Data Clerk - “Under 24 Hour Media Guard”
Comment at end
22nd November, 2007
IS THIS A NEW PHRASE FROM BROWN’S ‘OPEN’ GOVERNMENT?
I couldn’t quite believe it on Newsnight last night, when almost as an aside Jeremy Paxman said that the 23 year old junior clerk, purportedly the one in whose hands the missing CDs were last known to have been held, was being put up at a hotel under “24 hour media guard”!
Well, at least it isn’t police guard.
Perhaps this is the right thing to do in order to protect the individual at the centre, who would understandably be hounded by the press if at his own home; so perhaps it really IS for his own protection.
But WHY don’t I feel comfortable about it?
Seems I’m not the only one. This blog echoes some of my thoughts, and explains why Brown will NOT be replaced.
Yet, anyway.
Major had Heseltine, Blair had Brown. Even when relations were most strained between these men, there was a big beast other than the Prime Minister who could squash the cabinet if necessary. But Brown has nobody. He is truly alone - like Thatcher in the late 1980s.
Anyway, I commented at Newsnight’s page, copied below. Click here to read it.
Excerpt from the BBC’s latest report:
[Conservatives] say the National Audit Office, which was due to receive the two discs sent via internal mail, had asked for bank account details to be removed.
But HMRC allegedly declined the request as it would be “too costly and too complicated”.
Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Philip Hammond said: “It was made clear the Revenue would not be able to make it available in that form because it would involve an additional payment to an IT firm.”
He said an assistant director at HMRC was copied in on the decision by e-mail.
“Alistair Darling told the House of Commons this was a single maverick junior official operating in contravention of the rules,” Mr Hammond told the BBC.
“This seems to suggest a decision was made at a senior level not to desensitise the data simply to reduce costs.”
He called on the chancellor to say whether he knew senior officials were involved in the decision before he made his Commons statement on Tuesday.
The Tory disclosures are based on a memo by NAO chief Sir John Bourn released to the chairman of the Commons public accounts committee Edward Leigh.
My Newsnight comment:
On the programme tonight, the item which MOST left my gob truly smacked was when Paxman fleetingly referred to the 23 year old clerk being holed up in “a hotel under 24 hour media guard”!
I’m sure I heard it right.
What!?
Are we in Russia or Saudi Arabia suddenly? Personally I was never bothered about all this loss of civil rights stuff that Blair was accused of handing us. Under Blair’s protection I had never felt more free. That is, up until June 27th this year when Brown took over.
And now our “Stalinist” leader has directed that this young man be kept away from the press?! Well, who else decided, if not the man who for the last ten years ran the HMRC? Is he afraid the employee might blab?
InCREDible business.
I second the comment by David Mercer:
“[Brown] … supposedly, was the inventor of New Labour; and responsible for all its success. Those of us who were advisers in the early days knew the reality was very different; Tony Blair, supported by Peter Mandelson, was the creative giant behind the project. But, presumably, the general public believed the Brown myth.”
Any study of recent history of the Labour party and Blair & Brown makes this fairly clear, though Brown too is given credit where due. But, for a start, Blair wanted root and branch change of public services. Brown did not. But Blair had the courage to TELL us. Brown did not. And even now the present PM has not told us if he is thinking of ditching Academy Schools or the PFI.
He is allowed to cloak his “vision” on policy in a shroud. Presumably the same one he wrapped around the airbrushed Blair at conference. The invisibility cloak he used to wear whenever there was trouble.
Bullies are often cowards, are they not?
Until last September when I surprised myself by leaping to Blair’s defence when the backstabbers had a go at him, I had NO IDEA how Blair had changed Labour! And in so doing, he changed the Tories and the country.
Not being a member I’d never studied Labour or New Labour in any depth. I’d just let Blair’s changes wash all over me, like the great disinterested majority.
I was content, you see, as, I believe were a lot of us. Some in the press tried to tell us why we shouldn’t be.
They were wrong; Blair was right.
Their recent history is fascinating and perhaps moreso for someone like me who hasn’t been soaked in its past.
Brown should have been challenged to a contest by Blair in 1994. I expect it’s easy for ME to say. Brown would have lost and, even if Blair HAD made him chancellor, which he probably would have (HE recognises ability) Brown would have had no further claim to the crown than any other MP.
Two-Brains Brown might then have used his brains ONLY to build, not to destroy.
If this present ‘government’ had had any sense at all, they would have left their great reformer and election winner in place.
They’ve clearly blown it.
http://keeptonyblairforpm.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/unbelievable-got-a-child-oh-darling/
Tags: brown, blair, data clerk in hotel, hmrc, darling, newsnight, nao
