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Warsi is cleared but her future remains uncertain

Cameron refuses to guarantee that Warsi will remain Conservative co-chairman.

Conservative co-chairman Sayeeda Warsi. Photograph: Getty Images.
Conservative co-chairman Sayeeda Warsi was cleared of claiming expenses while living rent-free. Photograph: Getty Images.

To the undoubted dismay of her many enemies, Sayeeda Warsi has been cleared of any wrongdoing over her expenses by the Lords Commissioner for Standards. The Conservative co-chairman was alleged to have billed the taxpayer while staying rent-free with Tory official Naweed Khan.

In response, David Cameron has stated that Warsi will lead "a big summer of campaigning" ahead of this November's police commissioner elections, but this still leaves him with the option of moving her in a September reshuffle. The PM has faced persistent calls to replace her with Michael Fallon, the Tories' deputy chairman and attack-dog-in-chief, or housing minister Grant Shapps, both viewed as superior media performers. ConservativeHome editor Tim Montgomerie, for instance, has written:

Cameron also needs to reinvigorate his team. He should begin with getting a half decent Party Chairman. In tough times like these you'd normally see the Chairman all over the TV, defending the leader and lambasting Labour. Where's Sayeeda Warsi? She's been completely invisible. I asked CCHQ where she was. Is she ill? Is she out of the country? No, she's preparing for party conference which is still three months away. Pathetic. She needs to be replaced as soon as possible.

If, as seems likely, Warsi is replaced as chairman, the smart money is on her becoming International Development Secretary, a job that would allow her to utilise her international contacts, if not improve her relations with the grassroots (most of whom would like to see development spending slashed).

14 comments

treborc's picture

God I hope she does not walk over to labour we have enough problem without her.

hugh markey's picture

On a tiger hun of course you need beaters. Cameron has his elephant gun and solar topee and will be atop the pachyderm. Georie O in his BB uniform and wearing his Field-service pill-box headgear will be in the howdah with his governor.
Baroness Varsi - based at ground level. Down there somewhere. Tiger buffet! [ Those big beasts in the Shires have a healthy appetite ]

Col Sherre Kahn-Blimp

hugh markey's picture

On a tiger hun of course you need beaters. Cameron has his elephant gun and solar topee and will be atop the pachyderm. Georie O in his BB uniform and wearing his Field-service pill-box headgear will be in the howdah with his governor.
Baroness Varsi - based at ground level. Down there somewhere. Tiger buffet! [ Those big beasts in the Shires have a healthy appetite ]

Col Sherre Kahn-Blimp

Don Brisbane's picture

The problem with Warsi is that she's not very good at her job. She failed to get elected to Parliament and so had to get a peerage, she made a complete fool of herself during the AV campaign, appearing not to have even read a brief on the matter before fronting the media and spouting nonsense and her declarations about the UK as a gloriously Christian nation would have caused uproar if they had been spat out by David Cameron or, say, Ed Balls.

Most disturbing of all is the fact that even liberal commentators seem determined to ignore these failings because having a female Muslim Tory with a regional accent just ticks so many PR boxes that it's not even funny.

The fact that the Tories wanted a moderate Muslim voice in their party and Warsi was the best they could do suggests that they didn't look very hard.

Tesco Shelf Stacker's picture

Cameron's "Poster Girl" ... rejected twice by the electorate - Warsi was the token ethnic baroness that was supposed make the Conservative Party look ethnically 'inclusive' and secure him the votes that would have otherwise gone to Labour. She's just a typical party apparatchik promoted above her capability and handed the job simply to pander to the jackbooted members of the liberal diversity brigade. She's a self-serving hypocrite just like the rest of them. In my opinion if you are unelected, you should not be serving on the front line of politics - unfortunately, for the shallow sociopaths of this world like Tony Blair and David Cameron who have no principles - tokenism is all ... more important than democracy.

Davidaslindsay's picture

The case of Baroness Warsi and Abid Hussain might finally expose to the general public something that some of us have been pointing out in considerable depth for several years, namely that it is the Conservative Party that is the fully functioning British political vehicle of the Far Left, of Islamism, and of South Asian communalism.

The entire Socialist Workers’ Party faction of Respect in Tower Hamlets not long ago defected to the Conservative Party after having fallen out with the Islamists. Johanna Kaschke, a longstanding Respect and Communist Party figure, left the Labour Party in 2007 after having failed to secure its nomination for the parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green and Bow, and ended that year by joining the Conservative Party, in which she has rapidly become a well-connected activist. Around the country, local factions of various Asian and other origins routinely defect from Labour or other things to the Conservatives on frankly communal grounds, and are always welcomed with open arms.

David Cameron’s vehicles toured Ealing Southall blasting out in Asian languages that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals would be made public holidays under his party. His “Quality of Life Commission” (don’t laugh, it’s real) then proposed giving the power to decide these things to “local community leaders”. What else will those figures be given the power to decide in return for filling in every postal voting form in their households in the Bullingdon Boys’ interest, and making sure that all their mates did likewise? To the statelets thus created – little Caliphates, little Hindutvas, little Khalistans, and so on – people minded to live in such places will flock from the ends of the earth, entrenching the situation forever.

With some fanfare, the Conservative Party recently welcomed John Marek, who was fiercely anti-monarchist and anti-hunting while Labour MP for Wrexham, and who went on to become the founder and only ever Leader of Forward Wales, a Welsh separatist, Welsh-speaking supremacist, economically Hard Left, unyieldingly Politically Correct, Tommy Sheridan-endorsed, RMT-funded party which was only dissolved in January 2010, and which continues to be named as Marek’s party, despite his having become an enthusiastic Conservative, on the list of former MPs who continue to hold House of Commons passes.

Will David Cameron also recruit, if he has not already done so, Marek’s fellow founder-members of Forward Wales: Ron Davies, one of the very few former Cabinet Ministers without a seat in either House, and a noted campaigner both against shooting and for the abolition of the monarchy; Graeme Beard, a former Plaid Cymru councillor in Caerphilly; and Klaus Armstrong-Braun, who in his time on Flintshire County Council was the only Green Party member ever elected at county level in Wales?

Cameron has already signed up Mohammad Asghar, a Member of the Welsh Assembly who has moved seamlessly from Plaid Cymru. Rehman Chishti, now a rising star as MP for Gillingham and Rainham, was Francis Maude’s Labour opponent in 2005 while working for Benazir Bhutto, whom he assisted from 1991 until her assassination in 2007 in her leadership of a party the motto of which includes both “Islam is our Faith” and “Socialism is our Economy”; he was still doing that job when he defected to the Conservative Party in 2006 and became an aide to Maude as its Chairman.

And so on, and on, and on.

They obviously find the 1980s Radical Right’s company as congenial as they find each other’s, with David Cameron and 80 per cent of his party’s MPs as members of Conservative Friends of Israel, which is not even a front for the thoroughly racist Israeli Government, since that would require some degree of secrecy, or at least of discretion, about the treasonable nature of the relationship. Liam Fox has had to resign as Secretary of State for, of all things, Defence because the Israeli Far Right and its nominally American fellow-travellers had, treasonably, been running a parallel foreign policy out of his office and through its subsidiary fake charity, now deregistered.

Blue is the new Red-Brown.

swatantra's picture

A great comment! Blimy, now that's what I call 'entryism'! And we thought we had it bad with Militant. This beats everything.

Davidaslindsay's picture

Read all about it, and much else besides, here - http://www.lulu.com/shop/david-lindsay/confessions-of-an-old-labour-high...

swatantra's picture

A great comment! Blimy, now that's what I call 'entryism'! And we thought we had it bad with Militant. This beats everything.

swatantra's picture

A great comment! Blimy, that's what I call 'entryism'! And we thought we had it bad with Militant. This beats everything.

Keir's picture

Blue-Brown. Ultra violent-Brown.

swatantra's picture

I knew she would be. Shes an asset to the Tories ... and to Labour. She's got the guts to tell the Muslim Community that they've got to change their ways, and very few politicians I know of are willing to be that vociferous in telling them the way things are in Britain today. She has that 'I'm not taking any of that nonsense' tone about her in Dewsbury accent and is probably more refldctive of the views of a lot of upand coming Asians and BME than Labour is prepared to admit.

Nathan Jones's picture

Change their ways? What are you, their new viceroy? Honestly.

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