KHOODEELAAR! evidential examination of Michael Portillo's 'comment' via the Times news organisation [280]

1610 GMT London Sunday 2 November 2008


KHOODEELAAR! evidential examination of Michael Portillo's 'comment' via the Times news organisation [280]




Another, mildly phrased, warning against CRASS spending on Crossrail
By©Muhammad Haque...1600 GMT London Sunday 2 November 2008:
KHOODEELAAR! SAID IT YEARS AGO! Good !] to see the analysis belatedly recognised by the Tories! However, it is not good enough for the Tories merely to show haphazard understanding [a contradiction that! ] of the probes Westminster...The Tories ‘spokespeople’ and ‘tokens’ [as typified by the increasingly idiotically spieling Boris Johnson] are all over the place... Contrary to what Michael Portillo is saying in his piece as carried by the Times newspapers this weekend, the Ca-Moron cabal [Portillo actually uses that word, ‘cabal’ - the concept that Khoodeelaar! has been examining and expostulating for years....] The fact that they haven’t done so yet shows that there must be a secret society in action...
That whatever the real world faces, the ‘secret society’ decides what ITS adherents should do... Is Osborne [the so-called Opposition Finance spokesman in the UK Parliament] a member of the same secret society to which Mandelson belongs? Is this why Osborne has not blasted the crass Crossrail funding debts-creation scam? How many Tories on their formal front bench are in fact in receipt of money from Big Businesses? Is that a fact? That most of them are already compromised by identifiable links with sleaze-balls? This question does not have to be even asked. Most of the MPs ARE compromised by links with sleaze-balls.... And BOTH Osborne and Ca-Moron took part in blocking investigations into the links.... It is therefore VERY ODD that Rupert Murdoch is promoting Ca-Moron as being somehow against the Big Money sleaze balls...[To be continued]



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From The Sunday Times
November 2, 2008
Now call a snap election, Gordon
Michael Portillo
The damage that the Conservatives have sustained over recent weeks goes well beyond the sharp reduction in their opinion poll lead. Gordon Brown’s rehabilitation as a supposedly competent man of action has blown apart the Tories’ election strategy and no plan B exists.

For a full year after the prime minister failed at his party’s 2007 conference to call an election, the Conservative narrative depicted him as a ditherer who had failed the test of the highest office. One suspects that Peter Mandelson whispered a similar analysis into George Osborne’s ear when they met on holiday in Corfu this summer. The representation of Brown as a procrastinator was credible and almost universally accepted. As his poll ratings plummeted to below those of John Major in the 1990s, the Tories had only to wait for office to be delivered to them on a plate.

During that period their worst fear was not yet realised. They had been anxious that as the economy deteriorated the public would turn to Brown as the man of experience, or at least the devil they knew. But voters showed no sign of switching as the government lurched through a series of blunders over Northern Rock. If that was a honeymoon for the Conservatives, they squandered it by failing to pin on Brown the blame for Britain’s economic woes. Instead his excuse that the UK was the victim of problems born in the United States just about prevailed.

When, in early October, three British banks approached the government for a capital injection, it was seized by panic. The news was leaked and the banks’ shares dropped alarmingly. Following confusion and shambolic allnight sessions, the government agreed to risk colossal amounts of taxpayers’ money by buying bank shares.

By then Mandelson was back in the cabinet and the government attempted the boldest spin in modern history. The crisis in the British economy and the gambling of billions of pounds of the public’s money were to be presented as a triumph. Notwithstanding that the global crisis is largely the product of inappropriate expansionist policies pursued in Washington and Whitehall, and ignoring the blatant irresponsibility of some British banks (which took their cue from Brown’s fiscal imprudence as chancellor), and overlooking that Brown had removed from the Bank of England the job of regulating those banks, the government’s sweaty response to the City’s financial catastrophe was portrayed as the model for action across the world.

Incredibly the ploy worked. In a situation where bankers, economists, journalists and politicians had no idea what was happening, it was enough that Brown did something - even if unthinkingly forced into it - and he won the accolades. Everyone is entitled to his luck; politics and logic have always been strangers. In the circumstances it is not surprising that the Tories have been left gaping.

I make public speeches. After Brown’s failure to call an election, just to use the words “political courage” and the prime minister’s name in a single sentence set people hooting with laughter. If I try linking the two now, people think I am serious.

If voters think Brown is a decisive leader and don’t believe that he caused the mess we are in, then the Tories have real problems. The other card that they can play is “character”, an issue that David Cameron addressed at his party conference. That play ought to work, because even if Brown has convinced many people that he has saved the planet, he remains curmudgeonly and ill at ease. By contrast, Cameron looks comfortable in his skin and remains generally relaxed and friendly under pressure.

However, Brown’s personality traits are less in focus now. The Labour party has put away any idea of a leadership contest and David Miliband has given up his undeclared challenge. The Tories, meanwhile, have been laid low by Osborne’s contact with Oleg Deripaska. As Major learnt when he campaigned to get back to basics, you need to be sure of your own purity before you decide to fight on character. Osborne behaved unwisely and for days the press have carried excruciating photographs of him at Oxford’s club for rich boys, the Bullingdon.

Of course, having a public school education is a crime only for Conservative leaders. After all, Tony Blair went to Fettes, Oxford and the bar. Yet the Tories are pigeonholed as irredeemable toffs, even though Cameron is their first public-school leader since Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down in 1965.

By wooing an inappropriate donor, Osborne is badly damaged just when the party needs him in match form. The Corfu caper is a particular calamity because he is in fact modest and unpretentious. Cameron must be sorely disappointed with him, and that is unfortunate because they and William Hague have constituted one of the most closely knit - and therefore effective - political cabals of modern times.

Brown has capitalised on Tory grief by setting the party a dilemma. At every election while he was chancellor he outwitted the Tories by proposing to increase public expenditure. The Conservatives could denounce his fiscal indiscipline and so be accused of “slashing” public services; or they could match the government’s promises and so demoralise their supporters. Still, the Tories assumed the problem would not recur at the next election because the government was already struggling to hold down the growing national debt.

Brown thinks this card can be played again. With all his fiscal rules bust, he thinks he has nothing to lose. Employing Orwellian subtlety, his slogan has been amended to: prudence good, profligacy better. The Conservatives, he says, fail to understand that you have to borrow in a recession. That is not true. What they did not understand is why Brown had to borrow during a prolonged boom.

Not everything is going according to plan for Brown, however. The pound has dropped like a stone. Investors don’t believe that Britain is uniquely well placed to weather the storm, as he claims. Given the immense part played in the UK economy by financial services, pounds will continue to be sold.

It is odd how media fixations change. At one time, if the pound had lost a quarter of its value against the dollar, the prime minister would be searching for a new job. Not long ago public borrowing figures such as those announced last week would have put the skids under the chancellor. Brown’s successful spin is to convince the media that the crisis is all but over and the time has come to devote their attention to pressing matters such as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand.

Even Mandelson’s antics served to bump the economy off the front page. You might think that while he was a European commissioner, his inappropriate contacts with Deripaska would arouse a storm and suggest that Brown’s judgment in reappointing him was flawed. But the tide is running Brown’s way and he is not being pressed. Mandelson can deny any wrongdoing because the commission conducts itself by a laughably lax code of conduct.

After I was accused of dithering for not entering the Tory leadership election in 1995, I made the opposite mistake by launching myself precipitately into the contest in 2001. Brown shows signs of the same syndrome. The man who last year could not decide to go to the country now makes six imprudent decisions before breakfast.

Be ready for an early election. The economy will sink lower throughout 2009 and before long we will start to forget that Brown saved the world. He ought to call a vote sooner rather than later. Yesterday’s man of caution has become today’s reckless gambler.

HAVE YOUR SAY
The Tories have been all over the place on the economy and they will be punished for their ambiguity at the next election.
Keith Darlington, Ilford, UK
The problem is that a large majority of the population are unbelievably thick when it comes to politics. They blindly follow the headlines to form their 'opinions'. So the BBC say GB is a genius and Osbourne/tories bad and thats what they believe when in fact GB has sold out the nation for his job.
Anthony Lester, Brum,
Brown and Blair were gamblers right from the very start: and if you didn't see that, you weren't so astute a politician as I suspect you'd like to believe you were, Mr Portillo.

The principal failure of the Conservatives for the past decade has been its failure to demonstrate that reality.
Robert, Hull, UK
Read all 11 comments
HAVE YOUR SAY

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