Dishonest John Sweeney was on show at the Union Street Fire in Glasgow yesterday all dressed up in a Hi-Vis Jacket so that he was difficult to miss. The TV cameras were rolling, of course, hence the Hi-Vis. It was the first time Dishonest John has been seen in Glasgow for many years.
Amazing what a forthcoming Holyrood election in May can do for a First Minister's soul. As if John cares a damn about Glasgow - but votes are votes.
Classic Dishonest John.
The Right Honourable Lucy Powell is MP for a Northern working class constituency. She is also Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. As far as we are aware, she no longer holds any Government appointment as she and Keir don't get on terribly well.
Lucy is one of the great freeloaders of the current Parliament. She has received tens and tens of thousands of GBPs recently in what is euphemistically called 'gifts'. Not 'bungs', of course, but 'gifts'. Can anyone tell us why the hell would a politician ever accept a 'gift' from anyone?
Following last week's disastrous by-election in Denton and Gorton, Lucy stuck the knife brutally into Keir saying that if that chancer, Andy Burnham, had been the Labour candidate instead of the Labour-annointed candidate, Labour would have won.
That's how stupid Lucy actually is. It has never dawned on her that the root causes of Labour's unpopularity are (a) the almost unbelieveable wholesale acceptance of this thing called 'gifts' to politicians that scunnered the electorate (b) the quite extraordinary dishonesty on which Labour based its election promises to the electorate and (c) Labour's abysmal record since being elected to Government some 20 months ago.
You might be stupid, Lucy, but we certainly aren't. That's why your own seat is on a very shoogly nail same as the rest of them.
Peter Mandelson was arrested two days ago by the Metropolitan Police invesigating the fallout from the Epstein Saga in the United States. He was held for 8 hours before being released on bail.
The allegations the Police are investigating relate to this outrageous common law English crime called 'Misconduct in Public Office'. This deeply unsatisfactory crime is the sort of crime that, for a public official, is magnificently vague but covers every alleged wrongdoing under the sun.
Yesterday, Mandelson's solicitors hit out at the decision to arrest him on Police suspicion that he was going to flee the country. They said there was 'absolutely no truth whatsoever' on which to base that suspicion and we accept that without question.
In our view, this is the Metropolitan Police response to the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrest by Thames Valley Police of last week. We regard both arrests as totally without justification at this stage of the investigations.
We have the same bad vibes about Mandelson's arrest that we had of Mountbatten-Windsor's arrest.
For some days now, the media has been awash with the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to ad nauseam accompaniment that 'no one is above the law' and nonsense of that sort. It's been poor journalism for the most part.
From our point of view, we are very far from convinced that arrest was either justified or appropriate at this stage and we are firmly of the view that Thames Valley Police were simply grandstanding to be first out the box for a Royal Arrest - the first Royal Arrest since Charles I we are gleefully and repeatedly told. We are told also that the arrest was in relation to allegations of Misconduct in Public Office - ie scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel allegations - relating to Mr Mountbatten-Windsor's time as UK Trade Envoy many years ago. (Mr Mountbatten-Windsor was appointed UK Trade Envoy by Tony Blair when Prime Minister in 2001 but that's another story).
We have been told further that Mr Mountbatten-Windsor's various properties were searched and, indeed, continue to be searched as we write. We are unsure what the Police expect to find in those properties from all those years ago but there you are. Certainly, they have not explained anything and the arrestee was released without charge after only 11 hours in custody.
That, in itself, is unusual in that if the arrest was a really genuine arrest, rather than for show purposes, one would have expected the detention to have been either for a much longer duration or the arrestee formally charged with a crime. In a normal criminal investigation of this type of allegation, we would expect the Police to search first and arrest later if considered appropriate. And why, of all things, was Mr Mountbatten-Windsor simply not invited to attend the Police Station by civilised arrangement?
That Mr Mountbatten-Windsor is a very unsavoury character - and keeps equally unsavoury company - there is no doubt. That, however, does not in our view justify the circumstances of his arrest. It has been reported, rightly or wrongly, that eight separate Police Forces are interested in Mr Mountbatten-Windsor. If that is so, we hope they proceed with much more professionalism, finesse and savvy than Thames Valley Police.
Sadly, we suspect that none of this has registered remotely with Mr Mountbatten-Windsor. He is way beyond any form of contrition, correction or redemption - or even understanding of his predicament.
Dorothy Bain is the Lord Advocate of Scotland and, as such, the country's most senior criminal prosecutor. She's now got herself into a very big pickle and entirely of her own making.
After the decision had been made by Ms Bain's department to prosecute Nicola Sturgeon's husband, Mr Murrell, on charges of fraud allegedly amounting to £460,000, Ms Bain wrote to First Minister John Swinney advising him the details of an indictment and charges that had been served on Mr Murrell and that the case was calling in court on 20 February. This was an extremely unusual and extremely stupid thing for a Lord Advocate to do as it didn't concern Swinney in any way. Neither the public nor the Press was informed, only Swinney.
All hell broke loose subsequently and the matter called in the Scottish Parliament yesterday when Ms Bain tried to explain herself to MSPs. She failed miserably and appeared utterly clueless. Essentially, she had no answer to what she did and, bizarrely, maintained that once an indictment had been served on an accused the matter was then public. However, her underlings at Crown Office refuted this and said an indictment is a public matter only when it first calls in court. They cannot both be right ...... and common sense indicates to us that the underlings, rather than the Lord Advocate, are correct.
The Conservatives claimed the circumstances 'smacks of corruption' but such claim is, in our view, grossly over the top. Rather, it smacks entirely of incompetence and stupidity. It's not, exactly, like a Sheriff corruptly giving a verdict in favour of a party to whom he or, indeed, she is beholden in some form or other.
On any view the Lord Advocate is clearly out of her depth. That's the worrying bit.
Well, you could have struck us down with a feather.
We have just learned that Jonathan Powell, former Chief of Staff to Tony Blair as Prime Minister, has been National Security Adviser to Keir Starmer since November 2024. Powell has no qualifications whatsoever for the post other than being a fully-paid-up member of The Gravy Train.
Sums up Starmer's Government in one.
