Quality | 2009.03.15
Diary: Hugh Muir
When you\'re facing fines, coz the air is foul, who ya gonna call? Green Boris
With trouble looming it is good to know someone reliable - and in the matter of air quality and avoiding European megafines, the hopes of the Labour party rest with Tory Boris Johnson. Ministers are facing possible humiliation and the only way out is an action plan to meet legal targets by 2011. But these calculations depend on the western extension of the congestion charge - which was killed off by Boris - and an additional low emissions zone, restricting 90,000 dirty vehicles a day, which the mayor looks set to scrap as well. Unless Boris improves air quality, there will be trouble. Luckily, he is cracking on. The first masterstroke was to cut the green budget by £139,000, simultaneously lowering morale, while the second was recasting the department under his director of environmental policy, Isabel Dedring, once a consultant at McKinsey. Where she leads, other consultants have followed, all paid several hundreds of pounds a day. Still, their invoices are recyclable. Don\'t worry. It\'s fine.
Yes, it\'s good to rely on someone, and David Cameron has William Hague, who popped up in Brussels yesterday. The Tories will leave the EPP, the grouping they view as suspiciously pro-Europe, but they won\'t do so until after the elections, is the word. And this is shrewd because if they left the EPP before the election, their leader Timothy Kirkhope would be alphabetically obliged to sit in the non-aligned section between Robert Kilroy-Silk and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Best to wait.
We searched yesterday\'s Express, but could find no mention of Gerry McCann\'s denunciation at the Commons of newspapers that lied about his family during the search for Madeleine. The Express knows all about this of course, having paid £550,000 in damages for publishing more bilge than most. For all that, we did enjoy the paper\'s story upbraiding Gordon Brown for not being able to say the word "sorry". Can we all say humbug? Yes we can.
Extraordinary is the occasion that brings together a Great Train Robber, one of the Guildford Four, a member of the Birmingham Six, one of Britain\'s most respected QCs, a former deputy assistant commissioner of the Met, and a man who sought to assassinate General Franco; and yet with the publication of his new novel, If It Bleeds, my colleague Duncan Campbell was able to achieve this. Bruce Reynolds in one darkened end of the Flea Pit - a venue in east London; John Grieve, once the doyen of Scotland Yard detectives at the other. With Gerry Conlon and Paddy Hill, at the bar, Geoffrey Robertson QC and Stuart Christie - writer and would-be assassin - mingling, there was much talk of times gone by. In the novel, Britain\'s best known gangster begins pouring out his life story to his favourite crime reporter but is found dead before the juiciest details are imparted. Bruce, frail but immaculate in a dark suit, was never in that league, but once the speeches were over he was keen to be on his way. "Time to go, the people here look a bit dangerous," he said smiling. Some have a nose for that sort of thing.
Two decades on, one can see how time has treated the protagonists in the miners\' strike. Judged by his contributions to the anniversary coverage and his spirited attack on my colleague David Hencke in these pages, the years have barely mellowed Arthur Scargill. As for Peter Walker, Thatcher\'s energy secretary, he is retired and busy writing a biography of Gorbachev. And he\'s more than a little grateful to Scargill, for he tells us that only crisis meetings connected to the historic dispute kept him from Brighton when the IRA bombed the cabinet in 1984. Walker gave his room to Sir Anthony Berry. In the carnage, the grandee died.
Did we mention Gorbachev? Yes we did? Icon, father of glasnost, he led a great nation through tumultuous times. And who knows, today, when he plans to visit his friend Alexander Lebedev at the Evening Standard, he might have a few ideas on how to beat the rival freesheet. He\'s wise, Mikhail. He knows.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/12/diary-hugh-muir
