CHARLES MOORE We all know about spin in theory, bu
CHARLES MOORE We all know about spin in theory, but we are slow to notice it in practice. The approved version of the release of Gillian Gibbons, the 'teddy bear' teacher in the Sudan, is that the Sudanese government has seen reason thanks to the mission of two Muslim peers, Lord Ahmed and Lady Warsi. But is that so? Is it likely that the Sudanese government had no hand in the original, preposterous charge against her, and did not plan the game which followed? Is it credible that the demonstration calling for fiercer punishment for Ms Gibbons was not approved by the government? Was there any real concession in releasing Ms Gibbons after eight days rather than 15? Lord Ahmed is highly sympathetic to Islamist views. In 2005, for example, he hosted the book launch of an extreme anti-Semite in the House of Lords. Lady Warsi (see last week's Notes) opposes Muslim moderates because they are 'off the map'. It will have suited the Sudanese government to have empowered such Muslim intermediaries and snubbed official British government interventions, without conceding anything of substance itself. Now the pressure will be on our government to sneak away from its promises of helping the task force in Darfur in the interests of good relations with the murderers in Khartoum.
T t is not proving helpful to Gordon 1 Brown that he is the 'son of the manse'. The transition from Scottish Presbyterian minister in one generation to Prime Minister in the next was never likely to appeal to the majority. And now that scandal has engulfed Mr Brown, his holy background becomes the object of satire. An additional difficulty, I suspect, is that very few people in England know what a 'manse' is. In his dictionary, Dr Johnson defines it as '1. Farm and land. 2. A parsonage house.' But if you did not know that, how, from recent coverage, might you guess? As well as Mr Brown, his henchman, Douglas Alexander and Douglas's sister Wendy, the Scottish Labour leader who appears knowingly to have taken a forbidden donation from a man in Jersey, are also children of the manse. Will people conclude that the phrase means something like the word 'godfather' in the novels of Mario Puzo? As Chairman of the flourishing Rectory Society, I should like to take this opportunity to say that our work is not confined to England, Wales and Ireland. We welcome those with an interest in Scottish clerical property, former or current (membership@rectorysociety.org. uk), and we promise that, even for the most prodigal sons, we shall kill the fatted calf. Our annual general meeting, by the way, is at St George's, Hanover Square at 7 p.m. on Tuesday 29 January, where Lady Mary Keen will speak on parsonage gardens; free to members, non-members £10. Prime ministers may donate to the society pseudonymously.
people have pointed out the contrast between Mr Brown's uncontested 'campaign' for his party's leadership, which put the cleaning-up of politics at its centre, and what has happened now. Some attribute it to straightforward hypocrisy. But I suspect that the more powerful explanation was the crazed desire to go for a quick election. This took hold of Mr Brown's inner circle (notably of the non-Reverend Douglas Alexander) almost as soon as their man became Prime Minister at the end of June. It preoccupied everything the government did until, at the end of the week of the Tory conference in early October, the plan was aborted. If you want a sudden election, you want lots of money fast, and you have neither the time nor the inclination to ask searching questions about what has already come in. That would be why Peter Watt, the General Secretary of the Labour party, failed to see the hidden gifts of Mr Abrahams as, to use Mr Brown's cant phrase, 'totally unacceptable' and, indeed, accepted them. Any problems, he and other election managers would have reasoned, could have been sorted out after a Brown landslide had given the government new legitimacy. Alas, the best-laid plans of manse and men went oft agley, and by the end of October, Jon Mendelsohn, Labour's director of election resources, had to turn his mind to the mess. But by then it was too late.
Afriend who is an expert in the psychology of big donors to political parties points out that the desire to give under pseudonyms has grown much greater now that it is considered wrong to give honours to donors. If true, this is another example of how the wrong moral lessons keep being learnt. It is not necessarily wrong to give knighthoods or peerages to people who donate to parties. It is necessarily wrong to take money from people who are pretending to be someone else. The same applies to the proposal to put a ceiling on the amount of money anyone can give. There is nothing wrong with giving large sums honestly and openly: a ceiling would not clean up anything, but would add a new temptation to give money by roundabout means. The call for yet more reform of the law is what you might call a Brown herring.
Most people agree that last week was the most embarrassing for the Labour party since Mr Brown became Prime Minister. This would have been hard to discern from the reporting in the Times, though. After splashing on the first day of the story, it then relegated front-page coverage to single paragraph crossreferences, and concentrated on things like the 'stealth curriculum' for toddlers instead. The comment, too, was amazingly unThundering. If the Times has a feeling that there is, in general, too much Westminster politics in the newspapers, it is right. But here is a case where the story really does make a difference: an entire government is paralysed by scandal and the fear of more scandal to come. Why shelter Times readers from this news?
t the Labour conference in September, Jack Dromey said that his party was 'starting to gear up' for an election, and was `no longer racking up debts' but 'living within our means'. He also attacked Boris Johnson, saying he was a 'tufty toff' and 'as genuine as a nine-bob note'. Mr Dromey is married to the niece of an earl, Harriet Harman, who is the Deputy Leader of the Labour party. She accepted £5,000 from Mr Abrahams, which he gave under the pseudonym of Janet Kidd. Mr Dromey is Treasurer of the Labour party. One would not be human if one did not get a little thrill of pleasure from rereading Mr Dromey's words now.
T n America, Philip Pullman's trilogy, His 1 Dark Materials, has been renamed The Golden Compass for the purposes of a film Should the reverse happen in Britain, and Gordon Brown's 'moral compass' be renamed his 'dark materials'?
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