Vague Hague Kills Ashcroft Story Stone Dead

Peter Hoskin has covered very well Hague's interview on "Today" this morning about the Ashcroft non-story, which I listened to while driving to work (which is where I am now - so this won't be a long post!). Suffice to say that Hague, while slightly vague at times, did nail down this stupid story once and for all, and successfully lobbed the ball straight back into Brown's court. Lord Paul, anyone? Hoskin's conclusions are rather cleverer than mine, (no surprise there), but sort of amount to the same thing.

Any road, it seems this is now a non-runner for Labour, but that does not mean they won't continue to push it, no matter how stupid they will increasingly look for doing so now that Hague has, in my view, successfully killed the story off once and for all. However, if, for instance, this latest piece of Charlie Whelan delusion is anything to go on, then truly anything is possible (so thanks to Daniel Finkelstein for reporting it):

In yesterday's interview with Will Straw, Charlie Whelan appears
to have given up being a spin doctor and a political organiser and become,
instead, a pollster. He claims that it is not true that a third of Unite
members are planning to vote Conservative because his own survey showed it was
only about 8 per cent. It never occurs to him to wonder if their might be an
interviewer bias in answers to a survey conducted by his own
officials. He describes the contrary evidence as:
Some Tory paper did a bogus poll of Unite members
But the poll was actually a balanced and representative survey of 1,023 members of the union conducted by Populus last year.

This Whelan man is extremely sinister, not least because he is as big a self-deceiver and figure-fiddler as Brown himself. Moreover, in the name of a union membership the majority of whom clearly doesn't support him or his party, he is trying to shut down British Airways internationally by unleashing the forces of militant trade unionism abroad. Sort of sympathy strikes for the global era. But care not one jot do these people for democracy, or the massive job losses that would result from the collapse of a business as big as British Airways.

A Matthew Parris anecdote in his column in this morning's Times is quite disturbing on that score:

It was before he was even a Cabinet minister that, in a private
conversation, Mr Mandelson was asked who he thought would be in the running for
the leadership of the Labour Party if the present Government were turfed out of
office at the coming general election.

He paused thoughtfully, then, with no hint of a smile, and peering over his spectacles in apparent incredulity, observed: “You don’t think a little thing like losing a general election is going to stop Gordon Brown, do you?” Whether, by “stop”, Mr Mandelson meant stop
Mr Brown from carrying on as Labour leader, or stop him from carrying on as
Prime Minister, he did not say.

Getting rid of this particular crop of corrupt, anti-democratic, arrogant socialists might take a bit more than a general election victory for the Conservative Party!

Brown won't take electoral defeat - or "No!" - for an answer.