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Diary

Dennis Sewell

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Dennis Sewell on the state of Lebanon and the charm of Guto Harri

It was a smart move by London’s new mayor choosing the former BBC political correspondent, Guto Harri, as his new communications director. Guto is one of those people who only has to walk into a room to light up smiles all round. One might think that kind of charm would be an essential requirement in a spin-doctor, but it’s mystifyingly rare in the trade. If Guto is looking for an eye-catching initiative to confirm Boris as the man to make our streets safer, he should point Mayor Johnson at a particularly outrageous practice that blights our part of south London. You can call it a tax or a toll or daylight robbery, but round here it’s known as ‘Shakedown Friday’. One of our neighbours has a teenage son whose walk to school takes him past the gates of no fewer than three other secondary schools before he reaches his own. Each Friday his father slips him six quid to pay the £2 impost levied by toughs stationed outside each school upon anyone wearing the uniform of a different establishment. The revenue thus raised pays for drugs and clubbing at the weekend. There’s a political dimension too that might appeal to Guto’s taste for mischief. My neighbour says that the most ruthless enforcers of Shakedown Friday aren’t from the sink-comp, nor even the bog-standard one, but pupils of the shiny new Lambeth Academy. The chairman of the governors there is the Labour party’s house comedian, John O’Farrell, who used to write gags for Gordon Brown’s speeches — though, obviously, that was quite a while ago.

My former colleagues at Newsnight, where I spent a brief but happy spell some years back, can be justifiably proud of their mini-scoop last week revealing the risk of foreign felons getting jobs at Britain’s airports without criminal record checks. Mind you, my own travelling experience confirms that quite a number of those working airside are wrong ’uns anyway, whether they have criminal records or not and whether they’re imported or homegrown. It’s not an urban myth that there are pubs in Hanwell that are pretty much like souks, where you can barter with Heathrow baggage-handlers any night of the week for a dodgy laptop or an iffy iPod. Of course airport security is a deadly serious matter nowadays. But we think we’ve got problems? The immediate trigger for the trouble in Beirut was the Lebanese government’s decision to re-assign the allegedly Hezbollah-friendly Wafiq Shuqair to his post as head of security at Beirut airport. His reinstatement was part of the price Nasrallah demanded for pulling back his militiamen. The news that the airport’s security chief enjoys the wholehearted support of an organisation with a long criminal record of international terrorism can hardly inspire confidence among carriers or passengers. Welcome to Lebanon.

Dennis Sewell Is A Contributing Editor Of The Spectator.