The press is awash with reports this morning that the Camerons accidentally left their eight-year-old daughter in a Buckinghamshire pub. The story could be somewhat more embarrassing for the prime minister, coming on the same day as the government relaunches its £450m troubled families programme. Presumably social services won’t conclude there is a ‘problem family’ in No 10, but potential embarrassment lies ahead every day this week for the increasingly beleaguered prime minister. Lord Leveson continues his inquiry with a heavyweight line up this week: the former prime minister Gordon Brown is due this morning, followed by the current chancellor George Osborne. The sessions culminate on Thursday with David Cameron in the dock for a full day. No doubt his text-etiquette will come under scrutiny, but Labour can hardly coo on an issue that has dogged British politics for decades.
Both the Conservative and Labour leaderships will face detailed scrutiny over their relationships with media barons. The scope of Leveson’s remit this week is vast, taking in as it does John Major, Ed Miliband, Harriet Harman, Nick Clegg and Alex Salmond. Until now all Conservative and Labour leaders, and increasingly the paunched figure of the SNP leader, have served a rite of passage to canoodle with the Murdoch apparat with a desperation that demeans them and their office. This has often been rather more alarming than any duck island, and altogether far more destructive. The extraordinary revelations that emerged last summer shed light on a morally shallow political elite hopelessly in thrall to a morally repugnant newspaper empire.
With the economy sliding back into recession, and a restless Tory backbench once again agitating over Europe, George Osborne could probably do without appearing in front of Leveson this afternoon. But with his political mystique well and truly lifted after his shambolic budget, the chancellor has many pressing questions to answer. The central piece of today’s questioning will focus on the proposed £8bn News Corp bid for BSkyB. Osborne will face awkward questions about when he first knew of it and how his social contacts with Murdoch executives might have affected his attitudes towards it. Osborne, of course, also played a central role in appointing Andy Coulson to the heart of government and put Jeremy Hunt in charge of the bid post-Vince Cable’s demise.
Labour mustn’t put politics ahead of pragmatism. After nearly seven months, the inquiry feels like a mix of a revenge mission and a behind-the-curtain display of modern power relations, with all the nauseating hubris that entails. This week is a chance for our political class to grapple with their distinct failures and change course for the better. And that applies equally to both Labour and Tory, and if not more so, the former given the reputation our party garnered over time in power.
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David Talbot is a political consultant, tweets @_davetalbot and writes the weekly The Week Ahead column on Progress
Leveson inquiry looks to me like a celebrities commentary show. Let us have something new on how we solve economic problem.
With my two also Labaour Councillor comrades we represent a 10,000 elector ward in Derby. It has a lot of deprivation. I have been a representative their for some decades and do know a good number of the residents.
I have never heard of any of them leaving their child behind after an event. This Prime Mesmeriser has absolutely no excuse and he should apologise to the whole of the kingdom’s caring parents for his lack of care for his own child. It is his party and its Liberal Doormat prisoners who have cut the budget for specialist family intervention projects which ould save around 50 or 100 times their cost in the long term.
The social engineering carried out on the futurre Prime Mesmeriser at Eton College clearly failed and intervention is surely needed.
Regards from
Councillor Robin Turner