Events | 2009.04.16
Duncan Campbell's diary: Westminster sleaze and giving prisoners the vote
Will Westminster sleaze and allowing prisoners to vote result in campaigns being run behind bars?
Now the Ministry of Justice is finally proceeding with the consultation process over votes for prisoners, it seems only a matter of time before inmates of our jails start filling in their ballot forms. The likeliest scenario is that prisoners - although possibly not those who have committed the most serious offences - will eventually be allowed to vote in their old home constituencies. With the prison population growing every year and now standing at more than 80,000, there is the equivalent of an average-sized constituency behind bars. Who will they vote for, and could the prisoners\' vote swing a marginal seat? At one level the Tories, with a former minister and party official - Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer - so recently behind bars may seem the likely choice. But Labour has made a late bid for the prisoners\' vote with the recent, albeit brief, jailing of Lord Ahmed for dangerous driving. Could it be that, as the investigation into MPs\' expenses intensifies, other politicians will find themselves behind bars and thus able to campaign for the vital votes? It\'s an ill wind.
• Theatre critics are always conscious that a phrase from their reviews may be picked up and subverted by the publicists for the show concerned. No such worries with the play Maggie\'s End, at the Shaw Theatre in London this week before starting its tour. The Daily Telegraph described it as "an obnoxious comedy that heaps bile upon Margaret Thatcher\'s time in office ... anyone who hates Margaret Thatcher will love Maggie\'s End." This, of course, is just what the playwrights, Ed Waugh and Trevor Waugh, must have been hoping for. "It\'s going to have pride of place on the tour leaflet," said a cheerful Waugh last night.
• For years, "suicide by cop" has been a feature of life in the US. Someone who has lost the will to live brandishes a gun, fires it randomly and waits for a police marksman to send him to meet his maker. Now, from Canada, comes a new variation. An aviation student, Adam Leon, of Thunder Bay, Ontario, allegedly stole his school\'s single-engine plane and flew into US air space, apparently hoping he would be shot down by F-16s. "He was trying to commit suicide and didn\'t have the courage to do it himself," a police officer who arrested him told ABC\'s Good Morning America. "His idea was to fly the aircraft into the United States where he would be shot down." Happily, no one opened fire, and Leon survived. He is now charged with transportation of stolen property and illegal entry. But surely that beats the alternative.
• Talking of suicide, after an item in the Diary last week about how the ex-RBS bank chief Sir Fred Goodwin might be able to slip from view, we were contacted by a US disappearance expert, Frank M Ahearn, author of several books giving advice on how to go permanently awol - and also how to track down those who have tried to do so. One of the topics on which Ahearn is an expert is "pseudocide", a neologism for faking one\'s own death. Pseudocides often consist of fake drownings, because it provides a plausible reason for the absence of a body. "According to an urban legend," says Ahearn, "as many as a quarter of suicides from San Francisco\'s Golden Gate bridge in which no body was found could have been faked." Ahearn adds that the British use the expression "doing a Reggie Perrin" - after the 1970s TV series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin - which somehow seems a nicer way of putting it.
• Which reminds us of the possibly apocryphal story of Sir Robert Helpmann, the late, great Australian dancer. He had just got out of a New York taxi but had left his umbrella behind. The homophobic cabbie spotted it and shouted: "Hey, ya fairy - ya left your wand behind!" Immediately, Sir Robert picked up the umbrella and, waving it at the cab driver, replied: "Disappear!"
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/14/diary-duncan-campbell
