Sez all ya need t’know!

Nick Robinson (some time President of the Oxford University Conservative Association) on the BBC website:

I have spoken to a wealthy backer of Liam Fox who says he and half a dozen others raised funds to pay for Adam Werritty to act as the Defence Secretary’s unofficial adviser — someone who, unlike civil servants, could be relied on to champion support for Eurosceptic, pro-American and pro-Israeli policies.

Compare and contrast (as they say on exam papers):

One of those donors was Michael Hintze, the founder of the CQS hedge fund and one of Australia‘s richest men, who allowed Mr Werritty to use a desk at his London offices. The tycoon supplied a private jet for Dr Fox and Mr Werritty to fly home from the United States in May.

Like Jell-O on springs

That’s “Jerry” (Jack Lemmon) watching “Sugar” walking the station platform. Or, in full:

Will you look at that! Look how she moves! It’s like Jell-O on springs. Must have some sort of built-in motor or something. I tell you, it’s a whole different sex!

Here, far more mundane and depressing, is a whole different English language, from the Reuters comment on the day’s currency markets:

Technical analysts said the break of $1.5716 had triggered a double-bottom reversal pattern which would target a potential move towards $1.6160.

Childe-Freeman said if sterling closed above $1.5590, the 23.6 percent retracement of the Aug. 19 – Oct. 6 fall from above $1.66 to $1.5270, it would be a strong signal for a more bullish environment.

So, can Malcolm — none the wiser, and resenting having to pack the whole works to go transAtlantic — afford an iPad?

 

Helmer: more hell for Dave?

Two high-level resignations in just a couple of days:

• Lord Hesketh, one-time Tory Treasurer, defects to UKIP.
• Roger Helmer is about to resign from the Euro-parliament.

Both give the same reason: disillusion with Cameroonie policy back in Whitehall.

Malcolm has always held the notion it would be the European issue that broke not just the ConDem coalition, but — once again — also the Tory Party. Come the moment, the wedge-issue could be Labour, coolly and cynically, backing a referendum on matters European. If Merkel gets her way, that opportunity might come sooner rather than later — the dynamic is already building in Ireland (and Martyn Turner exploiting, as right).

Helmer is particularly blunt:

… my decision is dictated in part by my increasing disillusion with the attitudes of the Conservative Party.  I am finding it ever more difficult to defend the policies of the Coalition, not only on my key issues of Europe, and of climate and energy, but on a range of other matters besides.

I will have more to say about this in coming days.

Malcolm very much doubts Helmer will have much of use or ornament to say; and will go largely unreported. The climate-change-deniers, in particular, are the nearest approach to British Israelites and  flat-earthers the Tories have as statutory resident weirdos at the moment.

Even so, Helmer can put himself around. Yet another dissident voice floating around the Round Table circuit and Tory dinners is not what the party hierarchs would prescribe.

Helmer is, in any case, a loose cannon with a run-away tongue, prepared to pontificate on anything from sexual relations via religious faith and the divine right to break speed limits to serious politics.

Above all, as Norman Clegg said of Foggy Dewhurst, on their first meeting, “I confidently expect this one is potty on a full -time basis.”

The relocation of Helmer to Roy Clarke’s version of Holmfirth, rambling and ambling along that marvellously-named Upperthong Lane (better believe it!) , is none too fantastical, either. He’d fit right — well, far right — in.

Addendum:

Looking a trifle closer, there is an extra level here, and it’s one of intra-party factions.

By resigning at the end of the year, Helmer eases into place by co-option an also-ran Tory from the last euro-election, and so books a spot for the next one. This would apparently be one Rupurt Matthews, a fellow spirit on the frothing wing of the Tory Party.

The intention: so that CCHQ can’t fiddle the list come next election.

 

 

Up and down the polls

Only in the dying ashes of an election campaign (and then with excesses of salt) should anyone, ever, obsess over polling figures.

Which is why Anthony Wells’s excellent UK Polling Report is both salutary and verges on the paranoid. All human life is not there, but there is always useful sampling being done.

Wells never fails to emphasise the difference between a single poll and a trend. So when he shows up this one, showing how women have fallen out of love with the Tories, we get the message:

The newspaper columnists — the Mail as much as the Guardian — will suggest why that is happening.

Enough to know that it clearly is.

Everybody implies. Nobody spells it out.

Well, the cruder types do in their comments on the seedier sites (Guido, the Mail …).

For the generality, though, in this enlightened day and age, nobody gives a hoot what consenting adults do behind closed doors.

With certain exceptions.

• You don’t make a song-and-dance out of your knickers (witness Nadine Dorries).
• You don’t claim your porn on parliamentary expenses (witness Jaqui Smith).
• You don’t take money and then double-claim it on your cheat sheet (witness David Laws).
• You don’t aggressively strut your stuff unless you are prepared for the snidery (witness Peter Mandelson).
• And you don’t get into a leg-over position, as well as having a knees-under-desk one in the military-intelligence nexus, unless you are prepared for MI5 to take an interest in your comings and goings (that’s the legacy of Profumo-Keeler-Ivanov).

The last of those is particularly relevant here.

We can reasonably be sure that Liam Fox was checked over long before he was enstooled as Grand Panjandrum at the MoD. Probably early in 2005, when he succeeded, as the shadow minister, Michael Ancram, the 13th Marquess of Lothian and therefore, most definitively, one of us — though, hardly coincidentally, another Bullingdon clubber.

Any doubts or difficulties, then or subsequently, would have passed across the desk of Jonathan Evans, DG of the Security Service, and from him to GOD himself (the almighty Gus O’Donnell).

In the current disposition, such wrinkles might then be vouchsafed to GOD’s representative on earth, David Cameron.

If Mr Werrity didn’t crop up in all that, it would be incompetent rather than remarkable.

Malcolm therefore posits that little of the froth of recent days will come as “news” in Downing Street.

Malcolm further suggests that the next Act has already been scripted.

Political anecdotage (dead MP edition)

There are all kinds of reasons why politics should interest all of us.

This is not the time to rehearse them.

Above all, it is a form of licensed blood-sport: the nearest thing we are allowed the the Roman ampitheatre.

Like sports (and much else) it is full of small, unconnected stories that make the whole pattern.

One such, and a nice one comes today from Gary Gibbon at Channel 4 News. It is titled Liam Fox and the smell of political death. Gibbon first gives the impression that, whatever the instant judgements on today in the Commons, all may still not be well:

A couple of Tory MPs I met this morning seem to think that even if Liam Fox survives today he’ll be hard-pressed to survive the week.

Perhaps. The killer would be if Werrity (who seems to have found a nice trick in touring the world and dropping into five-star hotels) made money on the back of the Fox connection. Werrity, capitalising on a dismal 2:2 degree, seems to have earned a well-buttered crust somehow. If not as a “security consultant” (apparently an operation that has already been “dissolved”) exploiting his Front Bench connection, then how?

That, though, isn’t Gibbon’s nice story. This is:

Liam Fox has some experience smelling political death. Back in the Major years a senior government whip, mindful of the government’s dwindling majority asked Dr Fox to cast his medical eye over the Tory benches and work out who were the “walking by-elections.”

Dr Fox looked for signs of all kinds of ailments, studied MPs’ skin colouring and gait, eventually reporting back with a list of those Tories unlikely to see out the parliament. He once claimed that his prognosis was nearly bang on the money. But he held back one name from the list he’d compiled – the whip who’d commissioned the list, David Lightbown, whose death in 1995 triggered a by-election loss to Labour on a 22 per cent swing.

Scottish folk dancing 2

The conspiracy theorists’ Schottische

Malcolm is currently awaiting the delivery of his pre-ordered copy of The Impossible Dead.

It looks as if the inventive Mr Rankin is managing to spin a whole dinner-service of plates with this one.

At the most obvious level he is reviving a few characters from previous outings.

He is doing a now-and-then split-scene narrative.

He bodes to be trespassing on the territory staked out by Christopher Brookmyre‘s Jack Parlabane novels.

Stories from the olden days

All that is guesswork, based on “informed leaks”, such as the extensive one, penned by the man himself, in yesterday’s Sunday Times (and not in the Culture section, either). It begins with a statement of “old news”:

On the morning of April 6, 1985, two Australian tourists were driving along a desolate stretch of the A87 in northwest Scotland. They saw that a maroon-coloured Volvo had come off the road. There was a man in the driving seat, alive but in bad shape.

They flagged down another car, which happened to contain a doctor as well as a Scottish National party (SNP) councillor. The councillor recognised the man in the Volvo as Willie McRae, a fervent nationalist who had run for the SNP leadership in 1979. An ambulance was summoned and McRae was taken to hospital in Inverness, before being transferred to Aberdeen.

It was here that a nurse washed his head wound and noticed something startling: a bullet hole. At this stage, McRae was still alive, but had suffered massive brain damage. The following day, with his family’s consent, his life support was turned off.

His car, meantime, seems to have been removed from the scene of the crash, only to be resited by police once they knew about the shooting. A search was made, and a handgun eventually found some distance away. The gun, a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver, belonged to McRae. He had taken to carrying it with him. Why? Because he was afraid.

Rankin is keen to place that apparently-unsolved death in the paranoia of the mid-1980s. McRae had been, it seems, not just “respectable” SNP, but also out in the weird-and-wonderful fruitcake fringes of the “Scottish National Liberation Army”:

The SNLA had come into being as a result of the “failed” devolution referendum of 1979. By 1981 it was collecting anthrax samples from the mainland near the west coast island of Gruinard. Gruinard features on few maps. During the second world war, anthrax was seeded there as an experiment, the thinking being that it might prove useful if dropped over Germany. It was certainly useful to the SNLA.

There were arrests, however, and some SNLA members fled to Ireland. But the campaign continued. A letter bomb was sent to John Nott, then defence secretary. The Conservative and Labour HQs north of the border were damaged by fire, as was an Edinburgh army barracks. An attempted arson attack on the Glasgow MP Roy Jenkins was botched. Hoax threats disrupted government and commercial enterprises in Britain and America. The SNLA experimented with ricin but found it wanting.

Rankin notes that the SNLA were still in operation as late as 2002, and gives a hat-tip to David Leslie’s on-line account of the SNLA — and gripping stuff it is. At over 60,000 words, it fulfills Rankin’s description as a “book”.

His other acknowledged source is “a non-fiction book called No Final Solution published in 1994 by the journalist Douglas Skelton”. This would seem to be out-of-print, and currently a single second-hand copy available on Amazon. What Rankin says there is:

According to Skelton, McRae was alleged to have been the SNLA’s “paymaster”, but was also (so friends said) writing a book on the nuclear industry and had found something important.

McRae’s death occurred only a year after that of Hilda Murrell, an anti-nuclear campaigner who had been found in woods near her ransacked home. McRae had told friends his home and office had been broken into and paperwork rifled.

Knowing Rankin’s ability to shift books, this will start a merry dance.

However, Malcolm suspects a bit of disingenuous spinning by Rankin: can he really have been as ignorant of the McRae episode as he says?

Willie McRae was a figure of some standing in academic law, and has a substantial entry on wikipedia.

The story of his mysterious death has been recycled at regular intervals over the years.

Five years ago The Scotsman had contact with the (for such events) statutory ex-policeman who conveniently recalled a mysterious commission:

A FORMER policeman has rekindled a 20-year mystery surrounding the death of Willie McRae, a former vice-chairman of the Scottish National Party, by claiming to have spied on him shortly before his death.

… Iain Fraser, who worked as a private investigator after leaving the police, has revealed he was asked by a mystery client to spy on Mr McRae just three weeks before he died.

Then the Daily Record was at it a couple of years back (presumably around the time Rankin was buckling down to this creation). This item adds significant details, including (if the conspiracy theorists needed it):

No one has ever seen the post mortem report. The procurator fiscal inInverness has refused to comment on the case, citing the Official Secrets Act.

When Madame Ecosse, Winnie Ewing, carried out an investigation for the SNP she was bluntly denied access to the Crown Office papers in spite of giving the customary legal guarantee of confidentiality.

So, to save time and trouble, here’s Malcolm’s short-list of the usual suspects:

• the nuke boys (well, natch);
• who were in bed with the Wicked Witch of the South — shudder! — Margaret Thatcher herself;
• other elements in the nationalist movement: the second car on the scene of McRae’s death just happened to be a SNP councillor; but — more to the point — there are suggestions McCrae was running a rival operation, the “Army For The Provisional Government” which may (or may not) also have been the “Tartan Army” and the “Border Clan”.
• the run-of-the-mill spooks: McCrae seems to have spoken fluent Urdu and Hindi, and — according to one’s taste was either an ardent supporter of Indian independence or an intelligence operative who had penetrated the nationalist movement. If he had done it in India, why not later in Scotland?
• Something with an Irish connection? If the Provos were around (and they liked to have fingers in as many pies as possible) then a couple of Special Branches (London and Dublin), MI5 and G2 of the Irish Defence Forces wouldn’t be too far behind.

Alternatively, Bacofoil do a nice line in headwear.

Anyway, anything by Ian Rankin will be well worth the effort. Expect Malcolm’s considered response eleewhere.

Scottish folk dancing 1

Who he (right)? Ah!, we’ll come to him shortly.

No known relation, but let’s start with —

The Flower o’ East Kilbride

And, despite the confident prediction by (among many others) the politically-late Jerry Hayes at Dale & Co, we start the week with Liam Fox still enstooled. With the might of ever-Sunny Trevor Kavanagh weighing in, that may be only a temporary reprieve.

Why hasn’t Fox gone?

Well, at one level you can take the boy oot o’ the schemes, but ye canny tak’ the scheming oot o’ the boy.

Another reason why he hasn’t gone (and an early exit could well have strengthened his subsequent position) is not because he shouldn’t, but because Cameron is paying out more and more line in the awareness that the ultimate drop will then be terminal. Cameron cannot afford Fox, even in after-life, mustering support on the back benches. This political death must be a full public execution, seen to be judicial and final, rather than a casual casting-off.

Fox will then have no standing with the Tory Right, and can go back to spinning out health providers and suppliers in the newly semi-privatised NHS.

Skull-duggery

Cameron has had considerable luck with potential opponents:

• As with the defenestration of Boris Johnson by Michael Howard (for serial lying: not for the screwing around). Then off-loading BoJo out of parliament and onto the undeserving folk of London.
• As with the in explicable implosion of leadership front-runner David Davis and his subsequent self-aggrandising but pointless political suicide.
• The way the two main parties handled the expenses scandals: Cameron made a lot of enemies thereby, but he was the one who remained inside the tent, and his inner circle — although far from Persil-white — didn’t get sucked down withe moats and duck-houses.
• Even the immolation of David Laws (a strong LibDem contender) made space for the weaker “Ginger Rodent” Alexander, whose only political threat is to himself. For which Clegg must have sighed in relief. And now the only other LibDem heavy hitter, Huhne, is also hors-de-combat.

Cameron now needs to be the consummate Machiavel.

In Scottish analogies, the murder of Riccio comes to mind. They all but the victim and Mary knew it was coming. It involved a lot of backstairs plotting and politicking. But eventually Darnley (that’s the young version, top right) got all his ducks in a row.

Come to think of it — Darnley was a Stewart; and Cameron descends from the Hanoverians, whose claim came through the Winter Queen, daughter of James VI & I Stewart.

Blood runs thicker …

Things that affect Malcolm (#94)

The New York Times slide-show of Rediscovering Paris.

Which reminds him of a lost youth and the inaccessible, impossible Françoise Hardy. Today it is called “cool”:

In a simpler, subtler age, those lifting skirts were as close to eroticism as the system could cope with.

YouTube also has a version, an octave or so lower, by Sylvie Vartan. Not in quite the same league. Compare and contrast.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing.

Melissa Wheeler & co

Melissa is an occasional inhabitant of Doonesbury. Currently (now that BD and Toggle have been invalided out) she is the main focus of Trudeau’s Middle Eastern theatre of horrors and the absurd:

Trudeau hasn’t shirked the seamy side of the US Army. Melissa was a victim of “command rape” — sexual assault by an officer. Her side-kick, Roz, has been the centre of this week’s strip.

To celebrate the ending of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, Roz has been able to come out:

As long as Doonesbury persists, there will be a small voice of liberal reason in most US newspapers.

As long as small but significant steps (like the end of DADT) continue, the Obama administration is not wholly without credit … and hope.