Events | 2009.12.08
Diary | Hugh Muir
What\'s the significant link between a thinktank and a petrol tank? Ask John Prescott
• Copenhagen is coming, and as we continue to debate what is and isn\'t true about climate change, all right-thinking types will welcome the contribution to the debate of Lord Lawson. He popped up to condemn the leaked emails from East Anglia University\'s climate change department. He says he has an open mind on these things, and we accept that. But the issue is plagued by scepticism, and the person most obviously sceptical about Lord Lawson would appear to be the man formerly known as the deputy prime minister, John Prescott . "Apparently, Lord Lawson is setting up a "high-powered all-party (and non-party) thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation," he told the house, noting that the Tory peer is also a bigwig in a body called the Central Europe Trust Ltd. The two, we are told, are not linked. "His clients are Elf, Total, Shell, BP, Amoco, Texaco – that is a lot of oil companies. From what I can see of it, it is not so much a thinktank as a petrol tank." That\'s Prezza. Top info. Top jokes.
• All is not well between chief constables and the Tory home affairs spokesman Chris Grayling, we understand. It\'s a freeze in relations which appears to stem from earlier this year when he was invited to their conference and demanded, it is said, equal billing with Alan Johnson. The chiefs, being robust types, said he could sit on the stage with the minister of state and Chris Huhne as normal. Grayling didn\'t turn up. His place was taken by the most junior member of his team, James Brokenshire . Gordon isn\'t the only one worrying about these Tories in government.
• Look at London, where there are more fears about the territorial ambitions of Boris Johnson\'s unsmiling heavy, Kit Malthouse. Earlier this year, he boasted that BoJo and friends have their "hands on the tiller" at Scotland Yard , thereby triggering fresh complaints about the politicisation of policing. He was forced back by the fuss, but now, it is claimed, he has his eye on the extermination of the MPA, London\'s police authority. Writing in his blog , Lord "Toby" Harris, the Home Office nominee on the police authority, says Malthouse, ie the "Uber Vice Chairman Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse AM, or UVCDMKMAM" for short, "has been telling everyone that it is only a matter of months before the MPA is abolished and he will have unfettered access to Sir Paul Stephenson\'s tiller. At least he is consistent about this, as he has been saying the same thing for the last year and a half." But does Sir Paul really want Malthouse breathing down his neck for the next three years? Of course he doesn\'t. Maybe he should send some of his burlier officers to have a word.
• Hospitals are under ferocious pressure following research by the NHS information firm Dr Foster . And thus we see the embarrassing spectacle of ministers pouring scepticism on the extrapolations reached by a company with which they struck a costly, ill-judged £24m public-private partnership deal. The figures are right but the conclusions reached might be dodgy, says health minister Mike O\'Brien. Trouble at mill? Maybe Dr Foster was a bit hasty, and if that is the case it will be in keeping with what former colleagues recall of its boss, the former journalist and Cameroon confidant Tim Kelsey (pictured) . So eager was he to reach Kuwait before his rivals after the first Gulf war that he raced his four-wheel drive ahead of the slow-moving convoy; whizzing through the darkness and colliding at speed with military debris on the road; previously the scene of heavy fighting. The thrill ride ended with the vehicle miraculously and comically positioned atop a tank turret. Quite why his fellow occupants stopped short of hospitalising Kelsey immediately afterwards remains a mystery to this day.
• Finally, a warning to progressives from Paul Richards, ex-adviser to Hazel Blears and author of the masterwork How to Win an Election. "Labour must not take its foot off the brake on NHS reform," is the teaser for his column on Progress online . And the headlines of the past week suggest it hasn\'t. So thanks, Paul.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/[...]hugh-muirs-diary-john-prescott
