Silence of Good Works and Blunkett's Best Bet

18 Oct 2006

Evening Standard

David Blunkett is one of the most remarkable politicians of the 20th century. To overcome blindness and rise to be a British Cabinet minister is a feat which will probably never be equalled. But being remarkable is not the same as being nice. Martin Narey, the former director-general of the Prison Service, has revealed a conversation that he had with Blunkett when the latter was Home Secretary which shows an ugly, bullying facet to Blunkett's personality. Blunkett, he says, flew into a 'hysterical' rage over a prison riot in 2002 and told him to call in the Army to 'machine gun' the rioters.

These recollections are just the latest episode in 10 days of Blunkett overload. His memoirs have featured in most newspapers most days; been the subject of innumerable radio news stories, a television documentary and an Andrew Marr interview; and are now being serialised on Radio 4 twice a day. It all leaves you yearning for the days when disgraced ministers, like John Profumo, retreated into dignified silence and unsung good works. It would help if Blunkett's memoirs where not quite so self-serving. They might as well be subtitled 'How I was right about almost everything'. Remarkably, he claims not to want to discuss his private life. Yet he describes the effect on himself of his problems with his ex-lover Kimberly Quinn as if he had been hit by a totally unforeseen external circumstance.

Blunkett still has strong supporters among the close-knit Yorkshire group of MPs. Other MPs are bemused that he is allowed to air the Government's differences daily on the front pages of the newspapers without reprimand. But then Tony Blair has always doted on Blunkett. Maybe he sees him as his Ernie Bevin, a rough-hewn working class hero licensed to abuse the Left, sneer at the intelligentsia, appeal to the worst instincts of the white working class and support Right-wing policies abroad. Yet Ernie Bevin had a record in domestic politics that Blunkett cannot equal: he built the biggest trade union of the era, the Transport and General Workers, and was both the sheet anchor of Churchill's war cabinet and a pillar of the 1945 Attlee government. Mr Blunkett does nobody any favours with these memoirs. As a general rule, political diaries published while the government they describe is still in power contain little of value. Maybe Blunkett should have gone the Profumo route and tried the good works first.



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