“It was like looking at Bambi. So I shot him.”

Tom Watson has given an account of that outburst for (the excellent) Labour Uncut:

It was like he was enjoying the humiliation. He wasn’t supposed to be … He gave the impression that he’d gone through the plans for every school in scholarly detail. And having grasped the detail, he was halving the number of building schools for the future projects – more than 700 schools … The following day, dischord erupted. Michael had got his facts wrong. The department was very sorry but the some of the schools would not be receiving the investment. How many? Well, ahem, er, all of them.

You can read the full thing here.

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“He can embarrass himself; he can disgrace his party; but what is intolerable is that he has cynically raised the hopes of hundreds and thousands of families. You’re a miserable pipsqueak of a man, Gove!”

There was some build-up context to this covered elsewhere …

Suffice it to say you should always return Mr. Watson’s calls.

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Plus he looks like Pob.

Hat-tip: Guido

*Who says Scrapbook isn’t high brow? ;-)

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Is Gove ripe for a “Reagan in reverse”?

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Ladies and gentlemen, Donal Blaney has left the building! The credentials of the UK’s #11 Conservative blogger as a freedom-to-offend commentator in the Rush Limbaugh mould were left in tatters yesterday after he pulled his blog at the behest of CCHQ. Visitors craving for the stylings of this p*** poor Richard Littlejohn are now greeted with the following:

So, why will those looking for bile about gays, muslims and immigrants now need to look elsewhere? The Young Briton’s Foundation (chief executive D. Blaney) has provided ideological and campaign training to 2,500 Conservative Party activists, including 11 Westminster candidates. Today’s Grauniad has done a number on the YBF, exposing the group – which aims to indoctrinate young Tories with a virulently right-wing agenda – as electoral kryptonite. Policies espoused by the YBF leadership include scrapping the NHS, the use of  waterboarding by security services and a US-style liberal firearms regime. Anyone familiar with Blaney’s writing will be unsurprised to discover that many of the most damaging elements of the article were sourced from his blog.

This could be dismissed as a non-story were it not for the fact that “there is an informal understanding that the YBF is the main provider of training for young Conservative activists”. To compound the embarrassment, the latest gathering of the YBF was addressed this week by none other than Eric Pickles and Liam Fox, who number among six Tory frontbenchers to have spoken at group conferences since 2003. Blaney’s personal blog, resplendent in it’s ’Nasty Party’ worldview, also features endoresments from Daniel Hannan, Michael Gove and Douglas Carswell.

Sunder Katwala has done a brilliant job of setting YBF in the context of a ”long tradition of ‘so right-wing you probably think we’re joking’ wing-nuttery” in Conservative youth circles:

“Contrast Norman Tebbit closing down the Federation of Conservative Students for being too right-wing in 1982 with the extent to which the ProgCons engage and champion this Maggie’s Militants rump today … I doubt anybody could believe they are so ill-informed or lazy enough not to know about YBF’s right-wing “radicalisation” mission – which was causing CCHQ disquiet when IDS was leader – and exactly where they are coming from”.

The removal of his blog is some climbdown for Blaney, who has revelled in his image as a champion of (right wing) free speech and a bête noire to the left. Those wishing to crow express their feelings on the matter through the medium of song may find the following appropriate (video below so you can sing along):

Brave Sir Donal ran away.
Bravely ran away away.
When danger reared it’s ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Donal turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Donal!

“He’s buggered off!”

“So he has, he’s scarpered!”

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[FULL TEXT OF TIMES ARTICLE BELOW]

What does Michael Gove (the 2010 Tory front bencher) really think about Lord Ashcroft?  To find out, why don’t we ask Michael Gove (the 2000 Times leader writer)! This is precisely what Kirsty Wark did last night as she ambushed the shadow schools secretary with his column of 4 April 2000:

Gove’s dismissal of a heartfelt polemic as the work of a raconteur playing to the gallery simply does not pass muster. As the then Tory treasurer (and commoner) Michael Ashcroft waited on tenterhooks for news of his ennoblement, Gove claimed unmistakably that the billionaire was a liability to the Conservative Party and rails against the foolhardiness of his elevation.

He (hilariously) compares Ashcroft to Jim Davidson, mocks his ambition to be raised to “Lord Ashcroft of Belize” while making the grave charge that the Conservatives’ “unhealthy reliance on Ashcroft puts its entire electoral strategy at risk”.

The full column is reproduced below but here are some choice quotes:

• “Surely a party determined to make patriotism and tax its salient issues would not have as its paymaster a man, like Michael Ashcroft , who was Ambassador for one foreign country and and a tax exile in another?”
• “Mr Hague certainly has a well-developed sense of humour …You certainly do not emerge strengthened as an opponent of cronyism by expending what credibility you have acting as the paid lobbyist for your own title-hungry Treasurer”.
• Ashcroft “enjoys no check on his arrogance … Why wasn’t the Conservative Party capable of seeing how much trouble reliance on this one man would cause?”
• On claims that objections to Ashcroft’s peerage were xenophobic: “You won’t make me a lord? Is it cos I is Caribbean?”

Enjoy!

Mr Hague and three nation Toryism

By Michael Gove, Tuesday 4 April 2000

The party’s unhealthy reliance on Ashcroft puts its entire electoral strategy at risk

Move over, Jim Davidson. Now there’s an even more high-profile comedian backing the Tories. Let’s give a big welcome to king of the one-liners, self-made millionaire and self-styled “wag”, Lord “I was just taking the Michael ” Ashcroft . The Conservative Party treasurer exposed a new, lighter, side to his character when he revealed at the weekend that he would seal his elevation to the peerage by taking the title of Lord Ashcroft of Belize.

And why not? We’ve had Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, why shouldn’t the man who collects Victoria Crosses ensure that the latest gong he’s acquired also has a military ring to it? Let’s run this one up the flag of convenience and see who salutes.

But before we had time to get on to the College of Heralds to see what the Caribbean peer’s new coat of arms might look like (tax exile rampant holding his party by the coconuts?) we were told by William Hague that it was all “a little joke”. Laugh? I never thought I’d start. Was the Tory party leader really asking us to believe that this was all a magnificent spoof, a surreal send-up of the interviewing process by the Tories’ own Ali G? Was Mickey A trying to suggest that there was something subtly racist about the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee insisting that a peer of the realm actually live in the nation whose laws he will frame? “You won’t make me a lord? Is it cos I is Caribbean?”

Mr Hague certainly has a well-developed sense of humour. He used it to coruscating effect against the Government in his reply to the Budget two weeks ago. So he must be able to see that Mr Ashcroft ‘s comments are not the stuff of good-natured self-deprecation. They convey the authentic whiff of a man who brooks no opposition to his will, and enjoys no check on his arrogance, and they serve to make an already tawdry episode quite ridiculous.

For the voters of Middle England, to whom Mr Hague sought to appeal over the weekend, the abiding memory of the last Tory Government is of an administration embroiled in sleaze, isolated from common-sense morality, at ease with foreign arms dealers and up for hire to corporate interests. The moral dissolution of that Government was lent a tragi-comic edge by the fumbled excuses it offered; the cocksure throwaway line of Neil Hamilton’s about placing a biscuit in the Register of Members’ Interests, the suggestion by David Willetts that he was using the word “want” in its “18th-century sense” when accused of misrepresenting his dealings with a member of the Commons Privileges Committee.

The impression created was of a Government without governing purpose, anxious only to keep favoured snouts in close proximity to private troughs, and so contemptuous of the public as to feed it any old swill when exposed to criticism.

One might have thought that any Conservative who emerged from the wreckage of the 1997 crash would pledge, above all, never to make those mistakes again. Surely they would steer clear of association with figures, such as Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, whose talent for fiction rendered all connected with him, literally, incredible.  Surely they would jib at relying on such a man once they were told he was the paymaster of a left-wing party in the country whose interests he represented at the United Nations? Surely they would worry that he had used his influence to change the tax regime in that country in a manner which served his own interests but which, according to a Foreign Office memo, would make that country less capable of withstanding criminality?

But no, the Tories, fatally, foolishly, put all their eggs in the Belize basket. They secured the short-term comfort of Mr Ashcroft ‘s tax-sheltered millions, but have paid the price in credibility forgone. How can they now effectively serve the purpose an Opposition should, as the independent, patriotic, scourge of an influence-peddling administration? To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, once you start taking the danegeld, you never get rid of the stain.

You certainly do not emerge strengthened as an opponent of cronyism by expending what credibility you have acting as the paid lobbyist for your own title-hungry Treasurer. What was Mr Hague doing calling the Prime Minister at the Lisbon summit to intercede for Mr Ashcroft ‘s peerage? How credible is your attack on “three jets” Blair when you’re string-pulling for “three countries” Ashcroft ? And how credible is your claim to speak for Middle Britain when your party thinks it’s amusing to joke about its reliance on Belize? Never mind Neil Hamilton, when it comes to making light of Parliament’s dignity, Michael Ashcroft takes the biscuit.

There is often something disingenuous about those who claim to protest more in sorrow than in anger. But genuine anger and deep sorrow are the only appropriate emotions many mainstream Tories will feel when they see their party’s spring conference overshadowed by this avoidable debacle. What is the point in this man’s money when it comes, like his peerage, with so many ignominious strings? It inhibits any effective campaign against Labour’s corporatist relationship with big business, it revives the ghosts of 1997 and it blunts any assault on Tony Blair’s manipulation of patronage. Why wasn’t the Conservative Party capable of seeing how much trouble reliance on this one man would cause? Now, it’s his party. And I’ll cry if I want to.

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With thanks to the Urban Gorilla.

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*”Pob who?” Those younger than mid-20s (or in the market for nostalgia) may wish to check out this video.

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0/3 – see me after class.

Hat-tip: Liberal Conspiracy

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