David Cameron’s fight to rebrand his party as modern, inclusive and compassionate has been questioned by a heavyweight critic.
Rosa Monckton, the highly respected campaigner on disability and a former confidante of Princess Diana, has condemned as a ‘disgrace’ Tory ministers’ failure to take seriously a meeting she organised to help them better understand the problems faced by the parents of disabled children.
Rosa, who has made powerful TV documentaries on the subject, had taken three months to arrange for 40 parents of children with severe learning abilities to gather in London.
Children’s Minister Ed Timpson agreed to spend 45 minutes at the two-hour meeting, but was forced to leave after 20 minutes because of other urgent business.
Rosa said he made a speech on the importance of compassion before he ‘ran for the door’.
His colleague Disabilities Minister Esther McVey also agreed to attend but cancelled because she had a ‘diary clash’. Yet the former breakfast TV presenter did turn up. Rosa said: ‘She swanned in a few minutes before the end, announced she wouldn’t speak because she didn’t like to shoot from the hip, and walked off at the end. It was a disgrace.’
Rosa said the parents had made complex childcare arrangements to get to the meeting and were deeply unimpressed by the ministers’ failure to listen properly. So much for the compassionate Tories.
Nadine Dorries may find her fellow MPs just as dangerous as anything she encountered in the jungleMeanwhile, the Tory leadership says it has rejected calls from its own backbenchers for a referendum on Europe before the general election because the measure wasn’t in the Tory manifesto or the Coalition agreement. But nor was gay marriage.
Justice Secretary Chris Grayling says criminals jailed for fewer than 12 months must be supervised for a year and will return to custody if they reoffend. I hope Chris Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce, who are about to be released, take note.
Look out Nadine, it’s a jungle in thereRebel Tory MP Nadine Dorries has had the party Whip restored after her misguided antics on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! last year. But she’ll find her viperish Tory colleagues much more dangerous than the maggots and cockroaches she encountered in the jungle in Australia.
Think-tank boss Douglas Murray has been criticised by Labour MPs for his comments about immigration. He said: ‘Mass immigration has altered our country completely. It has become a radically different place, and London has become a foreign country.’ But Mr Murray is hardly a raging Right-winger — the think-tank of which he is director, the Henry Jackson Society, has 11 Labour MPs on its advisory council including Jim Murphy, Shadow Defence Secretary, and former deputy party leader Margaret Beckett.
Disloyalty of the week: Former Labour minister Peter Hain says: ‘If a general election was held tomorrow, Labour wouldn’t win a majority. The truth is, if we want a majority in 2015, we need to be performing better than we are now.’
Former Labour MP Peter Hain has spoken of his doubt his party can win the 2015 electionOfficials at Labour HQ put a clock on the wall to show the number of days, hours, and minutes until the 2015 general election. But eagle-eyed staff noted it was going backwards, not forwards — a bit like Red Ed’s leadership.
A new organisation, Liberal Democrat Women, is being launched next month to campaign for ‘gender balance’.
It could start with the Cabinet where there are no Lib Dem women.
The Big Society, designed to foster greater community spirit, was the Tories’ big idea at the last election.
But it seems to have sunk without trace. Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, says: ‘Where is the Big Society — that once much-trumpeted flagship policy of David Cameron?
Was it simply a soundbite, a ruse that played well with focus groups?’ Yes, is the short answer.
Why Austin is all revved upA lament for how politics has become dominated by men and women who’ve spent most of their adult lives as trainee politicians, with little experience of the real world, comes from veteran Labour MP Austin Mitchell.
Mitchell, 78, says: ‘Arrivistes, garagistes and City whizz-kids replaced the older Tory elite, while Labour fielded fewer trades unionists and workers.
'We older politicians are discounted as irrelevant failures. Constituency parties might be supportive, but the national party will certainly be merciless in its desire to pick the youthful and the brainless.’
