight to the East Midlands apparently ate a scratch card on which he had won 10,000 euros after he was told he couldn't claim the money immediately. A true tale, an urban myth or another canny media strike by a man who can match the spin of Max Clifford - Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary?
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An app too late for Vern
1st March 2010[/align]
I may be the least digitally-savvy person on the planet but a new application, or app, for the iPhone will have me signing up. It's called TigerText, apparently not named after the golfer and serial adulterer. But if you believe that... Anyway, the app erases text messages from the sender and recipient's phones after they have been read, thus ensuring the contents can't be stored, forwarded or sold on.
Unfortunately, too late for Ashley Cole or Vernon Kay. Not, of course, that I could be caught out by sex texting. Believe me, it's for security reasons. The Metropolitan Police have confirmed to me that my phone was tapped by a disgraced and jailed private detective, hired by a wellknown red-top newspaper. Max Clifford, who represents most kiss-andtellers, said he was told his phone was tapped too.
Naturally, my lawyers are on the case.
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Why the Tory toffs are being hunted
1st March 2010[/align]
A ball hasn't yet been kicked in the political Old Firm match and already the underdog Gordon Brown is almost even with the Flashmen of Cameron's old Etonians. And like the affair at Ibrox yesterday, it's going to turn nasty.
It's an astonishing turnaround which owes much to the smell of Gosford Park about all the Tory wannabes. Their slogan is "change" but the first three cabs off their rank are: Relief for 3000 of their immediate neighbours - and all too close relations - from inheritance tax on big estates. The legalisation of tearing warm-blooded animals to pieces for the edification of tally-ho toffs - making flesh of Oscar Wilde's description of such barbarism, the unspeakable in hot pursuit of the uneatable. And finally, for the time being, the defence of an unelected House of Lords.
I believe it is helped, too, by the rabid personal attacks launched by guttersnipes in the Murdoch Press who have bitten the biter. This started last autumn with the fake ferocity over Brown's handwritten letters to bereaved families of war dead. The more they vituperated about Brown's dodgy eyesight, the clearer people could see this was just unfair, bullying even.
The equally fake furore over the shrinking Blairite violets working at Number 10, allegedly phoning bullying helplines because a PM in the midst of international crises shouted at them, has ended up boosting the standing of the hitherto rather desiccated calculating machine image of Brown.
In the last few days, it has turned even uglier and the Tories have reverted to type as the prospect of an overall parliamentary majority vanishes like sna' aff a dyke. Doorstep canvassers are cranking up the immigration issue with lies and exaggerations and statements which the BNP wished they had copyrighted.
It has the repugnant taint of the 1964 general election campaign in Smethwick in Birmingham when the Labour shadow foreign minister Patrick Gordon Walker was defeated by a Tory racist called Peter Griffiths whose slogan was, "If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour".
Above all, the British people are not fools. Blunder, crime and capitulation the Blair-Brown story might be. But people know a Tory government of sleazy, olive Martini lounge lizards and brothel creepers would be much, much worse. I say this to Scottish nationalist readers- nothing could be more irrelevant, in this election at least, than the SNP.
Let's wipe the Scottish Tories out.
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How many must die?
8th March 2010[/align]
The Tories complaining about Gordon Brown hiding among the khaki is like a ship's captain complaining about the sea. They've obviously hoped that we've forgotten Action Woman Maggie Thatcher driving a tank to surf the "Falklands Factor" in the Eighties.
Besides, they're all doing it. No Prime Minister's Question Time is complete now without all three main party leaders waving the shrouds of the latest batch of young British troops they have sacrificed in their doomed wars. How many more have to shed their lifeblood in Helmand Province - to which none of them would ever send their own children - before the British people overwhelmingly insist that enough is enough?
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Let he who is without sin...
8th March 2010[/align]
When I first knew Steven Purcell he was a young wannabe on the council, chubby and wed. Since then he's reached high up the political tree, come out as a gay man, divorced and developed a drug and alcohol dependency. And, as the weekend's papers show, he has fallen not just all the way down the tree but into a deep well of despair.
He could have been a contender. Dedicated, clever, articulate, modern - as far from the typical Glesga cooncillor as it's possible to imagine. The blizzard of exposure about his private misery took me aback yesterday and should have done for you too. For there but for the grace of God go us. All of us are sinners and all have weaknesses. Mine are trivial yet real.
I told you I had kicked my cigar habit of nearly 40 years in the making. But I have not. I wake up in a cold sweat in the night about leaving my toddler son fatherless. But I still light up in the morning. I just don't smoke in public places anymore, embarrassed at my failure and at my broken promises. Purcell tried to kill himself, it seems. How shocking thought I, drawing another mouthful of smoke...
Mind you, the stresses of the radio shows are extreme. Forced again to confront the CCTV of little James Bulger being taken away trustingly by his killers, and reading the sanitised version of the crucifixion of this innocent boy the same age as my son, was almost too much to bear. It was compounded, however, by the wave of murderous calls for revenge in kind from hundreds of listeners. Almost 200 paid money to send my show their warped, obscene belief that the two 10-year-old children who murdered James should also have been murdered, by the state putting a rope around their necks and hanging them.
Yes, hanging 10-year-olds in the name of horror at their killing another child. Some, even more obscene, insisted we should have kept them until they were 16 and then hanged them. Others that they should have been boiled in fat, or put in the stocks and had spanners thrown at their heads until they were dead.
Somewhere in the course of the show I began to lose the will to live myself. One listener with the moniker Gerry with the Pacemaker summed it up better than I was able to on the night. Writing about the hordes of hangers he said that they were "medieval barbarians from the filth and squalor of the 17th century, the type who cheered and jeered at the front of baying crowds when a nine-year-old boy named John Dean was dragged through English streets before being hanged for arson at Abbingdon Assizes in 1629". How little we have travelled in the last 400 years. Some people are always on the look-out for a witch to burn. It makes them excited and masks their inadequacies.
It seems that Jon Venables has himself been rattling down over the last few months making multiple confessions about his true identity and plunging into the kind of whirlpool that led Purcell into the depths. In Venables' case, it is clear the mob will not rest until they have found and unmasked him. Then they will surely tear him to pieces. Or a simple-minded fool will do so on their behalf. Lord, what trials you visit upon us.
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Tories' threats are real[/align]
8th March 2010
We have discovered that Jeremy Paxman will cheer you up if you pay him £25,000. The Victorian Paxo, surely born in the wrong century where the mistreating of one's servants is frowned upon, charges said sum for his public speaking.
This on top of the million pounds plus a year you are already giving the pantomime dame through your licence fee of course. For presenting the little-watched Newsnight - a bit like being forced to read the Scotsman, slowly - OK, it's not as bad as that but you know what I mean.
The BBC still refuses to divulge what we pay these people, even though it's our money. And these same "journalists" fulminate about MPs' expenses? Mind you some politicians are just as bad. Take William Hague. He wouldn't get out of bed to make an after-dinner speech for the peanuts Paxo charges. He was, however, out on Newsnight and the World Tonight on Radio Four. There he issued the clearest possible threat, without even coding the menaces, to Kirsty Wark and Robin Lustig, that they better leave this Lord Ashcroft scandal alone now. Or else, he didn't say, but a moron in a hurry could understand.
The arrogant Tories think they will be in power soon and so they might. The message to the BBC was clear. It's no more Mr Nice Guy, from the people who brought you Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit. A bit of advice guys, free of charge. If the Tories get in, whether you leave the villain Lord Ashcroft alone or not, they're coming to get you.
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PORN-AGAIN CANDIDATE
15th March 2010[/align]
The Lib Dems, whose predecessors brought us the Jeremy Thorpe affair - all bunnies and Vaseline - are certainly the avant garde of British politics. Their policies on the sex industry, drug legalisation, pornography and so on are certainly not tailored to a conservative electorate. Perhaps they imagine their potential voters won't hear of such things. As in, never know them.
This will be hard to maintain now the Lib Dems have selected a famous porn film-maker, Anna Arrowsmith, as their candidate in Kent. The woman who brought us the likes of Be My Toyboy, Hoxton Honey and other succulently entitled hum-dingers is running alongside Nick "No More Than 30" Clegg to "clean up parliament".
Their campaign is being paid for by convicted fraudster Michael Brown, who gave them £2.4million before being sent to prison for having stolen that money and much more. The Lib Dems refuse to give the money back.
Anna never actually appeared in any of her racy porn flicks. Though she is fairly easy on the eye, as I'm sure the picture editor will make clear.
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Freedom? I'm Nat buying it
15th March 2010[/align]
'Their complaint is I hate Scots Nationalism, don't want to see this island partitioned and could never encourage folk to vote SNP' I'd be a liar if I said I followed the small print of the SNP's labours like I would if I didn't have other duties, in England and beyond.
When what they are doing is big enough to intrude and it's right, I say so, loud and clear and without fear or favour. Like the release of Libyan patsy Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, framed and his health broken in a Scots prison for something that he never did. Mind you, as usual, that was a view I came to long before most.
Imagine my surprise then to be upbraided by flame-haired Joan McAlpine the other day for failing to notice the Nats 'planning a new approach to short-term prison sentences. In England, 60 per cent of those sent to jail for less than a year are back inside again within 12 months. The cost is up to £10billion a year and the first steps on the road of recidivism. I say prison isn't working, is too expensive and something else should be tried. Community service must be a better bet.
Supervised offenders can be taught a lesson, a visible one, in the very places in which they have offended. It's not a soft option. Work should be hard, hours long, terms strict. Instead of the taxpayer paying out more than it costs to send one's son to Eton to keep each of the thousands of short-term prisoners in jail, we would actually be saving money and getting needed works done.
If Salmond and Co are going to do this here, well done. If New Labour and their chorus are scraping the barrel of right-wing populism to oppose it, shame on them. Though if you have no shame - as they surely don't - then you can do anything at all. But Joan's criticism of me is misplaced, as is that from the Angus Oggs commenting, or rather ranting, on her blog. You see their real complaint is that I hate Scottish Nationalism, don't want to see this small island partitioned and could never encourage folk to vote SNP.
Salmond is head and shoulders abune them a' in Holyrood. There should be a multi-option referendum. Scotland has a right to independence if it votes for it. But if anything should dissuade Scots from the foolishness of separatism, it must be the crash we've been through. If this had happened to an independent Scotland we would be now like Iceland. Without finance, without defence jobs (for which I had to fight London ministers for nearly 20 years to save Yarrows on the Clyde).
The seas are rough out there. Getting out of a liner and into a Para Handy puffer on the storm-tossed seas just for the pleasure of shouting "och aye the noo" as loud as we like doesn't strike me as all that smart. How about you?
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Policy on refugees falls flat
15th March 2010[/align]
Speculation swirls about the role of the Home Office in the family of Russian asylum seekers who jumped 15 stories from the Red Road flats. It is impossible to get asylum from Canada as this family tried because, by definition, Canada is not capable of oppressing its citizens.
But that's not true, any more than it's true of our own country. In this case, however, the father had mental health issues. His claim that the Canadian authorities were beaming radiation at his house gives a clue to his state of mind. So, in this case, my gripe is not with the immigration agencies but with the social services and health service in Glasgow who had a duty of care to this family.
But it's a raw, unforgiving wind which howls around the Red Road flats. Some local people's hearts there have been hardened by poverty. But most of them have not, which is something of a miracle. Because successive governments failed to make refugee dispersal from London a win-win situation for locals and asylum seekers. And the policy has come tumbling down. The best epithet for this failure and this tragedy will be bringing the flats down too.
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THEN there's the meanness of...
15th March 2010[/align]
Then there's the meanness of spirit of nationalism. Its tendency to define itself against "the other", in Scotland's case England, in the case of the equally repugnant British nationalism, Europe. On my last Question Time appearance I said I hope England win the World Cup. Why not? Scotland and Ireland aren't in it. I've lived in England, happily, for 30 years. I follow the English Premiership. My children and grandchildren are born in England...what reason could I have for NOT wanting England to do well? I promise you Iam STILL receiving abuse from super-patriot Scots who consider it treachery. I just don't buy it. I'm outta here.
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SWEET AND SOUR MADNESS
22nd March 2010[/align]
The sharing of birthday cakes is forbidden now and hundreds of schools, and thousands of pupils, have been told that they can no longer bring in home baking to raise muchneed money for charity.
Five councils have interpreted a two-year-old Act banning sweets, chocolates and fizzy drinks from vending machines to encourage healthy eating to include a ban on scones and cakes, millionaire shortbread and anything else which has come into the orbit of the sugar bowl.
South Ayrshire banned "cakes of any sort" and Clackmannanshire Council have told parents to find "alternative ways of celebrating birthdays and special events". Meanwhile, chip and burger vans park outside schools to shovel out fatdrenched carbohydrates to pupils.
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CIA plot to send Fidel on a trip
22nd March 2010[/align]
For centuries Pont-Saint-Esprit, a sleepy village in the south of France, was noted for nothing remarkable. But in 1951 its 4000 people were infected by a communal madness. Some ran through the streets, screaming they were being pursued by demons, at least five people died and dozens were driven insane.
The official explanation was they had been inadvertently poisoned by a baker whose flour was contaminated by ergot, a fungus almost identical to LSD. A book by US journalist Hank Albarelli points to a crazy CIA experiment carried out by renegade agent Sidney Gottlieb. According to Albarelli, Gottlieb dosed the flour with the actual drug. Fanciful? Well, one of the CIA's plans was to drive Fidel Castro mad by infiltrating LSD into his beard.
click HERE for more info about this story.
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Byers needed for failed ministers
22nd March 2010[/align]
When I first knew Stephen Byers, he was a Trotskyist, his fingers stained with ink from copies of The Militant, the paper of his entryist group into Labour. Now his palm is open for any passing bung from companies trying to wrest deals for business from the Government.
He describes himself as like a cab for hire - although, for £5000 a day, you'd have to travel from Land's End to John O'Groats a few times in the back of a black taxi to run up that kind of bill. Two other former ministers for hire, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, are a bit cheaper at £3000 a day. Actually, to be fair to Byers, he may have got his sums wrong - as he famously did when he started his ministerial stint as schools minister. When asked to multiply seven by eight, he came up with 54. Betrayal of any principle, snouts in the trough - isn't it too achingly familiar? These mouthpieces are promising access to government and the ability to warp legislation and degrade politics. No doubt Downing Street will claim these three are relics of the Blair era.
Byers was a failure as a minister and, caught soliciting funds for influence, he makes a hopeless and rotten lobbyist. Who, then, would want to hire him or, indeed, another discredited minister, Scotland's former first one? The Tories, that's who.
Jack McConnell, the emissary to Malawi, part-time Motherwell and Wishaw MP and the first Labour leader to lose a national election to the SNP, has been talking to the Cameronians about some kind of international role in a new Tory Government. He has clearly given up on believing New Labour can win and has given up, like Byers, on everything he once believed in.
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ACTRESSES get jogging...
22nd March 2010[/align]
Actresses hoping to find a part in the new Pirates Of The Caribbean film will have to strip off and jog to detect whether or not their breasts are enhanced. The director Rob Marshall insists they "must have real breasts". Penelope Cruz replaces Keira Knightley, who is so natural that in publicity posters for King Arthur her chest was digitally enhanced. Johnny Depp plays Jack Sparrow. In its natural state, the sparrow seldom grows larger than four inches.
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Flying into the BA flak
22nd March 2010[/align]
Whenever I see BA's Willie Walsh on TV, I instinctively move to cover my child's eyes. That messianic glare, the bulging jaw muscles, the venom from his mouth... It's clear that he doesn't want to settle this dispute on anything other than his terms. Anyone who accuses probably the least militant trade union members in the country, the BA cabin staff, of trying to destroy the company - as he did - isn't on the calm pills.
The right-wing newspapers have been as virulent. And Gordon Brown, with Unite political director Charlie Whelan allegedly sharing his desk, has been only slightly less damning. It's worth recalling that two years ago BA was making £1 billion profit. Its strategy of relying on bankers and executives in business class flying long-haul crashed with the recession.
Walsh then embarked on his vendetta against some of the lowestpaid and hardest working staff, the trolley dollies. Whoever wins this fight, BA will be the losers. The buck stops with Walsh.
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Funny old world for ex-Trot on the make
29th March 2010[/align]
Schadenfreude, the German word meaning pleasure in another's misfortune, is the only way I can describe my feelings at breakfast yesterday. Coming under fire in the newspapers, suitably adorned in a tin helmet, was former armed forces minister Adam Ingram, the latest retiring minister pimping his services and his "network of friends" to a fictitious American PR company.
His clients were in fact undercover TV and newspaper journalists. For £2500 a day the East Kilbride man is ready to fight to the last drop of filthy lucre. His colleague Stephen Byers, like Ingram a former Trotskyite, had earlier been caught in the same ambush. Though his fare for his services as a 'cab on the rank' was £5000 a day, making Adam a kind of mini-cab driver.
Readers with a long memory will know he and I go back a long way. When I first knew him he was a young Orangeman who went out on the parades marching behind the flute bands. And when I revealed this fact in my autobiography I'm Not The Only One he took my publisher Penguin to the High Court in Edinburgh seeking to injunct publication. But it was a charge of the light brigade ending in abject failure with the judge quashing his manoeuvre. The Orangeman metamorphosed into a red, becoming a member of Gerry Healey's extreme left sect which eventually became the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Mind you, few workers were in it unless you count Vanessa Redgrave and the police spies who proliferated within. The former fact may have been helpful, at least in some quarters, in his role as Northern Ireland minister. The latter was probably rarely mentioned as he sat on the rank plying for hire.
An astonishing proportion of the New Labour apostates are previous communists of one of the 57 varieties or other. Dr John Reid was a hardline comrade for many years. I wonder if he has told Dermott Desmond, the plutocrat who owns Celtic? Alistair Darling was a bearded Trot when I first met him pressing Marxist-Leninist tracts into the hands of bewildered striking railwaymen outside Waverley Station in our lovely capital city.
Byers was a Militant. Milburn, a member of the International Marxist Group running a bookshop called Days of Hope - though known locally as Haze of Dope. I could go on but I would drown you in an alphabet soup. Suffice to say that everyone of them at one time in my youth regarded me as a backsliding, milksop reformist which, believe me, was one of the worst charges in the lexicon. Now some are for hire to American businessmen who can afford the fare. As Mrs Thatcher once said, it's a funny old world.
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Just Jack it in, Kiefer
29th March 2010[/align]
In the days before I was banned from Canada I met and was entranced by the actress Shirley Douglas, mother of Kiefer Sutherland. Shirley is a textbook liberal, as is, apparently, her boy Kiefer. So what on earth he's doing as his alter ego Jack Bauer in the series 24? The stories have Bauer routinely saving the world from a cast of villains, always of an ethnic disposition, and usually employing extreme torture.
It's rabid, right-wing nonsense and fortunately it's coming to an end soon. Shirley said she'd introduce me to Kiefer - I just hope this piece doesn't put his back up, as I did to John Malkovich. He said he wanted to kill me. I challenged him to a square go and I'm still waiting. If there's a promoter out there...
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It's a bit like hitting...
29th March 2010[/align]
It's a bit like hitting a barn door with a football, I know, but Gordon Brown has been missing so many open goals for so long it's still encouraging to see some hit home. The vapid five pledge card launched at the weekend by New Labour may not frighten the horses or the markets but won't set a single pulse in the land a'racing. Brown's great good fortune is that people in this country - nowhere more so than in Scotland - fear and hate the Tories. If I'm in the hung parliament, which looks increasingly likely, I'll vote to keep Brown in power - though on condition that he starts acting like the Brown Bomber Joe Louis rather than Primo Carnera, the big palooka with a glass jaw and no heart.
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A £30k Curry's too hot
29th March 2010[/align]
Another Tory David Curry, has been forced to pay back to the Commons almost £30,000 claimed for a honeysuckle and roses cottage in which his former lover was ensconced. He still claimed it on expenses as his second home.
Both Dismore and Curry were once pillars of the Parliamentary Standards watchdog, which - when you think about it - is entirely appropriate.
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Sock it to them
29th March 2010[/align]
The gap continues to narrow in the opinion polls. And PM Gordon Brown, who it seems increasingly looks like Frankenstein's famous monster, has got off the table and broken free. His big clunking fist is at last beginning to land some telling blows on the tailor's dummy that is David Cameron. And even more so on the Jimmy Clitheroe, Gideon (for that is his name, I wonder why he suppresses it?) Osborne.
