Fiona Millar to the Commons...

Dave B

Ms Miller does not seem to be a very sympathetic figure. That particular election would be one to watch :-)

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100063414/five-questions-for-fiona-millar/

Simon Stephenson.

Great for those who enjoy the shallow battles that pass for politics these days - another dogmatic, closed-minded, Big-State leftie to fire corks at. For those of us who'd like to see both Left and Right arguing their views, rather than just trumpeting them, it's just the latest example of the system's failure.

Sarah D.S.

I think you'll find it's Fiona Millar (not Miller) and Alastair (not Alistair). FFS people, it's not rocket science.

DavidDP

Presumably her husband will help to sex up her campaign leaflets.

les

Yet more inter breeding!

Ralph

'Miller would become Education Secretary ‘within a year''

Money well spent there Alistair?

Russell

Troughers cannot resist continuing to live the high life at the expense of the taxpayers, getting household incomes from the 'commoners'.

I suppose at least she will have to be elected albeit by mainly BBC believers, unlike Campbell (who maintains a steady income at the expense of BBC licence fee payers who have no choice, as when he was in government unelected).

If the BBC continue their pro labour position (today featuring Watson and BBC newscaster stating "Watson knows more about the hacking scandal than ANYONE else"!, a few million fee payers should consider boycotting payment.

All we get on BBC is shamed politicians like Blears, Jacqui Smith, Prescott, Campbell, and reporters such as Muckguire (photographed yesterday with Balls and Whelan at the cricket), (I wonder what they were discussing?). all getting more money from us on newsnight, The Daily Politics, The Politics Show and Question Time, as well as continuously on BBC News24.

Never mind the monopoly of NI, of far more importance is the brainwashing bias of the BBC on behalf of the Labour party.

No doubt we will see Campbells 'other' being interviewed by the BBC regularly between now and the election.

YouCannotBeSerious!

Millar, not Miller.

My invoice for sub-editing services is in the post

Andy Carpark

All I know about her is that she is a 'passionate' believer in state education and a militant atheist. Funny how the two often seem to go hand in hand.

Given that the idea of state education is per se neither good, bad nor indifferent (there being kinds of state education other than the British comprehensive system), it is difficult to see what a 'passionate' believer in state education could amount to, other than a vicious opponent of education being supplied from any other source.

There is also something not quite coherent about militant atheism, or militancy about an absence, like the attempt of the po-faced autocrat Enver Hoxha to found a Museum of Atheism in Tirana. (What was in it?)

Again, it is not so much unswerving commitment to something as a Stalinist intolerance of any conceivable alternatives. I am sort of making this up as I go along, but I strongly suspect there is a common psychological, even psychopathic, origin to the two viewpoints.

(For what it's worth, I have always been an admirer of the state education systems in Russia and China and have vanishingly small interest in metaphysical questions.)

Nick

So Labour still hasn't embraced teh concept of open primaries to select candidates. How very undemocratic.

Why aren't Tory spokesmen all over the media highlighting yet another anti-democratic Labour stitch-up ?

Nat

It's MillAr.

Sir Graphus

So that's the comprehensive schools system gone to pot again, even if Gove can sort it out.

Gawain

I think I want to cry ! If the Labour Party thinks that this vile, bullying witch has any worthwhile role in the education of children they need psychotherapy ! She is more toxic than her partner and is the nastiest face in what is now becoming a very nasty party.

Liz Brown

so nepotism stil firmly with liebour then...a faint glimmer of hope that the consituents will come to their senses and vote for any candidate other than the ghastly cohort of the dangerous Al

Hard Hearted Perry

And probably already working on a cartload of excuses as to why the state education system sank deeply into the abyss during LieBore years, whilst 'results' maintained an upward trend, - not that I would infer a weakening of standards or anything like!

Old Fox

The appointment of a retrograde, neanderthal vandal like her to such a post would constitute the blackest day in British education since the arrival of the ape, Crosland. She sees schools not as a ladder of opportunity but as an egalitarian bludgeon, bashing the brains out of the middle class. It is the spectre of creeps and ghouls like Millar and Balls which keeps many of us backing Cameron.

Simon Stephenson.

Old Fox : 11.48am

Spot on.

But would someone other than Cameron stand more chance of keeping her out, though?

J H Holloway

Genuinely nasty piece of work - witness Frazer's expose here of Millar and Benn's use of patsy parents and legal aid to try and stop schools opting out.

I hear that a Millar off-spring made into Oxbridge this year. They'll claim it as a victory for state education. The rest of know that a middle-class dominated metropolitan comp and two graduate parents who both worked at No10 might have more to do with it.

Even more bunker-minded than Hattie and more of a sh*t stirrer than Balls, appointing Millar to the front bench would show how Labour is giving up on the real world for the home comforts of Dartmouth Park.

Tiberius

THe prospect of such an individual in power is truly terrifying. Thank God the Tories elected a leader capable of bringing back many of the voters who deserted the party in 1997. Otherwise Brown would be in power and Stalinist Britain would be in rude health.

roger37

We don't want people like her in Parliament. She is a typical champagne socialist troublemaker hell bent on anarchy.

TrevorsDen

Good call daveB - all in all its yet another good reason for all good tories to come to the aid of the party and ensure that labour are never let need government.

This is the number 1 priority, and the number 2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10th priority

David Smart

Good God I'm glad we still have somebody who remembers the dark figure of Anthony Crosland,Old Fox is right to remind us of the man who wanted to and suceeded in destroying the Grammar schools.As an ex grammar school boy I was able to rise from my bottomm rung on the ladder and also to develop socially and culturally,indeed it was proved to be the conduit to social mobility that this latest example of Fiona Millar slithers into view ready to stick her finger in the pie.What is reprehensible about these cohorts- The Balls Two are prime examples,went to public school but don't mind condemning the rest of their constituents to bog standard state schools,made bog standard by the social engineers who followed their political leaders wishes.The Mega state employees who helped to keep down any sign of educational excellence or original,even unorthodox thinking by a school pupil.Don't mention the word elitism.These are desperate times and I still find it difficult to understand the reluctance to re-introduce grammar schoos,although there has been an attempt to extend the rolls of courent grammar schools.Perhaps we should all move to hampstead and get on the electoral roll,but seriously don't think she won't get the job if They win.

Simon Stephenson.

Tiberius : 12.22pm

"Thank God the Tories elected a leader capable of bringing back many of the voters who deserted the party in 1997."

Indeed, though presumably you'ld have thanked God even more if they'd elected a leader who'd been capable of doing this without, at the same time, alienating those who deserted the Perty in 2010, so scuppering the chances of winning with an overall majority?

Still, you can't have everything, I suppose, though in my book that shouldn't mean settling for an intermediate position before you've exhaused the possibilities of it being improving upon.

Sir Everard Digby

The definition of a militant atheist is:

'one who is militantly opposed to theism, theists, and religion. Militant atheists have an extreme hostility towards religious theism that entails a desire to see religion suppressed by force'

Perfect Labour Party fodder then.Religion =thought crime= must be suppressed.

Do they see the Tories as a religion? It would explain a lot.

perdix

Maybe Campbell can help her "sex up" her policy documents!

William Moore

Dan Hannan, your country needs you!

Anxiously Stable

Just for the pleasure of seeing Toby Young and Fiona Millar going at it hammer and tongs in the Commons, can't someone nominate him to pick up a safe Tory seat before the next election?

Frank P

The two faeces in the illustration above perfectly depict the ugliness of socialism.

[oops! Sorry! A Freudian 'e' slipped into the third word above - perhaps I should just leave it in?].

Andy Carpark

Frank P - WBGTWI?

arnoldo87

To sum it up, then, you all think she'd make a pretty good Member of Parliament.

I agree.

michael

@ Frank P . It's just the maths that's awry -
I reckon it up to at least 4 .

StrongholdBarricades

That doesn't say a lot about the current encumbant of the post, and seems to accept that the Labour Party might dispense with it's election system for the Shadow Cabinet.

V

The photo is interesting proof that egoists with all the answers and a will to impose their solutions on others tend to marry people who look almost exactly like them. Mirrors.

Simon Stephenson.

J H Holloway : 12.21pm

"I hear that a Millar off-spring made into Oxbridge this year. They'll claim it as a victory for state education. The rest of know that a middle-class dominated metropolitan comp and two graduate parents who both worked at No10 might have more to do with it.">

Not to mention of course the anticipation of the College authorities of the self-aggrandising vitriol that would pour forth from the mouths of Ms Millar and her equally rabble-rousing "partner", Alastair Campbell, if their offspring were to be turned down for any reason other than no longer being alive.

RocketDog

It's not just nasty pieces of work like these two sitting at the foundations of the political class and living off the rest of us

What about people like Nicola Blackwood? (Cameron babe representing East Oxford & Abingdon - saw her vacuous questioning when Stephenson was prancing around in front of Vaz etc last week). According to her web site she was home schooled, has a first in Music, and to all extents and purposes HAS NEVER HAD A PROPER JOB. (Also probably more interested in human rights and Africa than Cowley and Blackbird Leys)

Westminster is full of them. Whatever their political hue they drop straight out of Oxbridge into an internship, ten minutes as a journalist or in PR ands the next thing that we know they are sitting somewhere in or around Westminster thinking up ideas about how to draw attention to themselves

If local constituencies could choose their own candidates without central party interference I think that these freaks would be left at the periphery and we might get some real representation. At the moment it is a farce

Frank P

Andy CP

Your inferred innuendo was unintentional - but then ... That's Freud for ya! ;-)

Btw; my favourite Freud one-liner is "If youth knew; if age could". It gets more relevant by the hour on this blog.

Frank P

michael

Should have copied last comment to you also.

David Ossitt

Andy Carpark.

“(For what it's worth, I have always been an admirer of the state education systems in Russia and China and have vanishingly small interest in metaphysical questions.)”

Cuba has a great system; I had it explained to me in great detail many years ago by our guide an ex-head of English at some Cuban University.

He said we look for natural talent and abilities and then we encourage and nurture it, in that way we produce ‘elite’ in every sphere and from that we all benefit.

Occasional Ostrich

Russell @11:26am

If I were presented with such an appropriately well filled trough, I'd get my nose into it ASAP.

We mugs should make much more of an issue about getting these troughs closed off, and getting the troughers to understand that they are OUR employees.

John Montague

It really would be funny, not to mention delightful, if this loathsome woman lost Hampstead. Frognal socialists may vote Labour on principle, but a lot of them will resent Millar's attack-dog approach to the academic elite, be it the London and region public schools or Oxbridge.

Alan Douglas

We must assume that Mrs Millar will agree with the policy as propagated by her "husband", one A Campbell, of pushing for more "bog-standard" Comprehensive schools.

Alan Douglas

Tiberius

Simon S: nothing wrong with idealism!

No other Tory would have done as well as Cameron in the 2010 GE.

Silent Hunter

Hah!

Good(sic) old Labour; still as sleazy as ever . . . now it's "jobs for the Girls"!

Simon Stephenson.

Tiberius : 5.06pm

Well this rather raises the question "Is Cameron a Tory?" Certainly he's a member of the Conservative Party, but is he, or the modern Conservative Party, accurately described as being Tory. A similar question to "how liberal are the Liberal Democrats?", or "which part of the labour force does Labour still look after? Even in the public sector, are Labour's eyes more on the extension of the scope of the sector than on the wellbeing of the people who work in it?"

Isn't the reality that all three Parties who the mainstream would consider voting for have graduated into being State-important communitarians, where this ideological commitment is stronger in policy formulation even than the favouritism they have historically shown to their natural supporters? Isn't the opinion poll and focus group data, by which they assess policy, determined by people choosing from what they consider to be available, not from what they'd like to have if there were a Party offering it? Isn't the concentration of Parties around communitarianism more to do with ease of marketing it, than that very many people actually want it?

David Lindsay

Education Secretary? She can dream on. Blair's Court was exiled when the right Miliband won the Labour Leadership. It won't be coming back.

Tankus

Was it an all male shortlist ?

Tiberius

Simon S: I think the BBC and the Labour party think he's a Tory, as do Gordon Brown, Dennis Skinner and Bob Crowe.

Once the New Labour blight has passed (and the voicemail hacking scandal may well hasten that), the Tory party can once again present policy in a way which won't leave it exposed to the juvenile sniggering of snakes like Blair, Brown, Mandelson, Campbell and the rest.

Simon Stephenson.

Tiberius : 8.33pm

If you take off your hat that says "I need to support the Conservative Party, irrespective of what it's currently favouring", are you intrinsically a supporter of the Generation X, modern world Conservatism that Cameron is promoting? It's far more State-important than any Conservatism we've seen in the past - even the One Nation stuff of Macmillan and Heath. Do you start from "this is my type of philosophy" or is your support more along the lines of "this is the best I'm going to get from the choices available"?

David Lindsay

Tiberius, Ed Miliband recently and rightly withdrew from the Durham Miners' Gala rather than appear on a platform with Bob Crow, whose union has not been affiliated to the Labour Party for some years (nor have I, but that's another story) and whose closest connection to any political party is now to that of David Cameron.

For the Conservative Party quite recently welcomed, with some fanfare, John Marek, who was fiercely anti-monarchist and anti-hunting while Labour MP for Wrexham, and who went on to become the founder and only ever Leader of Forward Wales, a Welsh separatist, Welsh-speaking supremacist, economically Hard Left, unyieldingly Politically Correct, Tommy Sheridan-endorsed, RMT-funded party which was only dissolved in January of last year. Although he is now a Conservative Party activist, Dr Marek still lists Forward Wales as his party on the list of former MPs who retain House of Commons passes.

But then, the upper classes, from which this Cabinet is so heavily drawn, were the only section of society in which, right up to the fall of the Soviet Union and even beyond, it was perfectly respectable to profess oneself a Communist. It was just dismissed, in an attitude unknown to the rest of Britain at the time, as an amusing little eccentricity such as any proper toff is obliged to have. Not everyone might have known that Anthony Blunt was a KGB agent, but everyone, including Her Majesty His Employer, knew that he was a Communist, and snobbish as only Marxists ever quite are. Then as now, and really at every point in between, anyone who was sufficiently grand could secure advancement in the Conservative Party, and it was considered vulgar to enquire as to specific political opinions.

Who would look for them in the Conservative Party? Yet the seriously posh world of MI6 and the upper echelons of MI5 was absolutely riddled with them right up until the bitter end, to the point that it had become a standing joke even within the general public. Everyone knew that the KGB's main recruitment ground was not the patriotic, socially conservative trade union movement or anything like that, but Oxbridge in general and Cambridge in particular, and only the public school rather than the grammar school circles even there. (There was in fact a huge amount of patriotism and no shortage of social conservatism in the USSR, but that is another story.)

The perfectly preposterous idea that Harold Wilson, of all people, and for heaven's sake even Ted Short and George Thomas in the more recent versions, were somehow Soviet sleeper agents continues to serve what has always been its purpose, that of pure distraction from what ought to be the blindingly obvious reality.

I have written before about the convergence of the 1970s sectarian Left and the 1980s Radical Right in the present Political Class, and also about the extent to which the Conservative Party is now the willing and cheerful vehicle of choice for the Far Left, for Islamists and for Asian communal rabble-rousers. I reiterate all of that, and I shall doubtless return to it. But it would be wrong to assume that the extreme Left, its means changed from the economic to the social and cultural, has flowed into this only in the form of its creation and instrument, New Labour.

Important though that is, at least as important for the present Government is the influence of Common Room and country house mentors, most dead but some still alive, who were introduced with a chirpy, "He's a Communist, you know". Not only that, but, unlike almost any proletarian, "he" was actually on the payroll. And "he" is still earning "his" pay, even if from beyond the grave.

Baron

David Lindsay, remind me, if you will, Jack Jones went to Eton, Cambridge, Oxford, or to all three of those nests of British communism?

Baron

you are too harsh on both of them, he meant well, she means well, what else could one ask for.

his ‘45 minutes from certain death’ claim was to back up the precious Labour government, her love for the standard comp is to secure the supply of voting fodder for the precious Labour tribe, one sees nothing wrong with either.

David Lindsay

Baron, in 1983, Michael Foot refused to endorse Peter Tatchell as a candidate for the House of Commons; in 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a seat in the House of Lords. Think on.

The Tories backed the 45-minute claim up to the hilt rather than questioning it as they were paid to do, and their LEAs were the first to go comp, with so many grammar schools closed while Thatcher was Education Secretary that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled, with not a single one re-opened between 1979 and 1997, and with Cameron eventually leading every single one of his MPs into the Government Lobby in support of an outright ban on any more grammar schools in England.

biggestaspidistra

John Montague: 'Frognal socialists'

chuckles.

Baron

David Lindsay, ta, your replying after all I’ve hurled at you has marked you up in my book (not that you should care though), still, however much Baron thinks on, no neurons light up, deed poll name change from Jones to Tatchell perhaps, then cosmetic reshaping, lipotropic jabs? Am I on the right track? Surely not.

on the other issue, hard to argue with evidence, but you may like to note Baron ain’t a member, never has been of any party, has never voted for any party he agrees with, only one he disagrees with the least, there hasn’t been one since 1992.

and lastt, have you ever heard me sayin the boy’s a conservative?

David Lindsay

Baron, my point was that blame can and should be apportioned equally between the two parties, both for Iraq and for comprehensivisation.

RCE

I look forward to seeing/hearing her non-stop on the BBC henceforth.

Suzi Q

Hmm. Richard kay at the Daily Mail, that well known source of inside track Labour Party gossip. I think not. First Ms Millar has to get selected - and there are a long list of contenders for H&K and then Labour has to get elected - which may not be instant....