Infamy! Infamy! (They've all got it in-for-me!)

Like Kenneth Williams' Caesar in Carry on Cleo (the one British costume film WCH actually likes) the knives, it would appear, are out for poor old Shaun Woodward.

Promoted to the Cabinet in the summer for the now incongruous-sounding role of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, both Kevin Maguire in his New Statesman column and the Telegraph’s Rosa Prince both reckon the socialist MP for St.Helens South is toast in the next reshuffle.

The Tory-hating PM doesn't appreciate his trips down Memory Lane in Cabinet meetings, we are informed, reminiscing what his old mucker John Major would have done when his back was against the wall.

But it’s a bit rich for Gordon Brown, or anyone else in the party, to have a pop at the Tory turncoat (clearly WCH is exempt) after being quite happy to welcome him with open arms and drop him into a safe Labour seat before the 2001 general election as a "dog whistle" to Tory voters. Woodward's no angel, but in comparison to the MP he replaced, the unloveable Gerry Birmingham, he's Nelson Mandela.

And Woodward was a good junior minister in Northern Ireland, bringing in a rule that stopped families paying any more that 3% of their domestic income in water charges. A small measure, granted, but not one any UK minister has had the balls to make.

I have posted previously that Woody should be made Party Chairman. Here’s why:

The Party needs a good frontman; someone reliable to communicate the Government’s case. At the moment we are short of decent talent in this department. It needs to be someone tough and silky; and let’s face it, casting an eye around the Cabinet table doesn’t turn up much in the way of silk.

Jacqui Smith just looks flaky. Darling is narcoleptic. Yvette Cooper is tetchy. Ruth Kelly sounds like a WPC making an appeal on Crimewatch. Purnell and Andy Burnham aren't good enough communicators. While Ed Balls has all Gordon Brown’s worst habits plus a few of his own to boot.

Meanwhile Harriet Harman – job sharing as party chairman and Leader of the House and the person nominally tasked with raising the party standard aloft on the Today programme - is simply too plodding and dull-witted to articulate the Government’s case properly.

No, much as it galls a class warrior like me to say it, the man for the job is Shaun Woodward. He’s not got too much on as Northern Ireland Secretary, so make him party chairman as well.

Crucially, he’s English and speaks fluent Tory (as you’d expect!) so useful in checking the rise of Cameron and the Etonic Kittens.But he’s also a tough old media pro who knows how to handle himself. And that, dear reader, we need.

In a year when the economy could start to sink and our fortunes tank, we have to have someone of ability putting our case. Woodward is the best qualified person to do that. Fact.

If we can swallow our principles enough to parachute him into a safe Labour seat, then getting some practical benefit out of him is hardly any worse.

Use him, that’s all I’m saying.

WCH

Maggie, we love you!

Is it meant to be ironic? Have cyber-vandals altered the text? Surely, to paraphrase the great John McEnroe, she cannot be serious?

To what and whom am I referring? Why the column on the ConservativeHome website from Tory parliamentary hopeful and sometime novelist, Louise Bagshawe, referring to her “hero-worship” (her phrase) of Margaret Thatcher.

Read this (and no laughing at the back if you please)

“She was the first major politician seriously to warn of global warming. Despite the ludicrous caricature of her public image, she was a champion of social justice, the grocer’s daughter who swept away the barriers to home ownership for many of Britain’s poorest people. Elected on a popular mandate again and again, the voters never threw her out, much to the dismay of the liberal commentariat. She was the ultimate people’s politician.”

More guff of a similarly simpering nature can be found here.

“I have several acquaintances who know Lady Thatcher socially. I can not, and likely will never, make that boast. I do not know Lady Thatcher. But politically, I worship her.

“Posters on this site should not worry when the media spins to them that Cameroon, modern compassionate Conservative MPs and candidates, want to distance themselves from Lady Thatcher. This is nonsense; I do not wish to distance myself. I wish instead merely to touch the hem of her garment.”

Funnily enough, WCH dreams of touching the hem of St. Margaret’s garment too. Usually as I launch the evil old bat off a very high cliff.

WCH

What next, a plague of locusts?

Disasters come in threes, apparently. If so, managers at the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust should brace themselves for what 2008 might throw at them.

For this is the Trust exposed by the Healthcare Commission last October for an "avoidable tragedy" when an outbreak of C.difficile - a bacterial infection of the gut which mainly affects the elderly – resulted in the deaths of 90 patients.

As if that wasn’t enough bad PR for a decade, they were named last week as one of the eight Trusts revealed to have lost discs of patient data.

Clearly some butterfingered NHS manager has dropped every mirror in the trust simultaneously.

Now they are advertising for a “Chair” to spearhead their efforts at “business recovery and improving customer service standards”.

They are looking for an “exceptional individual” with the “enthusiasm, energy, firm resolve and creative flair.” Presumably needed to explain away the catalogue of errors

Cryptically, the advert recognizes that “the Trust has had a troubled past, both clinically and financially. It now needs an exceptional team to drive forward improvements in patient care and governance standards.” I’d say that’s the understatement of the year.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the role pays a nice £22,524 salary. For a three day week.

WCH

Sleeping rough - what a laugh!

It seems not a day can be allowed to go by without Cameroonite social consciences being rolled out as if to prove the Tin Man has found a heart.

The latest piece of not-so-subtle ‘brand repositioning’ will see Tory housing spokesman, Grant Schapps, take to the streets of London in a bid to ‘gain a better idea of what life is like for homeless people’, reports this morning’s Observer.

Schapps, who sounds like a playboy from an Agatha Christie novel, will ‘spend Christmas Eve visiting homeless centres run by the Thames Reach charity. Then he will head off to the Victoria Street area to find suitable material for a bed and a comfortable place to sleep.’

“I am reliably told that cardboard and newspapers are two vital elements of good insulation,” quipped the Tory no-mark.

Now, I have never had the misfortune to sleep rough. But I can imagine how it feels: fucking cold and miserable.

And people like me, with the imagery of Thatcher's 'Cruel Britannia' burned into our souls, will need no reminding of “cardboard cities” as the vulnerable, destitute and mentally-ill were left to the elements, freezing to death in shop doorways.

I also seem to recall Matthew Parris, the overrated Times hack, trying a similar stunt a generation ago when he nominally laboured as a Conservative MP. Other similarly publicity-hungry Tories have camped out too, just to show its not all bad sleeping under the stars.

But of course we're not fooled. WCH remains in the mould of that other great Working Class Hero, Aneurin Bevan, who infamously proclaimed in 1948 that “no attempt at either ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep, burning hatred of the Tory party.”

“So far as I am concerned” the great man intoned, “they are lower than vermin.”

And despite Cameron’s cosmetic conversion to the human race, and silly stunts from Schapps, they still are.

My only hope is that a bunch of braying, boozed-up bovver boys piss all over Shapps as he sleeps. That would be an eloquent riposte to this latest gimmick by David Cameron's Conservatives.

Happy Christmas one and all – so long as you’re not a Tory rat.

WCH

Devolution, Lakota-style

Fascinating story in this morning’s Telegraph about the Lakota Indians and their declaration of independence from the United States of America.

Descendents of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse visited the State Department on Monday to announce they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties signed with the federal government of the United States - some of them more than 150 years old - claiming they are "worthless words on worthless paper."

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies and intend to continue their diplomatic mission in the coming weeks and months.

Their current constitutional status affords them a measure of “nationhood” within the US, but this move promises to see them issue their own driving licenses and passports.

The Lakota peoples are beset with all sorts of social and economic problems, including high teen suicide rates, a child mortality rate five times higher than the US average and a staggering male life expectancy of just 44.

Good luck to them I say!

Now, if only the north of England could have done something similar around 1980.....

WCH

Mount Clarke Erupts!

Oh dear. Charles Clarke, that veritable Vesuvius of former ministers has blown hot verbal lava all over the place in this morning’s Guardian. Again.

This time the big galloot claims backbenchers are “appalled” at Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” line; that Mark Malloch-Brown was a “foolish” appointment to the Government of all the Talents; and that Brown doesn’t support Ministerial colleagues enough ("Tony would always support his key people. Gordon should do that with his people").

But did I not hear The Big Bear was being lined up to replace Mousier Mandelson as Britain’s European Commissioner? Strange way of applying for the position berating the guy who makes the decision! And anyway, isn’t Comrade Mandelson in Europe in the first place simply because Tony Blair didn’t support him at the time of his second resignation?

Clarkey does however have a neat line in describing himself as “modernising old Labour” rather than a Blairite. WCH likes that, but not as much as Bernard Crick’s bon mot of his politics being those of the “moderate socialist”.

“Small ‘m’, capital ‘S’”.

A blast from the past

Wow, is it really ten years since we last heard from that Thatcher-loving, platitude-spouting, talentless irritant? The Spice Girls I hear you cry? No silly, I am of course referring to Britain’s 50th Prime Minister, Sir John Major.

His appearance on this morning’s Andrew Marr show HERE served to remind us (in case we’d forgotten) what we’re missing: A weak and peevish little man with no discernable achievements from his six and a half years in the top job.

His attack on Labour’s “systemic sleaze” and “unscrupulous” behaviour in exploiting his own Government’s manifold episodes of sexual misadventure and corruption, was, frankly, a laughable double-standard.

Major was one of the least able men ever to become Prime Minister. His elevation in November 1990 was as much the result of Conservative MPs deciding they didn’t want Michael Heseltine’s regicide of Margaret Thatcher to be rewarded as it was an endorsement of Major’s own titanic political talents.

In many ways, Major was a more contemptible figure than Thatcher. He initially promised to build “a nation at ease with itself” but presided over a deep and lingering economic recession, effectively shut-down the UK mining industry, privatised the railways and told us to “understand a little less and condemn a little more” in relation to lone parents and the poor. His was Thatcherism without the redeeming quality of Margaret Thatcher’s certain leadership. Ideology without the conviction.

Like her great nemesis Francois Mitterrand, Thatcher made no plans for her succession, leaving no-one of any ability to carry forward her mantle. Having only entered the Cabinet in 1987, Major’s lack of experience in the political top flight meant he never stepped outside Thatcher’s shadow. His puppet-premiership was a dismal interregnum.

His twee and backward-looking view of Britain was an embarrassing and threadbare offering from the man given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead the country.

His weakness in facing up to his internal critics on Europe made a mockery of Britain’s foreign policy, despite his earlier stated determination to put Britain “at the heart of Europe.” He even guffed-up the so-called ‘special relationship’ with the US, backing the wrong horse when he dispatched Tory reseachers to trawl over Governor Clinton’s time as an a Rhodes scholar at Oxford before seeing “Slick Willy” become president.

And his shabby deal to prop up his parliamentary majority with the support of the Ulster Unionists even prevented forward progress on the Northern Ireland peace process.

But the myth that Major generously bequeathed Labour a sound economy in 1997 is the biggest lie in British politics. What Labour inherited was an economy recovering from the ravages of the 1991 recession and Britain’s ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism on "Black Wednesday" in September 1992, which paved the way for interest rate cuts and renewed growth. Claiming credit for an economic upswing, following a recession he created, is a fig-leaf which deserves to be wrenched from his shrivelled reputation once and for all.

So there we have it. John Major: whinging, lightweight, no-mark. Let’s hope it’s another ten years before we hear again from him again.

And that goes for the Spice Girls too.