To quote the Bard “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,” says Malcom in MacBeth referring to the traitorous Thane of Cawdor. When it comes to Speaker Michael Martin, I think nothing in his political life becomes him. Period.
But I tuned in to BBC PM and there was Nick Robinson gushing sympathy for this Glaswegian clown. As sickening as Robinson’s cloying words were, the “tributes” to Gorbals Mick from other not so honourable members were even worse. And here’s a question for you; is it possible for the BBC to get through any item on Profligate without referring to Douglas Hogg and his moat? Maybe the mote in BBC eyes stops them also frequently highlighting Lib-Dem greed, for example? I fully accept that ALL the political pigs had their snouts in the trough but BBC coverage seems to damn Labour and Conservatives whilst giving Cleggy and co a free pass.
Finally, did anyone else find it a trifle odd to hear the BBC interview Peter Hain of ALL people on political integrity? Surreal.
PS Just spotted this BBC headline re Trougher Martin. “Pricky, decent, lonely, kind…” – I think I’m going to be sick. How about “Arrogant, biased, greedy inept?”
Ever get the feeling your listening to something entirley different from Vance?
Anon: Piss off beeboid tosspot. On Radio 5’s news just now they female beeboid reported that “no one in Speaker Martins constituency had a bad word to say about him”
Really? ITV and Sky have interviewed lots of people who felt he was a tosser and on the take.
The BBC spinning for McSnot. Remember there is going to be a by-election.
So expect Liebour to fiddle the postal votes and ‘lose’ the electoral register.
It’s funny how Nick Robinson and others can fret over class prejudice against Michael Martin out of one side of their mouths, while chanting, “The mooooat….the mooooat” out of the other.
David P,
Those brave class warriors like Robinson are not burdened with concepts like fairness! Oh the moooatttt…
Anon.
Ever get the feeling you need to get a life?
‘The Gentleman’s Club’ has now joined ‘the moat’ as the explanation for everything that has gone wrong at Westminster. Gordon Brown only ever plays politics – and the BBC chirrup out all his foul, class hatred with relentless persistence. Next up has to be a freedom of information order on all BBC expenses.
this is how kind and decent Speaker Martin was:
John Stonborough spun for the Speaker and the House of Commons Commission from 2001 to 2003. He was hired because he understood how to handle a hostile media environment.
On Stonborough’s blog he reflects back on how Michael Martin dealt with critical counsel:
On the July 1, 2003, I had one of my regular private meetings with the Speaker in his study overlooking the river. It was a friendly encounter, just the two of us, and I decided to mention this business of claiming for his second home. I think I had mentioned it once previously. I should not have needed to do this, but few Commons officials had the guts to voice their concerns to him. I did.
The Speaker went puce. He told me to stay where I was and summoned the Clerk of the House, Roger Sands, and made me repeat my “allegation” in front of him. I wrote to the Speaker afterwards saying I thought he had been a bit rough on me. Being an adviser is not a popularity contest. The Speaker never spoke to me again and like others before and after me I was cast out.Hat tip: Guido
Douglas Hogg never sold me for profit after cleaning me at the expense of the proles. And I’m no more expensive than that popular combination of a sofa, a flat-screen tv, and porn. Surely many working-class folk can relate to that.
So, Nick Robinson thinks there’s “some truth” in the charge that Speaker Martin was brought down in part by “class-based prejudice and snobbery” – despite the fact that everyone remembers that Betty Boothroyd was working class (and a fine Lancashire lass).
They remember her as a good Speaker. She was not biased. She wasn’t too close to the government. She stood up for backbenchers and told off ministers for by-passing parliament.
She wasn’t thick either. Martin is. (Not ours). He can’t remember names or parliamentary procedures and reads like a remedial kid. He’s a pathetic speaker (pun intended).
And he didn’t just “preside” over the larceny at Westminster, and he didn’t just fight against freedom of information requests that could expose it , Mr Robinson. He was a grand larcenist himself, as adept in “old-style Spanish practices”(as Robinson puts it) as the rest of the rogue’s gallery.
I’ve just read Martin’s Wikipedia entry. God, what a huge purple snout that man has and he‘s stuck it in some troughs over the years! The chippy sod spent over £20,000 on lawyers to defend himself against criticism. We paid for him to do it.
We don’t seem to be hearing any of this from Nick Robinson – unless any of our Anonymice can show otherwise.
Douglas Hogg’s name has proved a gift for lazy satirists. Shame Michael Martin wasn’t called Michael Thickaspigshit.
Don’t forget that the Speaker previous to BB was Bernard Wetherill who started out as a Tailor.
Martin was a failure as a Speaker because he couldn’t rid himself of that typical left wing trade union dogma that so infests the Labour party.
The man is also incapable of speaking in a professional manner. To see him spluttering and stumbling over his words yesterday was just cringeworthy.
But expect Toenails Robinson to tow the McTwat party line that Martin was forced out by Tory toffs. This will be the rallying call in the by-election.
As WE keep pointing out to the beeboid tossers that float in and out here, the BBC are spinning this story in a positive way for Labour.
If you switch for Toenails to Tom Brady (ITV) Jon Snow (C4) and Adam Bolton (Sky) the only one out of step is Toenails.
The much loved speaker, George Thomas (who became Viscount Tonypandy), was the son of a Welsh miner – as thoroughly working class as you can get. It is nauseating that Labour tries to make out criticism of Michael Martin has anything whatsoever to do with his background. It hasn’t. He was shite at the job, he was a corrupt trougher and his sacking was long overdue.
Martin – agree with you except about Jon Snow. Jon Snow is a fully paid up member of the save Gordon Brown club.
CanI just say I think the Moat cleaning was actually perfectably acceptable.
Moat cleaning sounds like some old English tradition from hundreds of years ago. It sounds the sort of thing a member of Parliament would have done, but not some chavvy flat screen TV.
George Thomas – was an old fashioned socialist with difference he cared about Britain.
No doubt today he would be attacked by the BBC as a xenophobe.
The BBC seem to confused about class – they seem to confuse it with being common. You can be from the bottom of the pile when it comes to “class” but that doesn’t mean you are common.
I would call Harman common and she is not from the “working class”
Martin: I know people in his constituency. If that’s what R5 is saying, it’s gone beyond bias into downright, barefaced lying.
Anonymous Anonymous said…
“Ever get the feeling your listening to something entirley different from Vance?”
Still getting the voices Anon?
Brown the hypocrite talks about the ‘gentlemens club’?
What a two faced hypocrite he is, he presided over the system and he benefited by the very system he now decries, the BBC are delighted to spew out his dog whistle soundbite to his socialist followers, he is tryong to appeal to the far left now, the same group he ignored for so long is now back in favour.
Brown will protect all his crooked cronies and the BBC will help by spinning the Tories as corrupt while Brown is the reforming crusader.
The Tories will see just how partisan the BBC is now, the dirty tricks have begun.
Isnt it strange that all these reforms to Westminster ‘just happen’ to dovetail with the EU constitution and fits perfectly with the new EU vision of Westminster as a rubber stamp executive firmly under the control of Brussels!
Take a look at the BBC’s page on the possible next Speaker, simply reeks of bias. Sir George Young’s Etonian background is of course brought up as is Sir Alan Haselhurst’s expenses figure; meanwhile Sir Menzies Campbell is described by “Respected for his integrity on all sides of the house” and his expenses just gets a passing mention. For more see my piece.
Not a Sheep,
As that ‘Question Time’ audience showed, Sir Ming is not “respected for his integrity” by the public. Beeboids have convenienty short memories. How can a man whose extravagent expense claims provoked such rage become a reforming Speaker? (Except by being a hypocrite).
cassandra said…
Isnt it strange that all these reforms to Westminster ‘just happen’ to dovetail with the EU constitution and fits perfectly with the new EU vision of Westminster as a rubber stamp executive firmly under the control of Brussels!
What makes you think it’s a new vision? That’s been the goal for years, aided and abetted by our political “elite”.
I really wish the same attention to detail was given to the troughing in the EU parliament. I imagine it would make our MPs’ claims look like petty cash.
Anonymous said…
Anonymous Anonymous said…
1:52 AM, May 20, 2009Words alone…. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you:)
I must say if our new political classless are ‘getting it’ at last, they have a darn funny way of articulating it.
Just watched a Minister pay homage to ex-Speaker Martin, ‘who showed just what a person he was by his noble deeds for the sake of the country’, or some such horse manure.
I don’t think his tongue was in his cheek.
Which part of presiding over a decade of abuses, trying to cover everything up and clinging on by his fingertips until prized loose by his equally tush-concerned mate Gordon, all in trying to score one last, wafer-thin £130k, factored into this quaint notion?
And, O/T, I have yet to have explained how ‘voting’ in the next overseer, albeit in ‘secret’, by the very clowns who have a vested interest in who oversees them, is something that the public needs not to be troubled with. Other than funding, of course. Again.
Mind you the BBC has inadvertently given some of Martin’s numptiest supporters plenty of rope to hang themselves. Look at the performance of Jim McGovern trying to defend his hero on Newsnight Scotland last night and weep. Particularly amusing when he tragically fails to understand the question about 15 mins in. It’s obviously something in the Scottish air.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00knqrz/Newsnight_Scotland_19_05_2009/
We are only required to pay out taxes and vote once every 4 or 5 years to give a figleaf of respectability.
I also find this ‘gentleman’s club’ thing rather clever… for a politician of a certain hue, if not for any in theory objective media that go along with it.
Beyond being merely interested in what the actual balance of ‘toffs’ across all parties might be, as I have found some sport in whispering in the ear of Aunty’s sisterhood, another might be to ask whether there are no female public schools (or at least that churn out anyone with a serious career), as this is the impression that seems to be created… with help from their male counterparts at almost every turn.
Nick Robinson the class warrior!
Is he the same Nick Robinson who was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association?
Or are you suggesting there are two Nick Robinsons?
What depresses, but does not surprise, is the collection of ‘moving on’ attempts I am now seeing.
Slightly more surprising is the motley collection of individuals who see themselves, and whose party evidently sees as being the best embodiment of this culture.
Er, no.
It minds me of a comedy skit (I wish I could remember which), where a confused punter is confronted by an ever-rotating collection of service representatives at the counter, who are in fact always clearly the same person. And saying the same, nonsensical thing over and over, if in different ways, as if that will satisfy.
What is worst in all this, are how many in the MSM now seem to feel this is fine, as the circus simply moves on.
I watched on SKY just now as the genuineness of the PM’s smirk was shuttled too and fro in the edit suite several times to assess, and his ‘performance’, and that of others, rated by a self-satisfied collection of WUVI’s, as if what they saw and now think has any bearing on what the rest of us can see and still think. Aunty’s minions are no better.
High on my list is that actions count, and a lot more from the past will need even more from the future, and changing the drapes in a house of ill repute doesn’t make the professional practices within any different.
Try again guys. It ain’t washing here yet.
Shouldn’t the Speaker be chosen by an independent external body , not be an MP and have no political affiliations ?
A role similar to the non-executive Chairman of a company.
Grant said…
Shouldn’t the Speaker be chosen by an independent external body
6:10 PM, May 20, 2009You’d think. I’d suggest the taxpaying public, who fund him/her and the others.
That a secret ballot solves the fact that 600+ potential troughers get to decide who best to oversee their future troughing seems… quaint.
Nick Robinson was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association, but since joining the BBC he has gone native. Otherwise, he would not have a career.
The same thing happened to Ed Stourton, whom I knew at Cambridge. In those days, he was rather quiet and socially-conservative, with a line in ancestral tweed jackets.
Once you join the BBC, it’s conform or die.