Yvette Cooper managed to say ‘let me be clear’ twice, in a couple of minutes during her interview with Nick Robinson on the Today Programme this morning. For seasoned Labour-watchers, the phrase ‘let me be clear’ was one inherited from the grand panjandrum of political deceit – Tony Blair himself – and is almost always an indicator that the person saying is it about to be as unclear as possible. They might as well walk around with the phrase ‘I’m lying’ written on their foreheads in red paint, so obvious an indicator of incoming deceit it is.
If these are the grown ups, then send in the clowns
The Foreign Secretary was on the radio in part to try and explain away Labour’s growing China problem. She took pains to explain how absolutely desperate she’d been to investigate but that it just hadn’t been possible.
‘I am deeply frustrated’, ‘we support changing the laws’, etc. It was like a particularly prevaricatory round of Just A Minute. Please Ms. Cooper, speak about the China Spy Scandal with no illumination, no cooperation and increasing desperation. Your time starts now.
The person whom Cooper was at particular pains not to name was the government’s national security adviser Jonathan Powell. Like many of the ghouls of the Blair years, he has been de-exorcised and brought back into the fold by Starmer. Given what the cadre of Blairite apparatchiks did to the country, our Prime Minister is the equivalent of a man who, having moved into the Amityville House, decides actually he’d rather like the Horror back.
Like a dog to its vomit, Powell almost seems unable to help himself returning to the breach to defend Chinese interests. From cutting his teeth throwing the pro-democracy movement under the bus in the Hong Kong deal during the 1980s, to his negotiation of the Chagos surrender, Powell seems to be in a sort of mystical thrall to Beijing. Judgement then, is clearly not his strong suit. Incidentally, this was also an under-discussed issue with Lord Mandelson’s ambassadorial appointment; his close links to Beijing – which included declaring the rule of law to be intact in Hong Kong, as recently as a year ago – should have prompted as many questions as his nonce-adjacency.
And yet the irony is that the return of Powell to helping the government was part of the PM’s signalling that the ‘grown ups’ were back in charge.
Another such appointment was Lord Hermer, the most damaging Lord H to British interests since Haw Haw. Both appear up to their necks in the Chagos debacle and current China scandal. Lord Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, has urged the Attorney General to attend Parliament to clarify the situation as soon as possible. ‘You simply cannot have a serious national security case collapsing without some proper explanation being given to the public,’ added Macdonald, damningly.
The fact that this is not front page news speaks of two catastrophic failings of Britain today. One, that the Treasury is now essentially a crack addict for Chinese investment. They say revenge is a dish best served cold and now, 200 years after the Opium Wars, it is China which has reduced the British economy to a sordid and soiled husk, dependent on its money. Two, it points to the essential lack of curiosity in much of the media. At the time of writing, the BBC had only covered two domestic politics issues on its website today – a consultation for teenage digital ID and the Plaid Cymru conference. This has moved from navel-gazing and into the sphere of auto-fellatio. There are tribes on the Andaman Islands who shoot down drones with bows and arrows who are more curious about the outside world than many in British journalism.
If, as it appears, Powell has been protecting China at the expense of Britain’s interests, using the rampant incompetence of the government he serves as cover for doing so, then it ought to be a national scandal akin to the Profumo Affair. And if these are the grown ups, then send in the clowns.
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