Oh the beautiful irony. Tom Watson put his X-Box down for ten minutes to have a go at Labour for playing up Ed as a strong leader like Thatcher. ‘It’s highly likely that a spin doctor, working for Ed, chose to persuade people that he really would “Govern like Thatcher”‘ he blogged. Within an hour or so it was a full reverse ferret:
The adviser who briefed Ed's speech has re-assured me he didn't 'spin' the Thatcher line. Happy to clarify here: http://t.co/XkMaRYEATP
— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) February 11, 2014
“Tom Baldwin, an adviser to Ed Miliband has been in touch to say: “For the record, I didn’t mention thatcher once in all the lobby briefing around the speech. Truth is, I suspect, they got together and constructed line themselves.”
Perhaps he should have checked his facts before he mixed opinion and news? Time for a due-prominence apology, for sure.
This is not the first time Watson has cocked up like this.
Remember when he accused Guido of selling drugs to George Osborne at a rave?
Or when he had to apologise to Nick Robinson for accusing him of being a Murdoch stooge in his book?
Maybe he should add a permanent corrections and clarifications section to his website, as they’re piling up…
It’s what Brian Leveson would want…
The two main front men of the Office of Budget Responsibility haven’t got the measure of the Treasury select committee at all.
Stephen Nickell lounges back in his chair scarcely concealing the waste of his valuable time as he explains the bleeding obvious to the MPs.
Sharp-faced front man Robert Chote smiles his various smiles (clever, indulgent, irritated, sly, patronizing) and chucks economic popcorn around the room.
You can tell they see themselves as the professionals, the experts: the MPs are the amateurs, the slaves of dead economists, the PR-people for their occult insights, predictions, forecasts and judgements.
The MPs were polite – dangerously polite – but unimpressed by the matter and the manner.
Chote and Nickell were presenting the OBR’s “sustainability report”, with a projection of the public finances over the next 50 years.
It seems to add grist to Osborne’s mill that we need to reduce the size of the state or go bust.
Whatever the merits, this is a rotten way of going about it, and the OBR’s report is an exercise in absurdity.
Nickell, for instance, said 50-year population projections change enormously from year to year as birthrates bob up and down – but that the report was based on the assumption that “if what happens today carries on for 50 years, this is what will happen”. (But it won’t, so what’s the point?)
My dear old chum, Simon Hoggart, has died after gallant fight with pancreatic cancer. http://t.co/ue2x3Pcx19 . Lots of people will miss him
— MichaelWhite (@michaelwhite) January 6, 2014
Guido particularly enjoyed one of Hoggart’s last pieces about learning Tony Benn ‘loathed’ him:
“To be loathed by Tony Benn is something any political writer of my age would sell their grannies for. I feel humbled by his hatred. He got almost everything wrong – not least the cuckoo behaviour that helped usher in Margaret Thatcher’s long reign. Or take his trip to the Chinese embassy after Mao’s death, recorded in an earlier volume of his diaries. He says that he was “a great admirer of Mao … he made mistakes, because everybody does”. True enough. I certainly do. But my mistakes do not make me possibly the greatest mass killer in history. Here are the figures: Number of innocent people who died in the Great Leap Forward, through Mao’s policies for the countryside and from mass executions: between 40 and 65 million. Number of deaths caused by me: 0. But Benn greatly admired Mao.”
RIP.
The Belgravia Gallery reports:
“Having been asked by Nelson Mandela’s art publisher to represent his work,drawings mainly of Robben Island, we had the privilege of spending a morning with Mandela when he was signing the lithographs at his home in Johannesburg in December 2002. He delighted us with stories about a number of well known British personalities over the years when he was president. Perhaps the most surprising was his description of Margaret Thatcher as “Motherly” and he remembered how she had poured him tea and they had discussed various ailments and how after he returned home, she had sent him herbal remedies.”
When on Thursday night this blog put up a picture of Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela together the abuse on Twitter from some quarters was more self righteous than Guido can recall ever before. It was also wrong.
The myth that Thatcher (and her admirers) supported apartheid is one of the core beliefs of the Comrade Blimpish left. Charles Moore touched on it in The Telegraph this morning. It is a false charge and Nelson Mandela himself was in no doubt – saying of Margaret Thatcher in July 1990 only a few months after his release: “She is an enemy of apartheid… We have much to thank her for.”
Mandela knew that for years behind the scenes she had been arguing with the South African apartheid regime for his release. Written evidence of her lobbying only came to light decades later when the ANC government released a now declassified secret 1985 letter from Margaret Thatcher to P. W. Botha. Comrade Blimp-types just won’t accept the fact that she did more to encourage the end of apartheid than Paul Weller and Billy Bragg. They’re wrong.
Read the entire letter here
Nelson Mandela on Margaret Thatcher, July 1990…
“She is an enemy of apartheid… We have much to thank her for.”
