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March 21, 2006

A noble mess and an ignoble introduction

To people that hate democracy, what is deemed news and what is not is an issue scorched by scorn and cauterized by chagrin. "Gadzooks!" they hark, "those devils in the MSM spend too long selling papers to the populace, meekly succumbing to manipulating the morasses of the minds of the majority in the pursuit of profit, when they should be fighting against such foolish ways, foregoing front-page flatulence in favour of a high-minded crusade, marching under the flags of honesty and moral fortitude." They are, it seems, unnecessarily grandiloquent harkers.

Unfortunately for these verbose villains, there is much to boil their boisterous blood. Similarly infelicitous is the fact that each issue is but a tomb of tragi-comic triviality.

Some examples, if I may. The Power report: an ephemeral explosion of media interest that centred on the prime-minister-in-waiting's support for Votes at 16, and ignored the other 75,000 words. Or, the 'Loans for Peerages' malarkey: a concentration on something that's been the same for longer than Ming Campbell's been alive, and nary a word about the especially dastardly bits.

I could continue, but I won't, primarily because it would be duller than the shipping forecast, but also because the Loans issue provides a link to what this ramble is actually about.

Loans, as even someone who works in the City could tell you, are about money. Something that an ego in a pin-stripe is less likely to tell you, but that people with souls know to be undeniably true, is that money makes for terribly tiresome conversation. With this in mind, I offer no more than the hastiest of rundowns of what people from all sides of the media are already failing to call Levygate.

Jack Dromey, the Labour party treasurer, claims he knew absolutely nothing of the £14m in loans that his party had received. It's what has become known as the 'Tessa Jowell' defence, where the senses of a senior figure in the government are so afflicted, that they can neither see huge strings of zeroes or smell the smallest scintilla of sleaze, despite walking to work in sewer-repellent wading gear.

However, in this case, Mr Dromey seems to have been playing the role, not of Tessa Jowell, but of Old Labour Stalwart With Quite Important Sounding Position Which Is Actually A Mere Token Gesture To Keep The Ones With Beards Happy; i.e. he was kept completely in the dark.

In fact, Mr Dromey's strongest link to the Tessa Jowell nonsense is that his other half, part-Hamster, part-Minister of Constitutional Affairs, Harriet Harman, is somewhat embroiled in everything, only this time, the circumstances were a little different. As one Labour MP remarked, "at least Harriet is standing by her man. Tessa stood by her job". Well, indeed. Not only did Harriet not stand by her job, she managed to delegate a big chunk of it (including looking after electoral reform) to someone else. For this she has to be applauded; as I've argued on here before, MPs work too darn hard: it's about time they did less work.

That someone else is Bridget Prentice, who Simon Hoggart has already found time to christen "blamelessly obscure". At the risk of making a catastrophic prediction, I don't expect this blameless obscurity to last too long. Firstly, she now has some power, thus she will be blamed for something (history would suggest rightly) sooner or later. And as for obscurity… well, that can only last as long as people don't go a-discovering on her website.

Visitors to the virtual Chateau Prentice are met with a startling apparition, which the English language, rich as it is, could not possibly describe appropriately, not even were the descriptor a Conrad, a Miller or a (justly translated) Dumas. See for yourselves.

Eek.

Should we really trust important constitutional matters to someone who chose that picture for the main image on her website?

Even if we can overlook that minor infraction of the laws of good taste – it might well have been some random geek's fault after all – there are other, equally concerning aspects to the cat-loving ex-lawyer's online domicile.

From her 'Young Persons [sic] Guide to Parliament'

My name is Bridget Prentice and I am the Member of Parliament for Lewisham East. I am sure that you have heard of Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. I work there. I'd like to tell you about parliament.

As. A. Brush.

(welcome to the show, Bridget ;))

Posted by pauldavies on March 21, 2006

Comments

Posted by: Cedalion at March 22, 2006 09:08 PM

We're democrats and believe in free speech, but we're also committed to civil and rational debate. We reserve the right to delete material posted to our site, but we hope and expect to exercise this right rarely if at all.