In other news, Korea tests nuclear device and it gets the MPs expenses off the front page. Result. Mixed feelings though; the Conservatives were coming off slightly worse than us, so I would have preferred Kimmy to wait until we needed the cover. North Korea is the world's only remaining hard-line Marxist state, if you don't count here. It is also the only one headed by an Elvis impersonator, and I had to listen to him crooning "Jus wanna be your terry bell" - uh huh huh - before asking nicely if he could hold off for a day or two. "An'fink for you, Roald Petel, an'fink" and so I asked for bank holiday Monday. "And we are friends, you don't have to call me Roald, it's just Petel". It's murder on the news grid, a bank holiday. Nothing for people to do but sit round and pick holes, so the threat of nuclear Armageddon should have concentrated what passes for their minds.
Not Jordan's, though. You could have knocked me over with a feather when the phone rang and it was wild 'n' wet Shackleton. "What ever shall I do, Lord Peter? I've had some rum coves through this office, what with Jug Ears and Macca, but now Katie Price is on her way".
"Did she say what she wanted?"
"I assumed it was a divorce, what with me being a divorce lawyer."
"Not necessarily. These celebrity types, they don't always know what they want. It is entirely possible they need you to negotiate the fees for the photos of their reunion."
"Wouldn't that be more Max Clifford's job?"
"Maybe, but it's possible that she thought she was doing a stunt and now Peter Andre is really leaving her."
And so it proved. Jordan's bust very nearly melted in rage in Fifi's office, but Andre is adamant and says he has had enough. I've agreed to go over and give him a little pep talk, maybe do some karaoke to Mysterious Girl. Don't know if it will achieve anything, but it's the thought that counts.
Ed Balls came over, pretending it was a social call. As if. "You and me have always been mates, Pete" he said, slapping me on the back and spilling my cocoa on my new blotch pad. "If you say so. Ed. Mate." I replied, but putting my hand under the desk and covering the panic button. Ed can turn unpredictably violent. Tricksy-wu was shivering in her basket just at the sniff of him.
"You've always liked travelling and foreigners, haven't you? And your grandad was a foreigner."
"If you mean Grandad Herbert, he was from Lambeth".
"Yeah, whatever, south of the water, foreign. Anyway, what Gordon was wondering, is how would you feel if history repeated itself?"
"Did you have any particular history in mind? That part where we discover all our intelligence officers are really double-spooks working for Tesco is not comforting". I thought with alarm that maybe all our missing data has already been added to the ClubCard customer files.
"Tesco? I thought they all worked for Waitrose. Oh well. No. That part where you become Foreign Secretary and pose under a big photo of your grandad, that's what we were thinking of."
I thought about it. It's very tempting, but it means leaving Ed unsupervised, right where he can cause the most trouble. Gordon has taken rather a shine to him, although he's no Peter Andre, and is hopelessly uncritical of everything he says.
"If one one is called to serve one's country, one must respond. But I'd be able to shift round the countries a lot quicker if I had a private jet."
Ed appeared to agree to this and went off looking far too happy, by my reckoning. No doubt I will soon find out why.
Author: Woman on a Raft
4 comments:
Dear Mr Mrs Woman On A Raft
Lovely, and every one of those words rang true; think you might introduce an element of fiction into future entries.
Brilliant. You catch the simpering perfectly. But we don't want him in the FCO ta very much.
Too kind, Mr Ishmael. I tried making things up; reality beat me to the draw.
Let's play How They Are Connected:
Recall that in February 1998, Princess Diana had been dead 8 months, but the issue of the stability of the monarchy had been called in to question.
Shackleton, who handled the Charles side of the Windsor divorce, met and apparently didn't much care for Mark Bolland, the pr guru credited with salvaging the reputation of her client. At Charles' 50th birthday party, a bitchy comment was made to a gossip columnist that Shackleton had not been invited to the party (despite her very good handling of the negotiation) because "it was for friends, not employees". Oh, get her, holds a grudge.
Mark Bolland is a long-time friend of Lord Mandelson. They go way back. Mark Bolland was/is the partner of Guy Black, who was head of the Press Complaints Commission at that point. Previously, Bolland held that self same job. The three men are in the same line of work, so to speak.
In February 1998 the magazine Punch decided to run a Mandelson profile which did not please him at all, and he attempted to get the piece suppressed by, apparently, complaining to Guy Black through informal channels - i.e. they were chums via Bolland - and also to Michael Cole, Al Fayed's spokesperson.
It looks very much like Guy Black was prepared to make the odd phone call to give Punch editor James Steen a friendly word of advice, but then Mandelson stepped it up and phoned Steen himself, inadvisedly threatening to set the dogs on him.
The bereaved Mr Al Fayed was beginning to kick up his long-running vendetta against Prince Philip, so he wasn't going to be put off by special pleading from either a mate of Tony's or a mate of a mate of Charles (and Camilla's). Quite the reverse; the grief-stricken paranoid bullying shopkeeper might well have read this as yet another example of how the Establishment was Out to Silence Him, and thereby Mandelson helps account for why we ended up footing some of the bill for the three-ring circus, sorry, inquest, almost a decade later.
So there you go: Fiona Shackleton, solcitor, Mark Bolland, Guy Black, Lord Mandelson, Mohammed Al Fayed, and finally a squillion-pound inquest about a woman who died in a car accident on account of not wearing her seatbelt, featuring the disestablishement's lawyer, Michael Mansfield QC.
As for Elvis, he is everywhere, as Mojo Nixon said.
........
Cheer up Mr/Mrs Secretary
Lord Mandelson likes foreigners and foreign parts, so at least you won't have to work with someone who believes wogs begin at Calais or goes "eewweech" when offered exotic dainties or gets confused at which way up to hold a map of the world.
It could be worse: it could be Woodward, who would replace all the powerpoint presentations with slides of his holiday in Majorca and lecture diplomats about the ingredients of a happy marriage.
BTW Guy Black is currently the Telegraph's Director of Corporate Affairs.
....
There's just been another fat fraud on Kirsty Warrrk Newsnight.
Sir John Butterfill by name, butter-filled by nature, and he looks exactly like he sounds, explaining he didn't know that you were liable for CGT on the sale of staff quarters attached to his extensive property. He didn't check. He very nearly sounded convincing, until checking his CV it appears he is a chartered surveyor by profession, even though it was some time ago, and he has been both a senior partner and property developer relatively recently. Didn't know, my arse. Nearly got away with it, more like.
Here is Sir John patronizing some unsuspecting voters who thought he really cared about their problems putting food on the table:
*"Mums who have been learning to make the most of their family finances got the chance to show off some of their new cookery skills when M.P. for Bournemouth West, Sir John Butterfill, dropped in to visit them at Action for Children’s Kinson and West Howe Centre on Friday 30th January, 2009.
John looked on as around ten parents took part in a cookery workshop at the centre in West Howe. The group shared ideas on how to eat healthily on a budget as part of a Financial Futures money management course run by centre staff and volunteers from local branches of high street bank, Barclays. Financial Futures is a £1.8 million national partnership between the bank and the charity, aimed at improving financial literacy and helping people to avoid debt."*
My budget recipe: Carefully remove brain and spine tissue of the nearest MP (there won't be much) and grill the remainder, allowing the fat to run off. Feed to the cats.
.....
Then Mandy came on and defended Margaret Moran, who comes to see him often about the Vauxhall plant in her Luton constituency, he said so, and he 'suggested' Kirsty withdraw any of the unfair and unsubstantiated comments she had made about poor Margaret.
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