Listen — I don’t know how we do this, but we’ve got to get ourselves involved
in the public inquiry business as soon as possible. You want the perfect,
fail-safe, exorbitantly overpaid sinecure — get yourself fixed up with a
public inquiry job, somehow. You’ll never need to work again, and there will
be no ramifications.
When the car firm MG Rover collapsed in 2005, we were all very clear that it
was a consequence of the extraordinary greed of the piggy-eyed, disingenuous
Phoenix consortium directors, allied to political opportunism and wishful
thinking on the part of two useless Labour ministers, Stephen Byers and the
truly scary Patricia Hewitt. I’d have told you that for nothing. I might
even have paid you to let me tell you that, so patently obvious was it and
so hugely did I dislike Byers and Hewitt.
But instead we had that thing, the public inquiry, headed by Guy Newey QC and
a glorified accountant called Gervase MacGregor, which took four years and
cost £16m to come to precisely the same conclusion. Just look at that sum
again — £16m, or four million quid a year, to tell us what we already knew
and to buy some time for the politicians directly implicated.
You want a scandal? Isn’t that a scandal, regardless of how familiar we are
with it, of the public inquiry run by some silken lawyer which seems to
exonerate everyone? It’s a worse scandal in a way than the sale and
subsequent collapse of MG Rover itself, with those 5,200 workers heading off
to the jobcentres to claim redundancies paid for, once again, by you and me.
Guy and Gervase — there’s modern, classless Britain for you, both
comprehensive school boys I’m sure — flailed around for four years and spent
more money than MG Rover originally asked for in terms of government support
— and ended up with no meaningful claim against anyone, nothing anyone could
do much about. A perfectly pointless waste of money, then, revealing little
of any note and enabling nothing much to be done as a consequence. To be
sure, Lord Mandelson has announced that the government will press for the
Phoenix directors to be struck off so that they cannot run a company again.
Well, that will put a crimp in their evening, having trousered more than
£40m from flogging off parts of the company and through pocketing the
interest on some loans which they then franchised out.
Guy and Gervase are very clear that the directors did nothing that could be
deemed illegal, even though one of them — Nick Stephenson — bunged some
Chinese bint a handy £1.6m, a woman whom it later transpired he was
surreptitiously rogering, presumably round the section where they fit the
back seats into the cars. A payment which even Guy and Gervase — £16m bill
for their team, remember — deemed “excessive”. When even they think it’s
excessive, it’s de facto excessive. But nothing which actually broke the law.
Nor any action against the Labour politicians who, at the time, were gung-ho
for the Phoenix consortium’s buy-out, despite being repeatedly warned that
no good would come of it, that it would all end in tears. Patricia Hewitt
bunged the new company £6.5m of public money, a sum considered at the time
“a waste” by the National Audit Office. But the 2005 election was only weeks
away — what are you going to do, let the company go bust with all those
votes up for grabs in the West Midlands?
Even the administrators told Hewitt that there was little or no chance that
the company could be successfully sold off. But both Byers and Hewitt were
motivated by selfish, party political concerns — and so to hell with the
public’s money.
Show me a government-ordained public inquiry which has resulted in anything
useful to anyone other than a fabulously hefty fee to the lawyers and
accountants who work on it. Name just one that has called the guilty to
account, fingered a government minister, resulted in a prosecution — or even
enabled us to learn something we didn’t know before.
It never happens.
+ I think we need to get the troops involved. Marcus the Sheep has
been taken hostage, probably with blindfold and manacles, by people
determined to turn him into a warming winter stew. He is being held at a
secret location while a head teacher, Andrea Charman, gets the mint sauce
ready.
Marcus was hand-reared by pupils at Lydd primary school on Romney Marsh
(saltmarsh lamb! Yum!), bottle-fed and petted by adoring kiddies every day.
But now his time has come, apparently, for him to pay a brief but
instructive visit to the local abattoir.
The pupils and parents are in revolt, arguing that Marcus has become too close
to the children to be slaughtered and threatened to liberate him — hence the
sheepnapping.
Charman is rather wonderfully uncontrite, saying that she intends to have the
sheep killed and his meat raffled off to raise money to buy the children
more baby animals which will later be turned into pies.
Come on, kids; get mum to buy a raffle ticket — then you can have Marcus for
keeps, in the freezer. Or air-dried, as with biltong, so that you can chew
him all day.
No Wags, no World Cup
Fabio Capello has gone too far. What is the point of a World Cup without the
Wags? It’s bad enough that Scotland won’t be there — though we will all, in
time, come to terms with our grief. But for the England manager to ban the
wives and girlfriends from the finals is to deprive us of far more fun than
that occasioned by the football. Bedecked in hideous Prada and bling, bottle
in hand and dissing one another, they are the sort of royalty one would get
if Chatham became a kingdom. And when England lose to the Sakhalin Islands
or Rwanda in the group stage, who will the players have to blame? I know
Capello wants Aaron Lennon and Steven Gerrard to preserve their virility,
but there are more important things than winning.
How the affluent met the effluent
That exciting culinary wizard Heston Blumenthal has pushed the boundaries once
more, this time serving oysters apparently marinated in raw sewage. For way
too long British diners have turned their noses up at sewage, pronouncing it
“fancy” and “a bit too Frenchified”, while the continentals swallow the
stuff by the bucket load.
Not all of Heston’s ingredients are readily noticeable; it is only after a
inquiry into a case of multiple food-poisoning at his restaurant, the Fat
Duck, that we learn that the oysters he innocently served up came with an
unexpected velouté of merde. Scores of customers were taken ill and the
restaurant was closed while health and safety tried to get to the, uh,
bottom of the problem.
I hope Heston is not discouraged from future use of this eco-friendly
ingredient. Perhaps next time he could freeze it in liquid nitrogen; right
now his tasting menu, closes with wine gums, which is playing it a bit safe
for £130 a head, excluding alcohol.
* * * *
A council canteen in north Wales has banned spotted dick from the menu in case
diners take offence at the name. It has been re-christened “spotted
Richard”. The word “dick”, of course, refers to the dough of the pudding,
rather than to the penis but I suppose it’s pointless to argue. And the new
name? Well, I just hope that they don’t have any cockneys working for the
council who have a decent knowledge of rhyming slang or they’ll be truly put
off their dinners. As in Richard III. Or maybe they’ll just assume that
Heston Blumenthal (c/f) is now running the place . . .
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