Yesterday saw some interesting developments at the Hutton inquiry:
Mr Doberman: Have you anything to say for yourself, Mr Hoon?
Hoon: Yes. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there. It was someone else.
Mr Doberman: So you didn’t do it?
Hoon: No. It was that other bloke, you know, the other fella. But it certainly wasn’t me.
Mr Doberman: But you still take the full buck-stopping Cabinet salary as a Secretary of State for the Ministry of Defence?
Hoon: Oh yes. I love earning well over a hundred and thirty grand a year.
Mr Doberman: For doing little that anyone can clearly discern?
Hoon: Yes, Mr Doberman. That’s right. I really do know absolutely nothing. I was only obeying my permanent secretary’s orders.
Mr Doberman: So what are you then, Mr Hoon? Are you a hopeless liar? Or are you a hapless goon?
Hoon: No, it’s ‘Hoon’, ‘Geoff Hoon’.
Mr Doberman: Thank you, Mr Goon. No further questions.
So it seems today is Antony Charles Linton Blair’s Big Day Out. His last Blairite ex-friend in the Cabinet, Geoff Hoon, has stitched him up big time, good and proper, a man obviously unprepared to fall on his sword to protect the Master. Which is just as well, seeing as the Master was going to drop Hoon down a chute, feed him to the wolves, and forget him as yesterday’s bad rubbish.
So like rats in a trap they’ve all finally turned upon one another. And a certain James Gordon Brown circles the rats, grinning from ear to ear. And who can blame him? I suspect the Master will still make it through today though, almost in one piece, but with the Hutton report hanging over him like the sword of Damocles. But it’s going to be a helluva dogfight, it seems, to get rid of Hoon, who doesn’t appear to be doing the decent thing and going gracefully.
And then it’s going to be that great big Cabinet office for Blair with not a friend in sight, Brownites to the left of me, Brownites to the right of me, here I am, stuck in the middle facing the Chancellor. Oh to be a fly on the wall.
Latest Duncan Fortune 500 betting odds? Blair out by bonfire night (November 5th), retired, injured hurt. I must brush up on some biographies of Gordon.
Gordon Brown’s first name is James? What if the other James Brown was chancellor? “Mr Speaker, huh!, I’m gonna get into it man a reduce tax on sex machines, huh, get uppah, ow. Papa’s got a brand new red box, yea. Think I wanna dance now. Huh”.
mark holland writes:
Gordon Brown’s first name is James?
Yup, a doody. See 10 Downing St.
It’s how he managed to get married without hardly anyone knowing. On the marriage ‘bans’, he put “James Gordon Brown”, and nobody twigged it.
It must be some Scottish thing. My dad was called “Kenneth James Duncan”, but everyone called him “Jim”, or “Jimmy”.
There’s some weird thing they also do with people called “Hugh”. Apparently, they always end up being called “Shuggie”. For the life of me, I’ve no idea why. Those Scots, eh? Strange breed.
You might be right though. Judging from Gordon’s seventies haircuts, I’m sure he found being called “James Brown”, was a bit much, when he’d have preferred being called, one assumes, “Jethro Tull”.
Maybe he renamed himself to avoid, huh!, groovin’ it, baby, like a sex machine. The mind boggles.
On a more solemn note but to propose an answer, Hoon is possibly “for” dog meat, i.e. being thrown to the wolves. Some sort of scapegoat is always required following these great enquiries that everyone knows are grand gestures, sops, showpieces just as much as Stalin’s show trials, and which will never be allowed to let slip anything truly damaging to the powers that be – as opposed to nonentities like Hoon, who may safely be dumped. I’m a scapegoat myself, along with 56,000 other handgun owners who were victimised following Dunblane. Please reflect that crucial information to do with that enquiry are buried beneath a 100-year non-disclosure ruling…
I’m currently visiting my mother in Southmoor, home to the late Dr Kelley. She knew him, and knows his widow. She assures me sincerely that no-one in the village, where the Kelleys are well established, believes that Dr Kelley took his own life. He wasn’t like that, they say. Who really knows – but we can bet it’s extremely unlikely that the people who might really know will ever let the truth see the light of day.
I get the distinct impression that the claim that Kelley was murdered by others rather than by himself is on the way to becoming one of those things that everyone – absolutely everyone – knows (or thinks they know), like William Hague’s gayness or Prince Harry not being the Prince of Wales’ biological son, and which the official media are going to hint at without being allowed to say, for a long, long time.
I’m thinking also about the use of the word “alleged” by Sky TV recently to describe Kelley’s suicide, and also the enormous fuss that was made by the papers about Kelley’s claim that he might one day be found dead in a wood, or some such phrase.
I hope the comment above gets noticed by others besides Samizdata readers of everything.
It doesn’t make much sense to me that a man who spent his working life contemplating the nastiest things that people do to each other would be driven to suicide by the mere matter of his career getting a battering. He wasn’t facing starvation for God’s sake, even if his pension had fallen to bits. He could have written a book, or something. (And that may have been why they killed him, if “they” did.)
For American readers here, the message is: the stink of this is extremely stinky, and will definitely harm (is definitely harming) Tony Blair’s government, whatever the official verdict they decide upon.
I’m with you there, Brian. One arm of the state investigating another arm of the state, to pronounce upon the actions of another arm of the state, and its murky links with yet another arm of the state, is the best we were going to get in modern day Britain, but it’s hardly ideal.
I think Blair will ‘officially’ get away with it. But I think even the extremely-slow-to-rouse British people have finally seen through him.
He’s finished. The rest is detail.
Roll on Gordon, an enemy we can really get our teeth into.