If you think today's Hoon/Hewitt ionspired events have been fairly calamitous all round, you don't know the half of it. I am told that Geoff Hoon mistakenly sent a blank email to all Labour MPs at 10.40am this morning, realised what he had done, then sent another one apologising. And then finally, just after PMQs had finished he managed to send the real thing. By that time, some Labour MPs had tired of getting emails from Hoon and didn't bother to read it.
This email malarkey isn't as easy as it looks, apparently.
17 comments:
I dont blame him this email thing will never catch on :)
Unless he did it on purpose to delay the whole event?
I have some questions that the readers of your blog might be able to provide some enlightenment. The piece has just been posted on my blog and is pasted below.
Labour's achievements
Geoff Hoon and Particia Hewitt in their justification for the already failing coup today talked of Labour's achievements and that these needed to be presented properly. Which raises a good question - What exactly have been Labour's achievements over these long 13 years?
Well it will depend who you are. Conservatives would be hard put to come up with anything and instead would point to a long list of failures and costs. But what would Labour people say? I can think of two sets of achievement that they would point to. One would be the massive quantum of public spending directed to objectives that could be considered desirable. Health, education and the support to the poor and disadvantaged would I imagine be where Labour hearts would swell a little. The fact that by pretty well any objective measure of outcome (i.e. not from the Labour government's own statistics), the waste and lack of results has been monumental, would I imagine not be of too much concern. For just as a true Tory supports and celebrates private activities (you might almost say however disreputable), the opposite would be true for the Left - where public spending, however wasteful and degenerative would be seen as an intrinsic good.
The other area I imagine where the Left would feel a little better inside would be the extent of legislation and activities in support of a better society. Equal rights legislation and devolution would be two such areas. And again the Right would say that at best these efforts have been neutral but if unintended consequences are taken into account, these activities can be viewed as damaging to the values, principles, social fabric and unity of the country.
And what I wonder would the Left say about the two wars begun under Labour, the failure to plan for energy supply over the next decade, the massive expansion of immigration (unplanned and still unexplained) and the awful deficit and indebtedness of both the private and public sector. I just don't know. Would the Left in their hearts believe that there are competency questions to answer here? Would they find it easy to sweep all this under the carpet? I just don't know.
And would there be any pang at all for the failure to put the Lisbon treaty to a referendum? I am pretty sure of the answer here and that is - why no pangs at all.
I remember the pictures of a tearful Thatcher when she was forced out of Downing Street - saying that she did believe that she was leaving Britain in a better state than when she had found it. So my final two questions are these. Do the Left honestly believe that Britain now is in a better state than 1997 and if they do believe that Britain is better, in what sense is that and is it due in the main to their administration?
I suppose it would interesting to know how many of the Left would have agreed with the tearful Thatcher outside No 10. Probably not very many but I would say more than there are now Tories who would have much good to say about anything of the dying embers of New Labour.
I have asked a lot of questions here. Any answers anyone!
Email? You don't know half of it! i hear there's a contraption called a Distance-Viewing Cinematograph for the Rediffusion of Snippets of Twitterings. Where will it ever end? Bring back the birch, I say...
The two most inept ministers who served in the most incompetent government in living memory...
...is any wonder it went belly up?
Grumpy optimist: What would the Conservatives have done, instead, since 1997, and would our present situation be much different?
Nobody seems to be discussing that Labour appear to have no potential replacement as Leader, regardless of fractures & failed rebellions.
The irony is that even when he fired off the real email it turned out to be a blank. And to think that this man was once Defence Secretary. No wonder we are fighting the same war he left us with.
The New Labour measure of success is how much of the wealth of the nation has been redistributed into the pockets of Guardian readers.
The Old Labour measure of success is to what extent the State has undermined the values and institutions which sustain a free society.
By either measure the Blair-Brown government has been outstanding.
Hoon/Hewitt inspired?
Is it just me that think that both Hoon and Hewitt might have been conned into this and it's one giant snow job?
Iain, If Hoon really did try to circulate this message at 1040 AM there is a very strong probability that it would have ended up in David Cameron's hands by PMQ at noon. Even if Brown was aware of the message before PMQ, it would have been an extremely difficult situation to have been placed in. Yet another example of how dirty the brothers and sisters are prepared to play.
Which underlines just how incompetent these shysters are. Not even capable of getting the simplest of detail right. I wouldn't be surprised if Hoon actually sent it out showing the full list of recipients, too.
Back to tactical warfare school, you idiots. If you're going to organise a coup then do it in such a way that failure bears no consequences to your supporters - who may have to live and fight another day.
"Kate j Norden
Grumpy optimist: What would the Conservatives have done, instead, since 1997, and would our present situation be much different?"
Well, Brown continued with Tory fiscal policy until 2000. The economy was in good shape and had improved, every year - until Gordon Brown dropped the functioning Tory policy and introduced his own. From that point on, it has been downhill for Britain.
Had the Tories been in power and had continued their fiscal policy, Britain would, almost certainly have been "best placed to weather the crisis".
It is absolutely certain that the Tories wouldn't have sold British gold, especially not at bargain basement prices.
It is also certain that the Tories would have used the boom years to reduce debt, instead of borrowing and increasing it, like Labour did.
Behaving like kids the lot of them. About time they grew up, stood up and stopped playing silly games and took their responsibilities seriously.
Grumpy optimist (sorry to go anon. but like Hoon with the e-mails I seem to be incapable of accessing comment via google account) it is a mark of Labour's malignant ineptitude that May 1997 now seems like a lost arcadia, a golden age which we seem to have lost. The thing that really grates though is the likelihood that Brown and his bunch of second rate leeches will not receive the drubbing that Major and his crew had; the Labour core vote will see to that.
Et tu Brutus?... Brutus?... oh there you are, what you up to?
Er... nothing much.
Hoon was like, if you could imagine, a treacle covered gorilla running through a room of drying bank notes only to emerge out the other side with no bank notes and no treacle.
Even regicide is beyond these tragedies. Schadenfreude would be appropriate if they weren't running/ruining our lives.
Buff Hoon is anything BUT a "buff ting" - more like a moth-eaten rabbit. How about Muff Hoon ?
Couldn't help but overhear Hoon dismissed by a Gordon Groupie on BBC News today as someone whom backbenchers regarded as 'just another lightweight' beside the intellectual genius of the Great Leader.
Ah yes, that will have been the lightweight who was
Secretary of State, Department for Transport
Chief Whip
Minister of State (Europe),
Lord Privy Seal, House of Commons
Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence
Minister of State, Foreign & Commonwealth Office
Minister of State, Lord Chancellor's Department
Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department
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