Fitaloon at MicroShaft

As I said earlier, what initially looks good for Gordon Brown tends to come back and bite. It appears that is exactly what is happening from his “performance” at the Chilcot Inquiry.

First we have this in the Telegraph, watch the video first at this link and watch the  Brownie being laid.

And then we have the rebuttals as follows

General Lord Walker, chief of the defence staff from 2003 to 2006, has said that defence chiefs threatened to resign over the cuts they had to make because of the 2004 settlement. Mr Brown insisted that the chiefs had been happy with that budget.

“The spending review of 2004 was welcomed by the chiefs of our defence staff,” he said. “They were satisfied at the end of the review that they had the resources they needed.”

That claim has been challenged by senior military figures, with one former head of the Armed Forces calling it

“disingenuous.”

“To say Gordon Brown has given the military all they asked for is simply not true,” Lord Guthrie, a former chief of the defence staff, writes in The Daily Telegraph.

“He cannot get away with saying I gave them everything they asked for, that is simply disingenuous. A senior military figure involved in the 2004 spending talks said Mr Brown’s claims were

“nonsense.”

The commander said:

“To say it was ‘welcome’ is to use a great deal of poetic licence.“To say the outcome of that process was ‘welcome’ is frankly hyperbole.”

Major General Patrick Cordingley, a commander in the first Gulf War, said:

“The real truth is the Armed Forces are underfunded.”

Asked if he was aware that the chiefs had threatened to resign over the 2004 budget, Mr Brown said:

“I can’t remember all the conversations I had.”

Shall we say that is convenient

Liam Fox, the Conservative shadow defence secretary, accused Mr Brown of a

“pathetic” attempt to avoid his responsibilities and said the Prime Minister’s evidence “does not add up.”

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said Mr Brown’s claim

“flies in the face”

of the evidence.

Next we have this from another article in the Telepgraph:

Gordon was similarly absent from the key meeting on July 23, 2002, presumably busy conducting an investigation into the loss of several boxes of paper-clips from the Treasury typing pool. Most startling of all, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most senior member of the Government, did not even see the legal opinion written by the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, on March 7 2003, querying the legality of the war.

By the end of this catalogue of absence, abstention and ignorance it would not have been surprising to hear Gordon announce that he had learned of the invasion of Iraq from the tea lady at Number 11. There is something far wrong here. Either Gordon is being economical with the actualité, as he is economical with so many other things, or this is the revelation of a totally fissured and dysfunctional government.

How many more times do we have to listen to our Prime Minister lie ? It is time that he was shown up for the liar he is and the disgrace he is bringing upon this nation. Then again all these senior Armed Forces could be lying, In Gordon Brown’s delusional  La-La Land they are.

Iraq inquiry: Army big guns attack Gordon Brown’s defence budget claims – Telegraph.

Probably the best review of Brown’s appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry is in the FT of all places.

It show us exactly how Brown has used this Inquiry as a showpiece to try and get him re-elected for five more years, rather than as a real Inquiry to help us not get involved in a War such as Iraq, and that if we did we were properly prepared and equipped for the War.

The FT has this

Mr Brown, a uniquely powerful chancellor in modern times, pretended that he was a mere beancounter. He defended his department’s funding of the war effort by noting that he did not turn down requests for money from the Ministry of Defence. But to focus on the narrow question of specific funding requests for operations in Iraq is to miss the point.

The defence budget, in the run-up to the war and during it, was not big enough to finance the foreign policy that Mr Blair wanted to follow. So an effective and strong chancellor of the exchequer should have been sounding alarms about Britain’s ability to conduct a war in Iraq in 2003 and its 2005 decision to expand its commitment to Afghanistan. But Mr Brown disappeared.

As my Wife said earlier to some derision from Labour posters on Political Betting

Just catching up with Brown’s Chilcott inquiry appearance. I suspect that like many of Brown’s budget’s in the past, immediate reactions will give way to different perceptions once the details have been properely assimulated and checked.

Brown’s biggest problem on the funding of the Iraq war will continue to go back to the spending decisions he took back around 2003.

We may have been fighting a war on Foriegn soil, but his mind was firmly on gathering a war chest for a domestic political battle within his government and in the country in 2005.

He might try and spin that he wasn’t aware of real problems for another three years, conveniently post GE, and at the time he was planning to finally oust Tony Blair.

Also, by 2006, we were fighting a second war in Afghanistan and that was by now beginning to dominant the news, as was military shortages on the front line.

It is astonishing that Brown always seems to have, at first,  “performed” well, but then on subsequent examination he is found to be utterly wrong, to have lied, or just to have papered thinly over the the issue.

You would have thought that by now intelligent people, like the members of the MSM and the Chilcot Inquiry would have cottoned on and looked behind the bluster and blah-blah that is Gordon Brown.

Tom Bradby has an interesting article highlighting how Brown has been doing this for years.

FT.com / Comment / Editorial – Macavity Brown.

Why has the big stooshie blown up in Northern Ireland in the past few weeks over the devolution of policing and justice?

There may be a clue in two stories that have been going on in Northern Ireland, one fairly well reported and one being touched on only by a few.

In the DUP case we have the case of the Robinsons, probably something you’ve read about in most of our papers as it has some of the major requirements to being a “good story” for the media. Now we see that despite standing back for supposedly six weeks while all the hoo-haa was sorted out Peter Robinson is back in the limelight as Sam Smyth says in the Irish Independent

TWO weeks ago, Peter Robinson looked like a beaten docket, taking quality time out to care for his ailing, cheating wife while he considered his position as first minister for Northern Ireland.

Yesterday, he was strutting around Stormont as born-again king, awaiting the Taoiseach and British prime minister, who had dropped everything to meet him.

His ace card was a demand that the Parades Commission be abolished as a pay-off for agreeing to the devolution of policing and justice.

Robinson has greedily seized back all the authority of his office as first minister.

In Sinn Fein’s case we have the lesser known but potentiallymore damaging story  of  the Cover-Up of the fact that Gerry Adam’s brother is a Paedophile and that other family members including Gerry’s father were also accused and the abuse that he carried out within his own family.

This story has not quite got to the National presses throughout the UK but has caused considerable embarrassment to Sinn Fein in Ireland.

The Tribune in Ireland has exposed much of the sordid story, but much has still to be revealed and none of it reflects particularly well on Gerry Adam’s or Sinn Fein. A little idea of what has been going on can be seen from this extract.

It all began on the Friday before Christmas, when those not out at office parties watched Áine Tyrell on UTV’s Insight programme detail how her father, Liam Adams, had allegedly raped her from the age of four. It was a horrific story, but nobody could have guessed the huge political cover-up that lay behind it.

Gerry Adams appeared on the programme saying he had believed Áine from the moment in 1987 that she told him what his brother had done. He had always supported her, he said. Tyrell’s interpretation differed. She insisted he had failed her.

But it wasn’t Tyrell’s words that meant this story was far from over. It was what Gerry Adams did and didn’t tell reporter Chris Moore that would lead to claims of a huge cover-up by the Sinn Féin president.

Adams told Moore that, after hearing Tyrell’s allegations, he’d been estranged from his brother for 15 years. Two days later, the Sunday Tribune proved that was far from true. We published photographs of the Sinn Féin president at Liam’s wedding to his second wife almost 10 years after he had been told Liam was a paedophile.

To attend a family funeral, where Liam might also have been present, would have been understandable. But to attend Liam’s wedding – to stand smiling and relaxed with him at the reception wearing a green Saoirse ribbon for IRA prisoners – was another matter. Gerry Adams obviously had a very odd understanding of the word ‘estrangement’.

But that wasn’t all we revealed. Gerry Adams never told UTV’s Chris Moore – on tape or in any pre-recording conversations – that his brother Liam had been in Sinn Féin. His account to Moore was neither honest nor transparent.

Two days later, the Sunday Tribune revealed that Liam Adams had been a high-profile Sinn Féin member in Dundalk in the 1990s. So senior was Liam Adams in Sinn Féin that he had sought the nomination to be the party’s Co Louth candidate in the 1997 Dáil election, but had failed. The nomination was secured by local veteran republican Owenie Hanratty at a selection convention in the Imperial Hotel in October 1996.

And we exposed something else. UTV had reported that Liam Adams had worked for youth projects in Belfast. The Sunday Tribune revealed he’d also worked for a youth project in the Muirhevnamor estate in Dundalk.

So we have two big scandals involving high profile members of the opposing parties, both of which reflect poorly on them as we progress towards power-sharing in Northern Ireland and the General Election.

What could be better than an even bigger story to eclipse these two.

So now we have a story that has attracted big Media coverage in both the UK and Ireland. We have Prime Ministers who have used it as an excuse to avoid facing up to bad news and as Smyth reports

We have been here before, of course. The world holds its breath while the political leaders in the North are cajoled and coaxed by the two governments.

Through the years, a US president or secretary of state would lard the political leaders with flattery and money. Now and then, comforting noises and a financial contribution would emanate from the EU.

Yesterday, the panic button was pressed again when Brian Cowen and Gordon Brown flew from London to Belfast — same old routine with a new cast.

Ian Paisley, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern are history and Gerry Adams was standing behind McGuinness, who stood centre-stage with Robinson, Cowen and Brown.

Last night, there was hope that the new players could defuse the first crisis of 2010 but old hatreds and distrust die hard in the North.

The governments in Dublin and London look back nostalgically to the Chuckle Brothers who morphed into the Brothers Grimm when Robinson replaced Paisley beside McGuinness.

Perhaps I’m being cynical but it seems to me that it’s very convenient that these issues should now have blown up.

Perhaps the only one really celebrating has been Gordon Brown, he has been able to use this whole sorry story to perform his Macavity the Cat act to allow him to dodge the rather awkward GDP figures.

Sam Smyth: Same old story in North but with a different cast – Analysis, Opinion – Independent.ie.

So No Deal for Gordon Brown in Northern Ireland just yet.

The main problem here is that both Sinn Fein and the DUP just like having arguments to see who can pick up the best bribe. Gordon Brown would have been better off staying at home and facing the music on the Economy.

Still the man of “Courage” has managed to evade comment for 36 hours on the GDP figures which will have been his main aim for bunkering himself away in Northern Ireland.

He will now be trying to pretend that all his time is taken up by tomorrow’s “Save the World” conference on Yemen and Afghanistan and hoping that come Friday, Tony Blair, will be the one in the news as he appears at the Chilcott Inquiry.

Isn’t it nice to have a Prime Minister who faces up to reality rather than running away at the drop of a Stat.

BBC News – Gordon Brown to leave Northern Ireland without a deal.

Mike Molloy

Mike Molloy editor of the Daily Mirror has this to say in the Daily Mail

My father cherished his job as a civil servant in the Stationery Office, although he always claimed that government wasted money.

He was a patriotic man, who believed families bound the country together.

As a life-long Labour Party supporter, he was immensely proud when I became editor of the Left-leaning Daily Mirror, a job I held for ten years at a time when the paper was selling four million copies a day.

I was brought up to believe the Labour Party was the best hope for ordinary people to make a better life.

The men I was taught to revere – Clem Attlee, Stafford Cripps, Ernie Bevin and Herbert Morrison – were people of the finest moral values who put their crusade for a fairer society before personal advancement.

For them to have clung to office in the face of error or transgression and allowed people below them to take the blame for the conduct of their departments would have been unthinkable.

Today, the hierarchy of New Labour has no such scruples; they shift and slide like desert sands depending on how the wind blows.

So I can only hope that my ancestors would understand when I vote Conservative at the next election. It was the hardest decision I have ever made.

More in the Daily Mail article

Not only is the former Mirror editor now going to vote Tory but here are a few more items that mean that Labour are screwed for the GE

• The economy is where it was back in 2005 but with Debt doubled and inflation on the march.
• The recession has only ‘ended’ in London. Everywhere else it is stuck-fast with Scotland probably still in recession
• Darling has admitted that there was a lot of capital funding brought forward to Q4 to try and haul us out of recession. Public Sector growth was up 0.2% in Q4 using Quantitative Easing (QE) money so the rest of the economy must have still shrunk.
• Many of the stimulus packages are now coming to an end and there is little money to add to or extend them.
• Th printing presses are now worn out so we have no more QE money left to throw away.
• The world’s largest buyer of bonds characterised UK as a ‘must avoid’.  Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest mutual fund warned the British economy was lying on ‘a bed of nitroglycerine’.
• The bad weather in January will have slowed  economic output so much that we are likely to have negative growth in Q1 2010, not quite a recession but as near as dammit.
• Gordon is back in his Bunker behaving like Macavity. This is a sure sign that things are bad.

MIKE MOLLOY: It would break my dad’s heart but I’m voting Tory | Mail Online.