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I read Piers Morgan’s diaries feeling like one of the great excluded: Faces pressed against the glass of the wondrous celeb world our leaders now inhabit. While he was editor of the Mirror Piers had 22 lunches 6 dinners 6 interviews 24 one-on-one meetings and innumerable phone calls with Tony Blair.
That shows how seriously Tony takes the business of news management. It must make your average Cabinet Minister green with envy (red is banned in New Labour so it can`t be with fury). How many Cabinet Ministers have had that much quality time with Tony? As for we footsoldiers, one-on-one time over the same period may be ten minutes per person. If we`re lucky.
The only people who’ve had more must be Campbell and Mandy with the job of telling him what to say to the ungrateful Morgan.
Elections are usually archeological vandalism. The parties pick up bits of the past, like the winter of discontent, or Thatcher’s effect on unemployment, and throw them at each other.
This time it`s Burke and Hare. The Tories are so busy robbing graves of moldering bodies of issues long dead, like gypsies, immigration, and now abortion. All dug up and pressed into service as the cost of a manifesto designed to terrify people.
Digging up the abortion issue is particularly messy. The numbers of abortions carried out after twenty weeks are miniscule. They`re mostly desperate cases. The existing settlement is working well. Yet to demand a cut in the permitted period now opens up the whole issue and brings into play all the forces opposed to abortion. They really don`t want not to tinker with the number of weeks. Just to stop it altogether. This is going to be like the Sealed Knot Society re-fighting the battles of the Sixties. It`s going to be messy. Indeed I imagine.......Indeed I imagine ……… will be bringing dead …….. to election meetings and asking what we`re going to do about it.
Step forward Cormack Murphy O`Connor and, more worryingly, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He really has no political sense at all. As moral issues come up like this and homosexual priests he shows no flair for leadership but a frightening propensity to let a hundred twerps blossom and then stir the pot himself. He should shut up. You can`t unabort abortions and it`s messy to unscramble eggs.
The stately bottom part of Whitehall, called Parliament St., is the location for an angry turf war between the Palace of Westminster on the one hand and Westminster Council on the other.
On the bottom left as you look to the Commons is a jumble of old buildings. They`ve been knocked together and a common structure of offices has been built behind the facades making the poshest Parliamentary offices around. The collection is called after the bottom building, Number One Parliament St. On the other side of the road is the Treasury building now leased off to Bovis Lend Lease who are refurbishing it to lease it back to the government at some inordinate level of profit for themselves. Westminster Council has now decided that that should be Number One Parliament St. After all, must give due status to Bovis and it clearly deserves better than the Treasury.
The result is a flock of people wandering to and fro across the road trying to pay their tax, VAT and Excise duties at the wrong building. MPs would be eager to accept the dosh but for some reason we arent allowed to. So now as I go into my office there are increasingly hysterical signs telling taxpayers to take their money across the road. Probably to give it directly to Bovis.
Soon after I was first elected the Callaghan government fell. Government came to an agreement with the opposition on what remaining bills cold be passed and what junked, and what struck me then was the camaraderie and high moral of a Parliamentary Labour Party battle hardened by the huge job of carrying on the work of a government with no majority and how orderly the whole process was.
Today`s preparations for an election no one yet admits will happen on 5 May are a total contrast. We`ve had months to plan for it but the imminence of the election is causing a panic. With our huge majority there’s a sauve qui peut spirit as people stop coming, lock themselves in their offices preparing pamphlets, or cling on because they can`t face life outside the Westminster hot house.
As for the preparations which Big Jim handled with dignity and efficiency, there`s total chaos. “I`ve never seen anything as chaotic as this in all my time here” one doorkeeper told me. No indications yet of what bills will be junked throwing away all the work we’ve done on, say, Gambling or ID Cards and how much time can be given to those that remain. Particularly since next week we go away for Easter leaving me wondering just how many are going to bother to come back. |
