Fitaloon at MicroShaft

Joan McAlpine writing on her blog Go Lassie Go has this to say on the Steven Purcell affair.

Tomorrow the wait is over. The council tax payers of Glasgow, who have read strange, coded stories about Steven Purcell’s health all week, might finally get to hear what all the fuss is about. I am not one for cybernat conspiracy, but if ever a story justified it, this is the one. The press coverage of the Purcell affair – apart from in The Scotsman – has been pathetic.  I will look at this in more detail tomorrow in my Sunday Times column – which explains why I believe this story – though clearly a personal tragedy – also has profound public implications.  Our paper also have a great Focus news feature which shines a light on the murky Labour establishment of councillors, lawyers, quangocrats, property speculators, car dealers and nightclub owners who still exercise enormous – but often invisible – power in the West of Scotland.

Could be interesting and illuminating, more at the link below.

Purcell and the Scottish Press – Go Lassie Go.

Fraser Nelson has fisked Brown’s interview in the Economist, and boy is it full of Gordon’s Brownies. A couple of them might whet your appetite. First on Debt

GB: Every country has had a build up of debt as result of the recession, no country has been immune from that requirement to add to its debt and every country is going to suffer a one-off rise in their debt levels that has got to be dealt with over the next few years.

FN: Yes, indeed. But let us look at how much these countries increased their debt by. Woooh, wait a minute, I just fell into one of Brown’s “verbal snares”. We’re not talking about a country getting into debt, we’re talking about governments saddling their people with debt. So, again, let us see how much debt the governments of various countries saddled their people with:

Second let’s have a look at one that gets most of the people all of the time, Brown’s “plan” to reduce the deficit. As Fraser so rightly points out when Brown says deficit people hear Debt, All he is supposedly doing in his unavailable plan is bring us back to spending what we earn, or at least halving the gap in the next 4 years. The debt we have built up in the meantime will still remain and have to be paid for, for years.

GB: I happen to think that our deficit-reduction plan over the first four years of halving the deficit is probably the most ambitious of any of the G7 countries.

FN: Brown has given himself seven years to get the public finances back in balance (he last balanced the government’s books in 2000/01). I know of no country with such a leisurely timetable. Again, observe the power of his spin. When he talks about halving the deficit by 2015/16, this is made out as some great national achievement. The PBR before last said (p190, here) that they would “eliminate the deficit on the current budget by 2015-16”. To downgrade this aim, from abolishing it to halving it, is a deplorable lack of fiscal discipline. But Brown uses rhetoric to suggest the reverse.

I suspect Brown’s aim is to exploit the lack of understanding of “debt” and “deficit” – a notorious blind spot in journalism (the BBC gets the two mixed up all the time). When he says “I’ll halve the deficit in four years” he wants people to hear “I’ll halve the debt in four years”.

Read the whole thing and understand how much this man can stretch the truth.

An interview packed with Brownies | The Spectator.

An interview packed with Brownies | The Spectator.

Direct from Nick Cohen in the Standpoint Magazine.

The personal relates to the political very closely in Gordon Brown’s case because his bullying is not a manifestation of his dynamism and determination but of his childish inability to admit error and acknowledge the need for change. Nowhere are the weaknesses of his character more obvious than in his aides treatment of Alistair Darling during at the start of the economic crisis. Darling had told my Guardian colleague Decca Aitkenhead that we were facing the worst recession in 60 years. If Darling was guilty of anything, it was understatement. But Brown could not tolerate his clear-headed assessment, because it revealed that his supposed economic miracle was an illusion and implied that his failures to regulate the banks and balance the budget would have catastrophic consequences. Out went his attacks dogs to undermine the chancellor at the very moment when he needed the Prime Minister’s support.

I heard Charlie Whelan, Brown’s prolier-than-thou public school boy, denounce the Chancellor outside a Soho pub. It says much for Whelan’s cockiness that he did not go off the record but conducted his black propaganda operation in a public where anyone might have overheard him.

I was free to report what happened and here’s what I wrote at the time

I was waiting with a crowd of guests at the Pillars of Hercules pub in Soho for the start of a party being thrown by Kevin Maguire, the Mirror’s amiable political editor, to celebrate his wife’s launch of a chick-lit novel. Political journalists and rom-com novelists are not the most promising mixture for a convivial evening, but we were all rubbing along until for no reason Charlie Whelan, Brown’s point man in the unions, turned to the journalists and started laying into the Chancellor of the Exchequer. As he was speaking in a public place and did not ask to go off the record, the etiquette of journalism allows me to say that I was astonished. Darling had been a loyal friend of Brown’s, but that did not stop Whelan from denigrating him. More pertinently, it was obvious even then that we were indeed facing the gravest economic crisis of our lifetimes; obvious to everyone, that is, except the Brownites. Because Darling had implied, however obliquely, that Brown’s stewardship of the economy had been less than magnificent, Whelan and his friends were willing to betray an ally, make an unnecessary enemy and undermine the Chancellor at a moment of national danger. The result was predictable. Darling could barely contain his contempt for the deviousness of a man he once considered his friend. (I imagine having to go to work every morning and contemplate the mess Brown left at the Treasury did not help cool his temper either.) Meanwhile, Balls rode on the back of the destabilisation campaign and implied that if Brown wanted rid of the Chancellor he would blushingly step forward to offer his own modest self as a replacement. Yet Darling survived the attacks and gained in stature.

On Sky this morning Darling recalled that briefings like Whelan’s were going on across Westminster and that he felt as if the forces of hell” had been unleashed against him.  Brown replies that “I was never part of anything to do with this. Look, this was the most amazing time… and lots of things were happening in this time. But I would never instruct anybody to do anything other than support my chancellor, and I think Alistair will confirm that.”

In which case will he sever all his links with Whelan? Will he upbraid him for trying to undermine the Treasury during a national crisis?You only need to ask the question to know the answer.

Of course the scheming bully Brown knew nothing of this,  Sorry I will have suspend belief on that.

The Magazine | Standpoint.

Benedict Brogan has the following:

Curiouser and curiouser. You remember that on Monday John Prescott was at his hectoring best, laying in to Andrew Rawnsley on every telly outlet. As I reported, one of his points of attack focused rather bizarrely on Andy Coulson. In strongly-worded terms, he suggested it was a bit rich to accuse Gordon Brown of bullying when David Cameron has on his payroll someone who was ‘convicted’ of bullying and who cost his then employer an £800,000 employment tribunal pay out. Prezza even had a transcript of the judgment to wave about. Part of Labour strategy it seemed was to create some kind of spurious equivalence between the two. (Mr Coulson may not be to everyone’s taste, but he is not a candidate to be Prime Minister.)

And what’s this? The DCMS select committee report on press standards, privacy and libel has just been published tonight. Buried inside the committee “notes”, a propos of nothing, that the News of the World paid £800,000 in November 2009 to sports reporter Matt Driscoll “after persistent bullying by then editor Andy Coulson” (paragraph 450).  Put aside that Mr Coulson was never asked to give evidence to the industrial tribunal or involved in the case, the issue patently has nothing to do with the matter the committee was investigating.

So how did it get there? The paragraph was sprung on the committee by Tom Watson (above) on February 9 – a fortnight ago – when it met to finalise the report. The paragraph was voted through by 4 to 2, with the committee dividing on party lines. Mr Watson, you may remember, happens to be the former Cabinet Office minister who confirmed in a recent Parliamentary answer that there had been up to five reported cases of bullying in Downing Street. He’s also a big ally of Mr Brown’s who does a lot of his media heavy work. And a fortnight ago Number 10 – and presumably Mr Watson – knew that the Andrew Rawnsley book was imminent and likely to focus on Mr Brown’s behaviour.

As readers of this blog will know, I’m not minded to back conspiracy theories. But isn’t it a bit too convenient to believe that the committee’s report was edited by a notorious Brown ally to include a gratuitous reference to Mr Coulson and bullying, just weeks before a story Downing Street knew about came to light? As I say, curious.

Curious this definitely is, unbelievable many would say, standard practice in the Labour Manual of Dirty Tricks as deployed by Alastair Campbell and his “Forces Of Hell” is what I would say.

Update: Guardian has this.  Strangely enough Tom Watson was immediately twittering about it along with @pickledpolitics. Tom Watson says he had no idea of Rawnsley book when he moved the amendment on 9th Feb , was he in a coma at this time?

Benedict Brogan – Telegraph Blogs.

A tweet from Oliver King Channel 4 News Weekend Editor to Charlie Beckett Director of Polis

Gordon Brown and Destroyed Nokias

Bully Brown is out there, waiting to pounce on someone, will it be as Michael Crick said

“…. weakest person in the room, usually the woman”

Bully Brown is unfit for Office.

Time for a Change

Twitter / oliver king: @CharlieBeckett on sunday ….