McNasty’s first encounter
Kevin Maguire
Published 16 April 2009
All the gossip from the Westminster village
The dismissal of Big Gordie’s keyboard-tapping Rasputin, Damian McBride, over that smeary email also marks the departure of No 10’s most right-wing apparatchik. McNasty is, I discover, a lifelong fan of Maggie Thatcher. It was he who proposed inviting his heroine to Downing Street to permit his master to claim the Rusty Lady for Labour. Hailing from Finchley, the young McNasty, still in short trousers, badgered his lefty teacher mum to take him to meet the Tory premier. It all proved too much for the NUT activist. She barked, “I don’t know how you sleep at night” at the Milk Snatcher, who calmly replied, “I sleep very well, thank you,” before turning to young McNasty to add, “Your mother is very rude.” Perhaps being rude to Tories runs in the family.
Sniffing an unlikely Tory plot after David Cameron forced him to quit as an MP over the employment of two student sons is Derek Conway. The dishonourable member for Disgruntled Central has been heard muttering that there was no difference between his position and that of Caroline Spelman, retaining her seat and a shadow cabinet post despite repaying £10,000 of taxpayers’ cash used to hire a nanny. Spelman, no doubt, would beg to differ. Conway wonders if Druggie Dave wanted him out of the way to give the Tory leader’s fellow bicycling Old Etonian Sir George Young a clearer run at the Speakership. Wonder away, Mr Conway, wonder away.
Running no more is Theatre Bell, the Commons racehorse that won small fortunes for Westminster punters. The animal has been left with only three good legs after an accident. The Labour MPs who own the horse, Alan Meale and the Tonys Cunningham and Wright, are to put it out to stud to breed little Theatre Bells. In these fevered times, I can see the headline: “MPs in sex for hire scandal”.
The management consultant-turned-Cabinet Office chaser, Liam Byrne, has so riled colleagues with his demands for onerous six-monthly departmental progress reports that they’ve taken to referring to him as “Mr Gantt Chart”. The nickname is a reference to the impenetrable diagrams used by McKinsey to part clients from their money. The government’s Mr Gantt Chart, a stickler for detail, is bound to object to the monicker. He’s a former Accenture man.
A snout rang to sneak on the driver of a silver estate who parked unlawfully on a double yellow, glancing shiftily to the left then the right for prowling traffic wardens before nipping into an office block. The location was London’s Canary Wharf, the time 11.30am on Saturday 11 April. The motorist was the local Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick, who should know better.
He is the roads minister.
McNasty’s rapid No 10 exit will be followed by the arrival of one or more replacements. The word is that knocking on the door of No 10 are John Reid’s one-time mouthpiece Stephen Bates and Alan Milburn’s echo Darren Murphy. Neither is popular with those still spinning, but Peter Mandelson, who has a say in these things, considers both sufficiently New Labour for the right-wing slot.
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
This article was originally published on 16 April 2009 in the issue Who polices our police?
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