I didn’t see much news in the last couple of weeks but the headlines from the Chilcot Inquiry managed to waft their way to my holiday bolthole. Claire Short and former Foreign Office lawyer Elizabeth Wilmhurst may have got the applause but for me the stars of the inquiry so far have been two other faces from the squalid past, namely Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.

The word that sprang to mind when seeing the pair is reduced. Look at Tony Blair, his tan skin pulled tight like the soiled sheets of a deathbed, the tear of his mouth revealing the bones underneath. With his invisible, inept, and ineffectual peace mission to the Middle East going nowhere fast, Tony has been reduced to whoring handbags for Louis Vuitton.

Now, I know he’s paid a shedload of cash for what he does but does he look happy to you? Intellectually hollow speeches to an endless parade of nodding dogs. The moody accounting. The handbags. Does the money make up for all the crappy, empty jobs he has? Speaking as someone who was once paid quite well for a job I loathed and which made me utterly miserable, I hope not. It would be some small punishment.

But then, as we saw from his evidence to Chilcot, Blair is a man of cast iron certainties. He’s not one for expressing regret or remorse or for reconsidering (‘I’d do it again,’ he declared). He could probably shovel manure for a living and convince himself he’s king of the world. He’s to be envied in a way.

Then there’s Campbell. One thing that Campbell’s evidence to Chilcot revealed was the true nature of what he did (and still does) for Tony Blair. He was a turd polisher. They may have been Tony Blair’s turds (or high-level government government announcements if you want to mask the smell of what Blair squeezed out between 1994 and 2005) but turds they remain. Each morning Blair would drop another steaming load (or initiatives and back-of-a-fag-packet ideas, if you prefer) onto Alastair’s desk who would then get to buffing them.

And with hindsight he wasn’t actually that good at it, as the likes of the transparently awful presentation of the so-called evidence of Saddam’s WMD shows. Look at the automatic scepticism that policiticians’ utterances are met with now and tell me Campbell doesn’t bear a huge responsibility for it. It’s a measure of Gordon Brown’s desperation and impotence that he would put himself under Campbell’s influence. Once a confidante of presidents and kings, Campbell’s now reduced to bragging about all the work he does for charidee on his blog. His blog!

Is Alastair happy? Possibly not. There he is reduced to near tears on the Andrew Marr show. Was his emotional display (if that’s what it was) triggered by the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children and hundreds of British troops? Not a bit of it. Campbell welled up over some perceived slight over his ‘latest work of fiction’, the precious, precious little love.

The delicate flower thought Marr was linking his latest novel to the piss poor Iraq dossiers. I might be a bit slow but I didn’t make the connection. I imagine most people merely thought, ‘Oh God, Campbell’s bashed out another awful book. He’s going to be unavoidable while he whores it’, rather than laughing at Marr’s supposed chutzpah. Still, it’s good to see that Campbell has a softer side. He isn’t just the strutting, jutting, hardman bully of popular legend but also a thin-skinned, whining little prat who can be brought to a breathless stop by Andrew bloody Marr. Campbell’s now trying to cover himself by quibbling over the number of civilian casualties as quoted by Marr. As if there is any number that shows him and his former boss in any favourable light whatsoever.

Campbell should be grateful. In a universe where morality worked properly he wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without being subjected to a thick hail of sputum. Instead there he is, going wobbly over some gentle questioning from an establishment bum-kisser. Still, it won’t have done the book sales any harm.

Anyway. Back.

(via Graham Linehan)

Back in a bit.

The Editors’ Code of Practice Committee, which writes and revises the voluntary code of standards overseen by the Press Complaints Commission, is undertaking its annual review of the Code.

It welcomes suggestions from the public, civil society and the industry on how the Code might be revised to improve the system of self-regulation of the press, of which it is an essential component.

A group of bloggers have got together to build a group submission/petition. Here are the five suggestions we’d like to make to the PCC:

SUGGESTION ONE: Like-for-like placement of retractions, corrections and apologies in print and online (as standard).

SUGGESTION FIVE: A longer and more interactive consultation period for open discussion of more fundamental issues.

You can sign the petition and make your own suggestions here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/pcc/.

Tim Ireland has all the details.

Harriet Harman meets
a constituent

“We have to understand that we now have a new cohort of well, active, healthy older people. The role that they play in their families, in the economy and in society must be recognised and responded to. We must recognise the emergence of the “wellderly”.”

You can just picture the warm little thrill she got when she said that, can’t you? I bet she did her best ‘aren’t I clever’ look. I sometimes think that some people are against all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats for no other reason other than the fear that such a system might turn up another Harman.

Anyway, her talking down to the electorate got me thinking. There must be loads of condescending does-he-take-sugar neologisms that New Labour could half bake in order to patronisingly pigeonhole thinking, breathing human beings. How about…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, incontinent older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “smellderly”.

…or…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, sexy older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “bombshellderly”.

…and…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, anti-social older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “neighbourfromhellderly”.

…then there’s…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, healthy older people aghast at the destruction of our civil liberties under New Labour. We must recognise the emergence of the “orwellderly”.

Then we’ve got the ‘farewellderly’ (never going to vote New Labour again).

Click to make big.

Make your own poster here (via Councillor Bob).

The alternative is too fantastical to contemplate. Imagine a darkened office in the Palace of Westminster where the Brownout plotters are gathered in the shadows. A hand reaches from the darkness for the telephone which is on the desk lit by an angle-poise lamp. Its silhouetted owner’s voice says into the mouthpiece: ‘This is a job for our top operatives. Get me Hoon and Hewitt’. Doesn’t work, does it?

The less said about Patricia Hewitt and her ‘would you like an ice cream, little boy?‘ demeanour the better. Geoff Hoon, should we forget, once suggested ‘that mothers of Iraqi children killed by cluster bombs would “one day” thank Britain for their use.’ Jacob Bronowski he most certainly is not. If these two were the finest minds the shadowy anti-Brown conspiracy has to offer, it’s well and truly knackered.

(See also the much used ‘Gordon Brown is the best man to lead this government’ line. Unfortunately, for a hollowed-out and intellectually bereft New Labour, he is.)

See also: ‘Who would rally to Geoff Hoon’s flag? Who would die in a ditch with Patricia Hewitt?‘

Unfortunately in these circumstances, silence is seen as treachery – ministers has to say something to avoid the appearance of complicity. What they should have done was get together and agree to pretend they’d heard nothing about the ‘plot’.

So when a journalist asked : ‘Minister, what do you think of Geoff Hoon and Patricia coup attempt?’ They could say: ‘Hoon? Hoon? Where do I know that name? Ah, yes. Didn’t he make the tea during the war?’ or ‘THEIR WHAT?’ and then walk away laughing uproariously and shaking their heads.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has said there’ll be no ‘backroom deals’ with either of the two major parties before the election. He’s saving them of course for after the election when they’ll have more pull and can’t scare voters off. He wants you to vote for his policies, obviously, but isn’t prepared to tell you which ones he’s willing to horse-trade away in exchange for a seat in the cabinet of a coalition government.

Meanwhile, what would you get if Kryten from Red Dwarf and Brains from Thunderbirds were to have a child together? I put their photos through the Make Me Babies! photo merging website to find out…

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Finally, what’s all this nonsense about New Labour being skint and on the verge of bankruptcy? This attack advert warning against the dangers of a Tory election victory must have cost a fortune…

One of the most vivid details to emerge from the [David] Kelly affair was that Alastair Campbell had used a pin held in the palm of his hand to control his temper while testifying to the foreign affairs committee. Each time he felt the explosive urge, the story went, he would squeeze on the pin and the pain would distract him from the immediate provocation. Like many stories about Campbell, this one wasn’t entirely accurate – it was actually a paper clip – but the gist was true.

It’s good to know this man spent so long at the heart of government.

All told, and without going into detail, 2009 was downright crappy for me and mine hence the large quiet periods on the blog. You quickly realise what a shallow and bathetic spectacle British politics is when reality decides to bite you on the bum.

The likes of Nick Robinson might as well be commenting on the goings-on inside the World of Warcraft for all the relevance the cloth-eared gobshite from Brown, Cameron, Clegg and the rest has when you’re up against it. No wonder millions of people don’t vote; if they’re not soldiers dying in vain in the desert, or not kids losing their minds in government detention centres, or not too close to the sharp end, they’re bumping along without politics and politicians. I imagine they’re quite happy. Or at least no more miserable.

So what’s next? Well, an interminable, unedifying and dirty-as-never-before general election campaign stretches out before us like a skidmark on the underpants of a morbidly obese incontinent. And nobody, as far as I can see, is offering to put a wash on. Mind you, the speeches we’ve heard so far have all the rhetorical heft of detergent commercials.

Judging by some of the bloggers the mainstream media have recruited so far to fill its hours of dead air and yards of fish and chip paper on the cheap, the general election is looking like one that will be won less by the Internet and more by the twin howitzers of glad, self-congratulatory anti-intellectualism and spitefully stubborn moral cowardice.

You think people are brassed off with mainstream politics now. What’s it going to be like in five months after all this?

There’s a big story breaking at Greenpeace today. Despite assurances from the nuclear industry that things had been cleaned up, Greenpeace has found that the villages near the uranium mines in Niger are still contaminated with radiation…

I’m extremely pleased to say that I played a small part in helping bring the scandal to light. Back in January I wrote a rather strident post for Greenpeace’s Nuclear Reaction blog about just what the French nuclear company AREVA had been getting up to at its uranium mines in Niger.

AREVA weren’t very happy about that and in their response they invited Greenpeace to go to Niger and see what was going on for themselves. The Greenpeace nuclear campaign accepted the invitation and this month, after much hard work and planning, sent a team to Niger. And they certainly did see for themselves… AREVA nuclear scandal: Greenpeace finds radiation on the streets of Niger.