There was no smoking gun in the docudrama The Plot Against Harold Wilson, just the inevitable smoking pipe and hot air about this supposedly great premier transforming a country “run by aristocrats in the time they could spare from their country retreats”.
Even ignoring that when Wilson returned to office in 1974 the miners were way mightier than marquesses, this was a comical plot led by swivel-eyed Blimps. To see how to lead a successful coup against the Labour movement you need to look elsewhere: at Tony Blair.
Soon after his win in 1997 I complained to a man now high up in No 10 that Tony was already showing signs of ugly cronyism. “Look,” he said, “new Labour was a coup; we took over an entire party with a tiny army of believers. So we stick together.”
His words came flooding back last week: you cannot understand the cash for coronets scandal — exposed in these pages — unless you grasp that new Labour was a coup. Labour had been funded by unions that had destroyed Wilson’s premiership and, very nearly, our economy: if you make a country virtually Third World, of course there will be mad talk of coups.
Blair was adamant he would not repeat Wilson’s mistake. But he needed dosh from somewhere. So, escaping the union barons’ stifling embrace, he hugged close business barons of his own creation. It is said Blair’s money man, Lord Levy, never meets Lord Sainsbury without asking for a million; well, supermarkets love the cashback idea. And look at the bonus points clocking up on Sainsbury’s loyalty card: made a peer and a never-to- be-reshuffled minister.
At the very best, the loans scandal shows Labour still doesn’t really “get” money: if businessmen plough money in, they expect a payback.
Perhaps Labourites, few of whom have toiled in the private sector, still think you can get something for nowt; the worldly Tories have always preached there is no such thing as a free lunch. So Cherie Blair, saddled with a huge mortgage, receives cash from a children’s charity and addresses a club that not so long ago banned black folk.
Labour still hasn’t learnt how to gain money above board, for its people or for its party.
One figure who graced Wilson’s resignation honours “lavender list” was Lord Kagan, a dirty raincoat magnate. He ended up in the clink. Blair’s eagerly awaited resignation “honours” list promises, any month now, to be compulsive reading.
Well, it is lucky the sick six in that fateful drugs trial were only human rather than real guinea pigs: then the dogs of war really would have been unleashed on the heads of drug companies. Animal rights sorts have been strangely quiet about the victim now said to resemble “the Elephant Man”.
Sorry though we should be for this man, he agreed to be injected with an unknown drug for cash. Animals have no such choice. Reportedly, one victim has earned £60,000 from such tests. Another was trying to pay off a student loan: might not a stint in a sperm bank, that ever popular student job, have been more agreeable? Still, thank God there are such brave people, from Jenner and his smallpox vaccine onwards, prepared to take such risks; I wouldn’t. Animal rightists would be worthy of genuine respect if they volunteered for drugs trials in place of animals. That really would prove their humanity.
Unfashionably, I feel sorry for the drugs companies. They were hammered in The Constant Gardener, but developing a drug costs a fortune. Whenever there is a new “wonder drug” we congratulate scientists; when, rarely, experiments go wrong, we blame “evil” drug companies. But if we want more cures, we need both.
Zac rides high as a favourite of Charles
Snappers, with customary charm, grumble that it can be a struggle at Cheltenham to tell the royal box from the winner’s enclosure, so equine-like is your typical royal. No such problems this year with the presence of Kate Middleton, prompting fevered tabloid stories that she will ride past the winner’s post to marry her boyfriend, Prince Willie.
But your correspondent’s attention was grabbed by the presence of another in the Prince of Wales’s party: Zac Goldsmith. Chazza collects pet greens. Indeed, if you were a royal toady (and no one suggests Zac is) the surest way of gaining an audience with His Royal Plantness would be to bang on about global warming.
Goldsmith, son of the late tycoon Jimmy G, is motoring: an adviser to Her Majesty’s opposition, he is now close to the future king. Not bad for the editor of The Ecologist, a mag of specialist interest. On the two occasions I interviewed him I found him both charming and bright. But if he were of slightly humbler birth, would he even have got to the starting gate?
We need water bad and all Prescott gives us is concrete
It was a sign spring had sprung last week when, struggling through a blizzard to collect the papers, I read that water companies have imposed their first hosepipe ban of the season. It was inevitable — yet no less outrageous than a restaurant demanding dosh without providing nosh. Gradually the practice will creep north, scarring our landscape; soon the flower of England will be the cactus.
But then another story catches the eye. Water utilities are flogging reservoirs — for housing. Sorry for asking the obvious, but is it any wonder we are short of water?
We also read Sir David Garrard has been giving Labour dosh. Sir David is a builder, and builders lobby to make chunks of England’s green and pleasant all too grey. Then, hey presto, John Prescott counts his toes and asserts we “need” 5m new homes.
But if we are already so short of water, we had better hope the proud owners of these Prescottian Palaces are into concrete lawns.
Alan Hansen is admired by some men for his sharp comments about balls flying into the danger zone; and by women for all that is encased in those sharp suits.
But now the football pundit has committed the male equivalent of falling out of a ballgown in public: he has posed in a red jersey for M&S. And what a jersey. It is the kind you see worn by Rover drivers and patients in care homes who dribble (and not with a football); it is the kind of fright that new, rebranded M&S is no longer supposed to sell.
He should have left it locked in the changing room: the shame is just not worth it. Posing in Posh Spice’s thong could scarcely have been as damaging. Hansen adverts for stairlifts and incontinence pads can only be a light breeze away.
