Smith's claims call Brown's political judgement into question

Simon Brock

Test and test

RW

"Does she think her constituency will re-elect her? 'If the general election was tomorrow, definitely not.'"

I think that's the only genuine statement I've ever heard this appalling woman make. At least it shows a glimmer of self-recognition.

Olaf Rye

I have no sympathy for her, nor any of the professional politicians that are in this government or have been apologists for it. It is quite extraordinary, though, that she even confessed to having done something wrong and did not utter the same old Nuremberg defence of 'just following orders', which has been subtly revised in modern Britain to 'acting within the rules' of a corrupt system.

David Alexander

So Smith does a round of Media pieces in an attempt at personal rehabilitation and suddenly..........'aw, she aint so bad, it was all Browns fault'.

How easily spun you journos are!

Pete Hoskin

David Alexander: erm, did you read my first sentence? And where do I say that Smith's misdemeanours are Brown's fault?

Bruce, UK

Jacqui Smith is a machine apparatchik who was an appalling Home Secretary holding Party above country. Her expense claims are an act of theft from the taxpayer and who would rightly, in any law-based society, be arraigned. So of course the Mendacious Manseman would want her to stay on. She is just the sort company he likes to keep.

Carly

She also said Blair would've handled it better. She said he would have seen it coming and stopped it unraveling as it did. Another point she said they've missed Balir communication skills. She has essentially nailed Brown's weaknesses.

Ivan D

Actually, what's you've 'got' to question are the hacks who proclaimed, as one, that Brown wanted Smith to go. Is there any lie so circular, lemming-like and shallow that the Lobby *won't* tell it?

Simon Brock

Test comment form the iPhone app please let me know if you see it

Verity

I give you two words: Geert Wilders.

The woman's a grotesque thought fascist.

David Parker

Of course this demonstrates Brown's lack of judgement, but not for asking her to stay on (which may or may not be true) but for appointing her in the first place. Nothing in her previous career suggested that she was capable of coping with any senior ministerial post, let alone that of Home Secretary.

Chuck Unsworth

So the only complaint you have is that she was 'ineffective' and her expenses claims were 'dubious'. Well, given that, she is clearly a paragon of virtue and probity......

I think you should take a much closer look at this woman. The sole reason she lost her job was that she was a political embarrassment to Brown. Had she not been so she'd still be a Minister. Competence and personal integrity are nothing at all to do with it. What about Hain, what about Ainsworth, what about Mandelson?

Pete Hoskin

Chuck Unsworth: no, as it happens, that isn't all I have against her - I didn't think you'd make the mistake of concluding that from one sentence in one post. I probably phrased my views more strongly in posts around the time when her dodgy receipts broke, but suffice to say that I think she was a disgraceful minister.

Pete Hoskin

Chuck Unsworth: besides, I did throw in a "to say the least," which was intended to flag up understatement.

Steve.W

It's not hard it's impossible for me to feel sorry for Jacqui Smith. She claimed, as a way of promoting ID cards, that people were always coming up to her and asking for a card. I am in contact with people in her constituency who cannot find any evidence of this on the scale Smith suggests was the case.

Also Smith's husband was fond of writing to the local paper and saying what a good job the Home Secretary was doing for the UK. The paper regularly printed these letters so was either fooled or joined in the game. So, Redditch the rotten borough?

David Alexander

Sorry Peter but as a normal person I read a piece and am left with a 'flavour'. The very headline plants the seed of Browns guilt. Yes I read the first sentence and buttressed against it is one expressing sympathy. As Rod Liddle remarks in The Speccie this week..........Journos are going to be next!

strapworld

An over promoted classroom assistant.

Frank P

I give you two words too - bus conductress!

mac

" . . . feel slightly sorry", Pete?

Soft lad to be even remotely taken in by a Grauniad kid glove, 'human face', attempted rehabilitation piece. Pity Hattenstone didn't follow up on her "reformist legacy' remark by exploring some her her crypto-fascist 'radicalism' at the Home Office, wouldn't you say?

Your blog should have ended after its first sentence.

Mark M

He wanted her to stay so it could appear as though HE kicked her out, rather than her leaving. Everything he does is a calculated attempt at scoring political points.

In this case, he wanted to appear a strong leader. Someone prepared to cast aside someone clearly not up to the job. He didn't want her jumping ship before he had a chance to push her.

The Huntsman

"...it's hard not to feel slightly sorry for her as she discusses the embarrassment caused by her husband's porn rentals..."

Bearing in mind her ludicrous claims concerning the nature of her 'main home' vs her 'second home', claims which any reasonable Juror in a criminal trial or a Libel trial would readily describe as 'dishonest', and her looting of the public purse by way of expenses (which she effectively concedes in the Grauniad), sympathy is not an emotion one feels at all in this woman's case.

When added to her relentless campaign to arm the State with all the impedimenta of a police state, the thought that she knows she will be removed from political life within the next eleven months fills me, and I suspect many other Coffee Housers, with nothing but unalloyed pleasure.

Verity

She bulged with bad judgement.

She postured fatly in charge of our ways and traditions, one of which was our ancient way of regarding one's sister's spare room as one's major household, despite that one's children and porno-addicted husband lived elsewhere.

She had the overweening, not to say lunatic, temerity to have a duly elected representative of an EU parliament banned from entering our country, to show a film he had co-authored, in the HoL at the invitation of a lord, because she had been "threatened" by "Lord" (ha ha ha ha!!)Ahmad Something with a march of 10,000 angry Muslims on Parliament if she allowed MP Geert Wilders into our country. As far as Jackie Jackboots was concerned, the Muslims were in charge not only of who could speak in the HoL, but who can enter our country.

The woman is the slime in 50 year-old loo pipes.

Verity

Frank P - "I give you two words too - bus conductress!"

Oh, Frank, lol! That was perfect!

RW

Following Steve W's comment, I wonder if there is any reader of this blog or anyone at Coffeehouse who has ever met, or knows someone who has met, a real person in possession of the wits they were born with who has ever been known to say (a) "If you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" and (b) "Yes! I'd like an ID card, please!".

Free Thomist

She knows that when her electorate does "vote her out" she will, as the convention of our hopeless Parliament dictates, join Martin and others in her sinecure in the Lords.
How can that be just for a useless Home secretary who "did wrong".

Chuck Unsworth

@ Pete Hoskin.

Nice to have two responses!

Maybe my understanding of your phraseology is at fault. 'To say the least' is hardly total condemnation, I'd suggest....

Nonetheless - and to encapsulate - in my view this woman is a monstrous, self-serving, incompetent, unintelligent apparatchik.

Perhaps you regard that careful analysis as a touch extreme. If so, let us agree to disagree, eh?

Marian C

The Huntsman;

Well said

Marian C

Verity;

"She bulged with bad judgement".

"The woman is the slime in 50 year-old loo pipes".

Verity, your so funny, I nearly choked on my coffee at your description;

Pete Hoskin

Chuck Unsworth: my point is more that we can agree to agree!

Nicholas

One of the many bossy, arrogant, porky, twin chip-shouldered, helmet-headed New Labour wimmen with a background in education (!), local government, or social work, who witter on about trivia in our parliament and want to treat us all like children or the inmates of the largest open prison in the world.

I don't just disrespect these gobby female bullies. I detest them.

Who cares what the odious idiot Brown said or did not say to her. Get off the stage and disappear into your well-deserved and long-overdue obscurity Smith - you are (thank God) history.

Verity

I always felt the striped hair was a mistake.

Susan Hill

SIMON BROCK. Yes, it worked. I can see it.

Paul

I never feel sorry for villains.

Sam Armstrong

Geert Wilders? ID cards? Ineffective borders? Policing on the cheap? Porn on the taxpayer?

No, I am sorry, I do not feel sorry for this woman. And if she really is down in the dumps, what the hell is she doing selling her grief to the papers.

Florence of Arabia

Sam Armstrong - so are you forgetting kowtowing to "Lord" (tee hee; giggle) Ahmad, who threatened the then Home Secretary with 10,000 angry young Muslim men storming the House of Lords.

She should have ordered him arrested for threatening the British government.

That a Home Secretary should cringe beneath such a threat is so disgusting that she should have been stripped of her office on the spot, with all her things waiting in cartons outside in the corridor for her to pick up.