Paymaster General Geoffrey Robinson has protested loudly at suggestions that the millions he inherited from the mysterious Mme Joschka Bourgeois were placed into a Guernsey-based trust in order to avoid UK tax. Funny, that. A year ago, the man who runs the trust for Robinson, Alan Chick, told City friends that he had been asked by a prominent Labour figure to shift funds offshore in order to reduce tax liability before the election of a Labour government. Incidentally, after Chick’s identity was discovered by the Sunday Times, he was given emergency coaching in how to handle the media by none other than Number Ten press officer Alastair Campbell.
Still on the subject of Robinson, it appears that his takeover of the New Statesman has cost him dear. The magazine has belatedly filed its 1996-97 accounts, which show a year-on-year loss of £1.8 million, more than ten times the sum it was losing annually under the pre-Robinson regime. About a quarter of the loss can be accounted for by the inflated salaries of editor Ian Hargreaves and the Blairite cronies he has placed in senior editorial positions on the once left-wing magazine. The rest is the cost of the Statesman’s ludicrous giveaway subscription offers and of the mass defection of its pre-Hargreaves subscribers, two-thirds of whom have cancelled their subs in boredom or disgust. The net circulation has increased by 5,000 as a result of the daft offers, but the new subscribers are fickle: no fewer than 12,000 people who availed themselves of cut-price subs last year cancelled as soon as they were asked to pay at full rate. And New Labour claims that it knows all about business.
LLB’s web page featured in the debate on the Greater London Assembly and Mayor, when Simon Hughes, LibDem MP quoted from articles by Dorothy Macedo and Leonora Lloyd. He used them as evidence that not everyone in the London labour movement is enamoured of the Government’s plans nor with the anti-democratic nature of the London Party leadership.
Relic of public schooldom, If and Monty Python sketches, the Army Cadets could be on their last parade. The Officer Training Corps, the elite of the schoolboy wargamers, cost the Government (well, you and me really) some £16,700,000 last year. In the last academic year, just 260 (or around 7.5%) actually went on to join up upon leaving school and college. Having stayed behind to do its maths homework, Periscope works that out at a whopping £64,230 (and 77p) per recruit. A possible public expenditure cut we could all support.
One of the seedier CD games out at present is called Imperialism (“conquer the world! World domination is in your grasp!”). The game for aspiring dictators is offered free in a competition in ... Air Cadet magazine. A good reason for getting rid of them too.
One of the architects of New Labour, polling guru and Friend of Peter, Philip Gould, is at last receiving his just rewards for helping Tony to power. He has just landed a second £30,000 contract with a government department. A long-time recipient of Euro-dosh, channelled via the Labour Euro-MPs, he now has one deal to survey public attitudes to Britain’s EU Presidency and another to advise of the state and image of the NHS (“it’s crap,” I claim my £30k — Ed.). He remains in charge of Labour’s internal polling and was responsible for bringing focus groups to British politics.
One of the glossier bits of lobbying on the foxhunting vote in Parliament was the circulation of New Labour’s Policy on Foxhunting — An Objective Analytical Review by Michael Poland. That couldn’t be the same Michael Poland who was Master of the Isle of Wight Foxhounds, could it? You know, the hunt that actually introduced foxes to the Isle of Wight in the nineteenth century so they would have something to hunt.
Tory David Amess MP tells of how he got to know John Heddle MP much better during an all-night Commons sitting. He was then “horrified” when he committed suicide a few days later. It’s official — spend the night with David Amess and you’ll want to top yourself.