Some advice from the best…

The culture of political special advisors was developed under Maggie, and boomed under Labour. Dave promised to cut the numbers of partisan aide-de-camps paid for by the taxpayer. The LibDems went even further and pledged in their manifesto to take SpAd’s off the public payroll and make parties pay for them out their own funds. However despite these “cast iron” promises the coalition have found a loophole – simply make former party staffers Civil Servants. Guido has been looking at this dishonest tactic for a couple of days now and the list of staffers who have been suddenly “neutralised” is absurd:

While Dave and Nick might promise smaller government and a new politics, they are using backdoor methods to get their yes-men into Whitehall and Downing Street.

Meet Tamara Mellon, who flew on the plane to China as one of the PM’s newly appointed Business Ambassadors:

Ms. Mellon will certainly be an asset to the PM on his visit to China, certainly an improvement on Digby Jones…

James Macintyre denies he was fired from the The New Statesman as Guido revealed yesterday. That’s not what the more than one source* from the Staggers said however, despite their “amicable departure“ statement. Though one source did say to go easy as he was a little “fragile”.  James claims he has left to write a book. Presumably fiction…

*Double sourcing, if only Macintyre had.

Clay Shirky writes of The Times paywall…

“One way to think of this transition is that online, The Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community. Instead, it is becoming a newsletter, an outlet supported by, and speaking to, a specific and relatively coherent and compact audience. (In this case, the Times is becoming the online newsletter of the Tories, the UK’s conservative political party, read much less widely than its paper counterpart.)”

The PM’s trip to China reminds Guido that he has a little factoid that he hasn’t seen anywhere else, namely that during Dave’s 1985 gap year he worked for Jardine Matheson, before going up to Oxford. Young Cameron worked for three months in Hong Kong as a ‘ship jumper’ for Jardine Shipping Agencies. Dave was responsible for attending to ships when they called at Hong Kong. His tasks ranged from taking care of all the formalities with the customs and immigration authorities, to looking after travel and personal arrangements for crew members. Did his time in Hong Kong teach him to work hard and invest wisely – or did it encourage him to squander his salary  in the bars of Wan Chai? Guido can confirm that there are many exciting diversions for a young man in Hong Kong…

The political relevance of this is that Jardine Matheson is one of the original Hong Kong trading houses or “Hongs” and Jardine Matheson’s early profits were based on selling opium to the Chinese. When the Chinese emperor tried to ban the trade, the company called on Britain to intervene, leading to the 1839 Opium War. This is not viewed well in China, something to be borne in mind when the former lackey of the oppressors is lecturing them about human rights…