The truth will out

There are two reasons many despots cling to power long after their sell-by date.  The first is that their egos are so inflated that they can't imagine being subservient to their successors.  The second is that once they leave power, the true nature of their behaviour becomes apparent.  Both are also true of "democratic despots".

This weekend we had more revelations about Gordon Brown.  Nothing really new there and what was not known already could have been deduced years ago.  I don't know anybody who psychanalyses tax legfislation, but if they looked at the anti-avoidance provisions from 1997 they would have a field day. Small losses to the exchequer were "fixed" by vast dollops of legislation that usually had far greater impacts than the problems they were supposed to solve - too long to go into details here, but suffice it to say the volume of UK tax legislation doubled under Brown's chancellorship. But that is not the issue of the hour.

First of all we learn why the Labour Party never thought the phone hacking scandal was worthy of a police investigation.  It turns out that Blair pushed Brown and Tom Watson to lay off the Murdochs.  After all Murdoch was the father of his goddaughter, not that he wanted it to be publicly known.  Neither in all likelihood id he want it pblicly known tha Murdoch caught Blair on camera in compromising circumstances with Anji Hunter when Blair, Hunter and the Beast of Bolton visited Murdoch to speak at a News International conference in Australia in 1995. The rest of the Labour front bench knew and were terrified the pictures might surface before the 1997 election.  They didn't, and Blair has been in Murdoch's pocket ever since.

The next revelation comes from our intrepid reporters in downtown Tripoli who tell us that MI6 were involved at the very least in tipping off Gaddhafi about Libyan dissidents and very probably co-operating in rendition of prisoners to Libya between 2002 and 2004.  Downing Street doesn't comment on security matters which is very convenient for all concerned, but since MI6 reports to the PM it is easy to see who authorised that degree of cooperation with the US. Seems like Labour's idea of an ethical foreign policy is to ship dissidents off for torture in return for oil concessions.

The next unanswered question is how Mandelslime has managed in 10 years to accumulate enough capital to buy a house costing more than 50 times his highest after tax income in that period. No doubt we shall find out soon.