I know it makes me seem a bit geeky but here’s the first time I came across Peter Hain. From my school diary age 9 twitpic.com/9l2umb—
Jim Murphy (@jimmurphymp) May 14, 2012

Terrible day. The horse was innocent.

Guido hasn’t read Hain’s “Outside In“ memoir yet, though his interview in the Observer suggests that it should, to a extent generous even by the standards of political memoirs, be filed under fiction. On having to resign after being exposed for over-spending an undeclared £100,000 under-the-counter on his Labour Party deputy leadership campaign he pleads

“It was about an honest mistake and a disorganised end to the campaign and when I found out about it I told everyone. It’s quite possible that nobody would ever have found out if I hadn’t done that. And a lot of thanks I got for it.”

Not true, Hain only went to the police about it after details were published on this blog and on the front page of the Guardian. Decca Aitkenhead says in the interview that for Hain “the subject is still terribly raw”. No doubt it is, that is still no excuse for falsifying the facts.

With a disaster on his doorstep in the Swansea Valley Peter Hain, the Shadow Welsh Secretary, has been hogging the airwaves all morning. Though he is the local MP, he seems to be trying to make  capital out of the Welsh mining tragedy. Guido understands that Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan is on her way to the site from London, feeding lines to the media on the way. She’s on a train. Presumably not a fast one though…

UPDATE: Hain’s office insist he was only part of the press conference at the specific request of the police.

Guido is always happy to hear news of an old friend, so imagine his delight when this press release arrived earlier:

“BITEBACK is delighted to announce it will be publishing the autobiography of former Cabinet Minister Peter Hain in January 2012. Hain held an array of glittering posts in the British political firmament under both Blair and Brown.”

Guido can’t wait to finally read the truth about keeping it in the family – with the details of what Hain’s pensioner mother was doing to earn her taxpayer funded salary as one of his staff. The truth behind that bank robbery in 1974 that Hain was charged with, but got off after blaming “a body double.” One of the most interesting chapters will surely be how he didn’t notice that “someone else” was spending an extra hundred grand during his deputy-leadership bid and how he couldn’t add it all up. The fun he had digging up cricket pitches as a Liberal Party student activist. And finally we may learn the truth of exactly how he was exposed to that perma-tan blast of radiation.

Peter Hain had a shocker on Question Time, being jeered and booed by the audience for his take on Britain selling arms to Libya:

If we found, as we did in some instances that they were not being used for the license they had been granted for… If that’s the case, then it was wrong to sell them and we wouldn’t do it again…

Which would of course be too late…

Hain’s ministerial record on arms dealing is far from squeaky clean:

Peter Hain, the Foreign Office minister with responsibility for Africa, yesterday told The Independent on Sunday that the Government would investigate the deal if any substantiated allegations were made… “nobody could object to Britain selling arms to South Africa”.

On the BBC’s Today programme ….

…the Foreign Office minister Peter Hain gave his personal assurance that new Labour had never sold arms to any government that used them for internal repression. At last month’s Farnborough arms fair, weapons and all manner of war equipment were on offer to Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey…

The Campaign Against the Arms Trade said: “The public were outraged and shocked in the role the UK had in being a major supplier of arms to countries like Indonesia. The fact that the government finally brought in an embargo given the atrocities in East Timor just recently shows that the public has become very concerned about where we are selling arms too.” However, Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain insisted the government had acted ethically and openly in its arms sales policy.

His conversion to the cause of peace seems to coincide with him being out of office…

Peter Hain says of Ed Balls immigration plans…

“It’s a basic article of faith of the European Union, the free movement of labour and free trade… It’s in the Treaty of Rome.  So the chances of changing that are about the same as the chances of going on holiday to Mars.”

The Sunday Times has uncovered that Peter Hain, despite being made Welsh secretary in Gordon’s last barrel scraping re-shuffle, is still a partner in a firm that specialises in political communications. HaywoodHain, a consultancy set up with his second-wife claimed to have a “detailed understanding of the political landscape in the UK” on its website and used Hain’s London home as the office address. No conflict of interest there…