The mystery minister

If you go to this thread on Jane Griffiths' blog, you will find some interesting allegations about the identity of the Cabinet minister who offered the late former Newark MP Fiona Jones promotion in return for sex.

Apparently the News of the World have already named him, but you would need to have read two stories written two years apart to make the link. The second story is HERE. Not surprisingly, the original one published in 2005 seems to have disappeared from its website.

No further comment from me required....

Update 1: Alice Miles of the Times has written a brilliant piece on Fiona Jones HERE. "That image of a teenage son heaving a mother in an alcoholic stupor back into bed for her to die, alone, is a dismal reminder that behind the machinery of politics, beyond the criticism and the cynicism we fling, lie real people struggling in a failing system."

Update 2: For some reason, this has been a record-breaking day on this blog, despite the missing hat-tips.

Gordon's Government - II

....Who will be following Blair and Prescott out of the door?




Last week, in the first of my series of posts on the likely make-up of Gordon Brown's Cabinet, I said I believed that up to eight ministers - more than a third of the Cabinet - could be leaving the government as a result of the transition.

The identity of two of them we already know - Tony Blair himself, and his deputy John Prescott who announced last October that he would be following his boss into retirement.

But who will join them? Which veterans of the New Labour years might have to be asked to make way for new blood - and which Blair loyalists might find they have pinned their colours rather too closely to Mr Tony's mast for his successor's liking?

Well, there are two over-60s among the ranks of the Cabinet's Blairite sisterhood who appear vulnerable on both grounds - Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, and Social Exclusion Minister Hilary Armstrong.

In the days when she was John Smith’s parliamentary private secretary, Ms Armstrong was once close to Mr Brown. But over the years, she has become more and more identified with the Blairite cause, most notably during an undistinguished stint as Chief Whip.

I suspect that she finds the social exclusion role much more to her liking, but at 61, she is surely living on borrowed political time.

As for Ms Jowell, her chances of remaining on board are additionally hampered by having been caught up sleaze accusations as a result of her husband David Mills' involvement with the corrupt Italian media tycoon-cum-politician Silvio Berlusconi.

Her solution to that was to claim she had known nothing of the link and then to lay down her marriage for the sake of her career, but her tenure of the Culture brief has not greatly endeared her to the press or public and her departure would be seen as no great loss.

More controversial would be the axeing of Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton, who has been seen as a rising star under Blair and who is still talked about in some quarters as a dark horse contender for the leadership.

I don't believe Gordon will go out of his way to victimise those who could have emerged as contenders - John Reid will be kept in a senior role for instance - but I somehow doubt if the quality of mercy will extend to Mr Hutton.

He is widely believed to have been the Cabinet minister responsible for telling the BBC's Nick Robinson last September that Mr Brown “would make a fucking dreadful Prime Minister," and I expect him to pay the political price for this outburst.

Joining him in the exit lobby will, surely, be Charlie Falconer, the "First Flatmate" and Prime Ministerial favourite who has performed much the same role for Blair as Lord Young did for Margaret Thatcher and George Wigg did for Harold Wilson,

There will also be much discussion concerning the fate of two of the Cabinet's other senior women - Margaret Beckett and Patricia Hewitt.

Mrs Beckett is now the only remaining minister who served under Callaghan and as such has an unrivalled claim to the title Great Survivor of modern Labour politics. She is also a very close ally of Mr Brown's.

But her role as Foreign Secretary is keenly coveted by a trio of heavyweights in Jack Straw, Hilary Benn and Peter Hain, and if Gordon can stomach the idea of a Derby South by-election she may well find herself asked to become Leader of the House of Lords.

That would be bad news for Valerie Amos, who has never particularly shone in the role, and also for Lord Kinnock, who some Labour sentimentalists hope might finally get to occupy a Cabinet seat in the evening of his career.

But if Mrs Beckett looks set to survive the post-Blair cull, I am far less sure about Ms Hewitt. A couple of years back, she fancied herself as the first female Chancellor, but her performance as Health Secretary has been lamentable.

Not only has she failed to convince many of her Cabinet colleagues to support the current regionalisation of health services, she has totally failed to explain it to the public either.

Australia's most famous political export is a Brownite of old, and that, together with the fact that Gordy won't want to be seen to be sacking too many women, may yet save her.

That said, it is hard to see her being offered any post that would not now be seen as a demotion, and as such she may herself conclude that her political career has now peaked.

The future of Margaret Beckett is also the main subject of my latest Podcast which is now live. A text version can be found at the Derby Evening Telegraph site.

A sad story

I can't claim to have known Fiona Jones (pictured, left, in happier days) but I was extremely saddened to hear the news of her death last week. Although her death was ostensibly due to alcohol abuse, her problems appear to have stemmed from our hard-drinking Westminster culture coupled with her shocking, but totally predictable, treatment at the hands of the New Labour hierarchy.

Fiona was one of a number of MPs elected in 1997 who hadn't really been expected to win, and who as a result had not been thoroughly Mandelsonised in the way other "Blair Babes" had been. Mandelson actually held a meeting with Labour Press Officers at 6am on the morning of Labour's election victory to discuss what to do about these dangerous loose cannons. In Fiona's case, the answer soon became clear: marginalise them.

She certainly wasn't the only one. Another 1997 intake MP who I won't bother to name also became well-known for enjoying a drop or two and for consorting with journalists, and within a couple of months of the election I was being told by people in the whips' office that she "would probably have to be deselected." Another victim of the briefing culture around this time was Gordon McMaster, who committed suicide in 1997, alleging that two fellow Labour MPs had spread rumours about his sexuality.

Like McMaster, Fiona Jones was not a heavy drinker before entering Parliament, but once subjected to its degenerate boozing culture she allowed a taste for alcohol to get out of control. Having worked in the Commons for nearly a decade I know how easily this can happen, and at one time I had to take steps to make sure it didn't happen to me.

In 1999, Fiona was wrongly convicted of falsifying her election expenses in what, in the light of what we now know about this sleazy New Labour regime, now seems a pretty inconsequential hill of beans. The sum total of the case against her was that she had overspent her allocation by a few quid by neglecting to fill in her expenses form properly.

She was cleared on appeal, but "whiter-than-white" New Labour had now cut her firmly adrift and in 2001 she lost her seat. Perhaps this is one of the reasons they were so keen to see the back of her.

Several other pieces sympathetic to Fiona have appeared on the blogosphere over the weekend, but perhaps the most revealing comment came from an anonymous poster on Paul Walter's blog, Liberal Burblings.

"She was treated like shit by a local and national Labour Party that should have at least the minimal duty of care that we would expect (especially a trade-unionised party) in any other type of work. I was told not to speak to her - "she's bad news." Fiona's story is not the first and will not be the last."

This post was featured on "Best of the Web" on Comment is Free.