A fully paid trimester with taxpayer-supported pension contributions Robin Cook wants to restart
A fully paid trimester, with taxpayer-supported pension contributions Robin Cook wants to restart work in September. This dangerous madman must be stopped!Yesterday, Jack Straw was asked whether he’d been in touch with his opposite number in Zimbabwe It sounded like the start of one of those sketch jokes. One politician upbraiding the other about a rapacious clique of vicious apparatchiks looting the country and dividing up the spoils among their supporters. How dare you talk about the Prime Minister like that, they’d both say Arf arf.Michael Ancram had just come back from Zimbabwe He’d gone incognito No one recognised him.
He might have presented himself at the border shouting: “I am Michael Ancram, shadow Foreign Secretary of the Conservative Party!” and he’d still have been incognito. Cram what? Shadow who? Conservative huh?He told us about his visit. He asked Jack Straw whether he was aware of the obscenity of famine. The obscenity of displaced families without jobs, possessions or homes There were 85,000 such farm workers over there Soon there might be 300,000.
That was obscene.It’s easy to despair of the Tories when you see them close up. They just haven’t got it.It is possible, is it not, to imagine a grave party elder standing at the dispatch box and making us see what he had seen; making us weep, indeed, by seeing what he had seen He might have shamed us for our moral sloth He might have thrilled us with what might be done He might have dwarfed the Foreign Secretary. That can’t be as difficult as it sounds.Mr Straw pointed out that the Mugabes had been humiliated and inconvenienced. What had we missed? They’d been made to wait in an aircraft on the tarmac at Madrid airport. It takes a politician to realise that another politician would feel this punishment so keenly. Did the dictator writhe, do you think? Did the humiliation turn his eyes into his soul? Did they close the bar at the same time? Mr Straw also claimed his great victory.