The part-time Labour scribbler Denis MacShane put his money where his mouth was after criticising the Tyke cash machine William Hague. The Rotherham Tory-baiter’s dig at Baldie’s vast earnings, speaking on Radio 4’s Any Questions? in Hague’s Richmond backyard, went wonky when the presenter, Jonathan Dimbleby, teased MacShane about supplementing his own parliamentary income through journalism.
But Denis the Menace, a former NUJ president and one-time BBC reporter (until he rang his own programme’s phone-in under a false name to call a prominent Tory a crook), is quick-witted.
He silenced the sniggerers by pledging to donate the fee for a piece published that very week to the North Yorkshire town’s Georgian theatre. The obligation is now fulfilled, although trustees anticipating a Hague-sized endowment may have been disappointed.
“I am afraid,” wrote an apologetic MacShane, “it is a miserable £85, since the Guardian is notorious for not paying very generously for outside contributions.” I also detect a hint of professional envy – the word in Fleet Street is that Hague doesn’t take off his pen top for less than £500.
A threatened walkout by unpaid ministers in Big Gordie’s austerity government has won them £1,475 each. The militant dozen – including Kevan Jones, Quentin Davies, Chris Bryant and Siôn Simon – protested when No 10 decreed that all ministers would forgo a 2.33 per cent rise for MPs. The ruling left unremunerated toilers earning less than backbench idlers, until Jones, a union negotiator-turned-defence minister, led a revolt of the corporals.
The prospect of burning braziers across Whitehall helped Downing Street find reverse gear.
Barack Obama has a firm, unsweaty handshake. No 10 apparatchiks continue to swoon over the rock-star president pressing the flesh in the Downing Street political office. Curiously, the plotters and schemers seem to have forgotten already how Obama walked in by mistake, misdirected on his way to the lavatory.
The matchbox-sized Tory John Bercow still fancies his chances, I hear, of succeeding Michael Martin as Speaker.
The key is the timing of the former sheet-metal worker’s departure. Should Metal Mickey go this side of an election, as is whispered, Labour MPs, who outnumber Tories nearly two to one, may prefer pinkish Bercow to either of those rival Tory knights, Alan Haselhurst and George Young. The latest betting in the Strangers’ Bar makes Ming Campbell favourite if the venerable Lib Dem straps on his sock garters and enters the race.
Spotting another banana skin, David Miliband politely declined to intervene when the Times editor, James Harding, begged the Foreign Secretary to help secure his Wapping rag an audience with Obama to match a sit-down in the Financial Times. Our man in Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, was equally unforthcoming.
Thus, the consolation prize for Rupert Murdoch’s empire was a question from the Sun to the most powerful man in the world about, erm, the England football team’s chances against Ukraine. No FT, no Obama interview.
Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
