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Ed Miliband needs a dose of the old Tony Blair snake oil

If a millionaire is someone whose net assets exceed £1 million, Miliband and Cruddas (pictured) are in the same category as 'the Cabinet of millionaires'

Labour’s latest slogan is: ‘Who wants to bung a millionaire? Dave does.’ It’s a reference to the Coalition Government led by David Cameron bringing the top rate of tax down from 50 to 45 per cent.

Labour’s new welfare campaign is launched by policy chief Jon Cruddas MP, who attacks ‘this Cabinet of millionaires’.

But doesn’t Cruddas own three homes, together estimated to be worth over £1 million? Labour leader Ed Miliband owns one in London which is worth around £2 million.

If a millionaire is someone whose net assets exceed £1 million (the usual definition) Miliband and Cruddas are in the same category as ‘the Cabinet of millionaires’. There isn’t anyone in the Cabinet earning £1 million a year, and Labour knows it.

Suddenly, Ed Miliband looks vulnerable on the welfare question. And not just because of his hopeless effort last week, via surrogates, to suggest that depending on benefits had nothing to do with father-of-17 Mick Philpott burning six of his children to death.

Deputy leader Harriet Harman’s all-over-the-place attempt to defend Labour thinking on welfare on the Andrew Marr show yesterday — interviewed by Eddie Mair — was no better. ‘Car crash TV,’ said a Westminster colleague. 

Labour activist Dan Hodges — son of Labour MP Glenda Jackson — thinks the party’s now in a panic over welfare, having first downplayed the Philpott issue.

He says: ‘Then they lost their heads, and dispatched Ed Balls to launch an hysterical attack on Osborne, driving the Chancellor’s comments to the top of the news bulletins, and making the Labour Party look like they had been employed as Mick Philpott’s defence attorneys.’

  More... JAMES FORSYTH: Labour go to war on welfare - but they'll never win Labour pledge clampdown on 'something-for-nothing' benefits culture as Justice Secretary announces £300m cut to legal aid for migrants Elderly couple left without heating in their 'hell house' for THREE years because of Labour's disastrous state-backed energy scheme

Another party supporter, former Blair speechwriter Philip Collins, says: ‘Seven out of ten people agreed that the country needs to spend less on welfare. To this unanswerable fact there has come silence from the Labour Party and vituperation from the Labour movement. The party has no policy to speak of.’

Last week, the party’s most successful leader, three-elections-winning Tony Blair, ventured the opinion that he would have done better than Gordon Brown in the 2010 election, saying: ‘Frankly, if I’d had a fourth election, I would have given Cameron a run for his money. I am not saying I would have won, but it would have been tighter than it was.’ Such modesty! I wonder if it’s genuine. Blair is likely to have held on to enough seats in 2010 to allow a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition, if not an overall majority.

Blair last week ventured the opinion that he would have done better than Gordon Brown in the 2010 election

Yesterday, Eddie Mair asked Harriet Harman: ‘Quick final thought. Do you agree with Tony Blair, that the election would have been tighter if he’d been leader in 2010?’

Harman: ‘Well, I’m not sure that looking back on that and making observations helps. I think our focus is on the 2015 election and we’ve got a very difficult job to do . . .’

That might be interpreted as: ‘Yes, and we may be facing the same problem in 2015 . . .’

It's very difficult for untried, inexperienced Miliband, the golden boy chosen by the trades unions, to lead Labour

It’s very difficult for untried, untested, inexperienced Ed Miliband, the golden boy chosen by the trades unions, to lead Labour. Blair was dragged down by the festering Afghanistan-Iraq Wars wound, our over-familiarity with his snake oil salesman persona and the determination of Gordon Brown and Co to drive him out of No 10.

Now Brown’s gone and the snake oil salesman persona seems to have made Blair a vast fortune. He’s now estimated to be worth £60 million.

But wouldn’t he have a surer touch on welfare than class warriors Miliband and Ed Balls?

  Liz has left the Hurley burly behind Liz Hurley stripped off and danced naked on a coffee table during her first date with actor, Tom Sizemore

Liz Hurley stripped off and danced naked on a coffee table during her first date with actor, Tom Sizemore, with whom she was appearing in the 1992 terrorist movie Passenger 57.

‘And it was a damn good routine,’ says Sizemore, then 26. ‘She knew what she was doing because she looked at me and asked: “Is it too bright for you?” And then got down and dimmed the lights and got back up and started dancing to music. After she was done, we had sex. It was wonderful.’ 

He then moved in with Ms Hurley. ‘And that’s when I found out that she already had a boyfriend back in England: Hugh Grant,’ he writes in the Mail on Sunday. ‘He hadn’t done Four Weddings And A Funeral yet, and I didn’t know who he was.’

The Sizemore-Hurley love was not to be. He recalls: ‘The last time Elizabeth and I saw each other romantically was heartbreaking. I called her up and said: “I can’t do this anymore.”’

Later, they met and Sizemore burst into tears. Ms Hurley told him : ‘Don’t cry. Let’s walk the dog.’

Sizemore concludes: ‘She didn’t like tears — no Brits do. They’ve been bombed by the Nazis; they’re tough. She said: “Tom , I’m begging you, please stop it. I feel bad enough.”’

Ms Hurley comes out of the story well. I think. Better than kiss-and-tell Sizemore, certainly. Yes, some may deplore her apparent two-timing of Grant but there’s little in his history to suggest he’s made a fetish of monogamy.

Table-dancing Elizabeth does not wish to comment on the Sizemore book and why should she? Her life now with cricketer Shane Warne is more pastoral than hanky panky.

She has chosen what another actress, Mrs Patrick Campbell, called ‘the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue’.

 

Clare Balding combined the roles of Grand National circus ringmistress and Channel 4 commentator, effortlessly promoting jump racing, John Smith’s beer, Channel 4 and, of course, herself. Ms Balding isn’t a journalist in the usual sense of the word. She’s on hugging, first-name terms with racing types she introduces on camera — a fan with a microphone, not an independent reporter. Maybe she’s what’s wanted in our celeb-crazed world. It’s post-ironic, innit?

  A very British style of oligarch When Sir Frank Chapman quit the BG Group due to ill health in January, he received a pay package worth almost £6 million, we now learn. I wish him well.

The BG Group has operations in 25 countries, a market capitalisation of £44.9 billion, and it’s the seventh-largest company on the London Stock Exchange.

It began in 1812 as Gas Light and Coke Company before going in and out of nationalisation.

Are Sir Frank and his mega-rich colleagues in other previously-nationalised energy companies oligarchs?

So are Sir Frank and his mega-rich colleagues in other previously-nationalised energy companies oligarchs? Oligarchy is defined as ‘a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.’ An elite, in other words. 

In Russia, oligarchs are characters such as Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, who seized control of huge industries previously owned by the state.

Can you see much of a distinction between him and our own, lesser-publicised oligarchs who exploited our post-Thatcher enthusiasm for privatisation?

 

How sad Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna feels he has to apologise for saying on a social networking site seven years ago that some London clubs ‘seem to be full of trash and C-list wannabes . . .’ Now he says that was ‘inappropriate and stupid’. It wasn’t. It was merely indiscreet. An occasion when ‘never explain, never complain, never apologise’ would have been more dignified.

  The crisis is hopeless, but not serious      More from Peter McKay...   In 70 years, have we gone from the greatest to the weakest? Silly spats prove how weak our leaders are 19/05/13   Is Cameron readying his lifeboat like Blair? 12/05/13   Don't panic yet, Dave. It's Red Ed who should be worried... 05/05/13   Sir, we are charging you with being a celebrity... 28/04/13   Will one of our cities be next to face 'lockdown'? 21/04/13   Grocer's girl who 'got above herself' 14/04/13   Labour's addiction to welfare hurts us all 31/03/13   Now Dave's 'dog whistle' guru is calling the tunes 24/03/13   VIEW FULL ARCHIVE Police will claim compensation for falling over their truncheons — if it’s available and they’re allowed to do so. It’s as simple as that. 

Lawyers will always push for compensation to be available, knowing they will be first to get their snouts in the trough.

Politicians famously relish spending other people’s money. The great French thinker Albert Camus called concern for the welfare of the people the tyrant’s alibi. Even without such encouragement, some individuals will make welfare claims simply because such a system exists. They are the  crooked timber of humanity.

If it’s true we face a great, living-beyond-our-means financial and existential crisis, which no palliatives of Right or Left are guaranteed to fix, shouldn’t we consider a Year Zero in increased government spending, followed by a back-to-basics dismantling of discredited programmes?

Perhaps, but no party can do it. They’d be voted out of office. We are where we are. Only small changes can be made. Even then they’re vilified as evil attacks on the poor.

So, the situation is serious but not hopeless?

No, it’s hopeless but not serious.

  Why is Foreign Secretary William Hague not protesting about the Saudis’ plans to sever the spinal cord of Ali al-Kwawaher, 24, a prisoner who ten years ago stabbed another boy to death in a fight?

A Foreign Office official says we’re ‘deeply concerned’. If al-Kwawaher’s family could afford a six-figure sum for the ‘blood money’, the operation would not go ahead.

Some will say the Saudis are our oil-supplying allies. We must never offend them. That’s why they got a visit from the Prince of Wales and Camilla last month. How they treat their prisoners is their concern.

Surely this isn’t so any more? As Oscar Wilde said after being told he was being paraded, shackled, in the rain outside Reading Goal as a guest of the monarch: ‘If Her Majesty doesn’t know how to treat prisoners she doesn’t deserve to have any.’





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