Stand down Margaret
There’s been two dismally cock-eyed performances from the Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in the last week.
First up was an interview in the current New Stateman. Such interviews are generally pretty soft, yielding very little new or interesting and you can see why cabinet ministers queue up to do them.
But the interview with Beckett is different. On the matter of nuclear proliferation, ‘[t]he more we question her, the more confused Beckett becomes.’ On Iraq ’she offers little clarity’. Asked about extraordinary rendition:
We ask her whether she is confident that the Americans are now keeping her fully informed. She pauses, looks in vain to her aides for assistance, and then haltingly offers the following: “We are being told the things we need to know, which are the things that affect us. I’m confident of that. I would never venture to say that any of our allies has no secrets from us. Why should they not have secrets? We have secrets from them.” Her advisers shuffle uneasily in their seats.
Unfortunately, the interview is immediately dated by its description of the Foreign Secretary as ‘”Safe Hands” Beckett, the unflappable stalwart of the Today programme’. Today’s papers are all over her, shall we say, eccentric performance on Radio 4 yesterday morning. (Listen again, here – RealPlayer required). Mark Steel nails it in today’s Independent:
How about this for a piece of prose. Margaret Beckett, asked on radio yesterday whether she opposed the latest report that claims the war in Iraq has made the world more dangerous, said: “Well, yes, I might well, um, yes, it’s a very serious, um, discussion and it’s not, um, er, one for doing in two seconds early in the morning, but I would say that a lot of these contentions are flawed, er, but certainly the underlying thesis that we’ve been because it’s not just in America or Iraq the argument is that we don’t have any influence in Europe.”
Amongst other contradictions, she then went on to describe the ‘45 minutes from doom’ scaremongery that softened us up for cluster-bombing Iraq as having ‘little relevance‘.
Are things worse for this government than the outward signs currently indicate? Its behaviour over the last few months suggests nothing so much as that of a man who’s found he has just six months to live: blow the savings, run up the overdraft, insult some friends and lie to the rest – all because you know you’re not going to be around much longer.
Posted on December 20th, 2006 at 12:48pm under New Labour, UK politics
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• 9 Comments |
Yes her performance on Today had me cracking up on the way to work.
I quite liked her dodging of the “Is the middle east a more or less dangerous place since we went into Iraq” question with something about the Middle East was always dangerous, or we’re not getting into this just now…
Hoho
Not so long ago, she was one of the tiny, shrinking gaggle of Labour pols I had any remaining respect for. But then she became Forry Sec, and there was a dreadful wet crunching and purple snot and the green leathery fangs shattered out of the occiput and tentacled round to the eyes. Goodbye, caravanning metallurgist, hello Bride of Cthulhu.
I’ve never liked this person, it’s apparent that she mistakes ego for competence, and idiocy for wisdom.
Are things worse for this government than the outward signs currently indicate?
The banality, the incompetence, the disconnect from reality; I’m reminded of nothing so much as the last days of Major’s ineptitude, except with added bloodshed. That’s fairly damning, I think.
You’d feel bloody stupid if it turned out you weren’t going to die after all though, wouldn’t you?
(Actually I’m fairly sure that’s the plot of at least one alleged “comedy”.)
It’s also available as MP3.
The political aspects of the post have been covered by the commenters above. What grabbed me was the Stand down Margaret. Top song it was but I forget, in the mists of time, whether it was the Selecter, Specials, Bad Manners or who else? Can you remember? The Beat?
Its behaviour over the last few months suggests nothing so much as that of a man who’s found he has just six months to live
Only if the man happens to be a wanker – some people do manage to go with dignity.
James: it was the Beat. Or if you’re American, the English Beat.