Events | 2010.01.26
Michael White's diary
The Cadbury Quakers weren\'t quite as sweet as their choccy bars – just ask the News Chronicle
• As Cadbury\'s management dries its crocodile tears and trousers Kraft\'s chocolate money, no one should be too nostalgic for the good old long-gone days of paternalistic Quaker ownership before the professionals and the hedge funds moved in. Exactly 50 years ago the Cadbury family scandalised liberal Britain by furtively selling the fading-but-liberal News Chronicle to the predatory Daily Mail for a modest £1.9m. After a court challenge even the redundancy pot went to shareholders. The bitter staff joke was: "Why not save the paper by giving away a bar of Fruit & Nut with every copy?" Answer: "That would only destroy sales of Fruit & Nut." Survivors still meet every year in their old Fleet Street boozer.
• With the navy fighting a land battle against fearsome Whitehall cuts, where better to demonstrate relevance and humanity than bringing aid to Haiti. Wasn\'t HMS Iron Duke recently in those waters , collaring cocaine smugglers with balding Sub-Lt Prince William on board? It was. It\'s usually in the Caribbean to chase drug vessels and assist in the hurricane season. The Type 23 frigate arrived home in Portsmouth on 14 December, just before Haiti\'s earthquake season struck. Back for the hurricanes next June.
MP-bashers keep the Diary up to date with offers of "all expenses-paid jollies" to exotic places like Turkey and South Carolina (both still open). The politicians tell a different tale. Hardly any dared show up for the annual British-Swiss ski-and-talk event at Davos this year, even though they pay their own bills: all too scared of the feral Fleet Street snappers outside. Former Europe minister Denis MacShane told a near-deserted Commons debate on expenses last week that during an official visit to Pakistan he took up an offer to visit Kabul on a UN plane. The Foreign Office then spent six months reclaiming the £200 cost. "I paid it from my own pocket," the MP confesses. Ditto his trip to Davos. Sheer nobility.
• Cautious Alistair Darling wouldn\'t want you to read anything into this. But the Office for National Statistics, whose caution makes the chancellor sound like Jonathan Ross on ecstasy, is not unveiling the next quarterly growth figures in its dour 60s office block in Clerkenwell. Instead chief economist, Joe Grice, will announce them in a live TV and press session at Church House, Westminster, on Tuesday. He will be then available for interviews. Could it possibly be that the recession finally ended in late 2009?
• The fratricidal tendencies which keep micro-political parties that way have broken out again in much-split Stoke. Veteran BNP councillor Alby Walker has quit the party and (for worse or better, according to taste) is threatening to split the BNP vote against Labour\'s token Etonian entryist Mark Fisher in Stoke Central, where Nick Griffin\'s BNP consilieri, Simon Darby, is standing. Darby is playing it cool. Alby is a bulldog and remains a "good friend" he blogs.
• Part of the Christmas board game, Thought Exchange, requires players to guess capital cities. But one of them is Jerusalem, recognised as Israel\'s capital by er, um, Guatemala and neighbouring El Salvador. The EU and US prudently recognise Tel Aviv. Aggrieved customers who ring makers, Happy Puzzle, are testily asked what\'s their problem.
• You can\'t keep a bad man down and Fred "The Shred" Goodwin (pictured) of RBS crash-and-pension fame, has resurfaced this week as an adviser to global architects, RMJM . At his old City HQ his successor, Stephen Hester, is unmoved. Fred\'s works of art have all been replaced by boring NatWest-RBS posters, pending their sale. All that remains of Fred\'s legacy is those deep-pile carpets he lovingly picked.
• Ten wannabe Tory MPs have been dispatched for green re-education by David Cameron\'s brain, Steve Hilton. Rebel backbencher, Douglas "Kamikaze" Carswell, dissents. Those "melting" Himalayan glaciers will outlast us all, he tells constituents.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/20/michael-white-diary
