Gove us a clue

Discussing the leak, to the Daily Mail, of the plan to bring back the O Level exam to British schools, Ken Clarke claims he does not believe Michael Gove was responsible for the leak. Clarke cannot resist a smirk however, and stumbles over his words, wrong-footed. Most tellingly, when Andy Burnham (Labour) comments 'Michael Gove is the best leaker in Whitehall', Clarke immediately replies 'Yeah' before swiftly seeking to blame Liberal Democrats instead. Who knows if it was Gove or a Lib Dem, but interesting that Clarke seems to agree that Gove leaks and leaks often.

Anyone got any information on Michael Gove's record on leaking? If so, please let us know by commenting below.

News In Brief

Stories catching my eye recently Many of you will have heard Obama's statement that he has 'evolved' into someone who supports same-sex marriage, and publicly affirming his personal support for gay marriage. It turns out one figure surprisingly not yet mentioned on this blog, American VP Joe Biden (who is famous for gaffes, slips and plagarism in public speaking) appears to have precipitated the affirmation. The story goes that in a typical Biden blunder, he jumped the gun by making a similar statement off the cuff, thus forcing Obama to make his statement - arguably, a case of the off-message mis-speak of a loose-lipped politician making a little bit of history. The Slate analysis is archly titled The Audacity of Evolution.

“I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger

This classic quote comes from an interesting post listing "political faux pas that will leave you in splits" from John Mark Ministries.

 Added to Blogroll: Sturdyblog, which has at the moment a post that does seem to conclusively prove David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, to be a liar!

Meanwhile here's a pre-emptive exposure of Cameron, courtesy of Armano Iannuci's Time Trumpet.


 Local councillors are so funny sometimes.The Right Ear has a hugely entertaining report on the twitterstorm created by an apparently pro-EDL councillor who, despite claiming not to have realised the EDL were racist in her subsequent apology, had previously tweeted such gems as 'if you don't like it here go back to where you came from' to someone on the basis of their funny foreign name. The post is valuable as an archive of tweets deleted by the councillor concerned.

And finally: a political parapraxis for French speakers.

Aristocrats joke around with gun

Last month I blogged that police are just another gang, children fooling around with guns. Today a similar story has emerged with regard to another privileged, state-supported group in society. Who is Pippa Middleton? I had to ask myself this question today when I saw this tweet:

Pippa Middleton with a friend waving a gun at photographers. Sun and Mail cover it, BBC silent.yfrog.com/od65gpfj cc @RepublicStaff
— Martin Robbins (@mjrobbins) April 16, 2012

I thought the name sounded familiar - perhaps a BBC newsreader? But no, apparently she is the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge, who is married to Prince William. Middleton was in Paris for some mock-18th Century Versailles-style parties with various aristos. While she's driving around the city of lights in a German convertible, the driver decides to point a gun at paparazzi. What larks! Er...yes, but they're paparazzi, mate. That means the whole world can see what an asset you are to society:

Let them eat lead.

In a gift for newspaper copywriters, this incident comes shortly after deadly shootings in Toulouse, exposing these more privileged gun-fans to accusations of 'bad taste'. The Sun report, which has a further three pictures, points out that even waving a fake gun publicly in Paris carries a potential custodial sentence.

From our point of view, we are interested in what this story reveals about the normal workings of power. The non-coverage by the BBC does reveal something about how that channel's pro-aristo, pro-state bias and self-censoring norms persist despite its sometimes radical, investigative history. For other organisations, I guess the potential revenue from covering the story, and any prestige from claiming the public interest high-ground, outweighs any bias they too have towards the powerful. Step outside the British media and the coverage becomes marginally more explicit. But let's not assume that bias and censorship has disappeared. Here's NBC:
The report is keen to tag this as a 'strange incident' straight away, immediately precluding the possibility that this is normal, if usually hidden, behaviour.  And is it really 'unclear' who the men in the car are? Or do the Sun know exactly who they are but prefer not to say?

NBC's sources claim that police don't know anything. Whether that will change is moot, but notice how the report, on no evidence whatever, that the gunman 'may'facing questions from police. How do they know? He could be over the border by now. The effect is to reassure the viewer that the gunman will face the legal consequences, while in fact there is no guarantee of that. Despite covering the story, they don't want us to get too angry about it, or know the names of suspects. The bias is still there.

No one is asking why these people didn't realise that their act would be interpreted as bad taste in the light of the Toulouse shootings. It's a terrible gaffe, but with such bad timing one assumes it did not even occur to these people that the two incidents would be connected in the public mind. Its as if these people believe they live in a rarefied strata of society that has nothing to do with the fall out of recent foreign policy that the rest of us have to deal with. The incident in Toulouse - if they were even aware of it at all - was probably filed away as beneath consideration. The grubby world of plebeian gun-crime has nothing to do with them. These people are proud to be able to brandish guns in public, as you can see. It is their birthright and their pleasure. It's interesting that despite the BBC non-coverage, this is public knowledge now. The Crown's PR people will presumably be doing whatever damage limitation they can right now. Expect a contrite-sounding public apology from Middleton soon. Aristos will keep their guns hidden for a while. But the power behind it carries on regardless.

Cock News

Sally Nugent, a television sports presenter, was recently drafted in to present the BBC Breakfast News and attracted a few headlines for accidentally saying 'cock' when she meant to say 'pocket'. The Daily Record claims

viewers took to Twitter to point out the embarrassing gaffe during a report about fake pound coins. Sally said: “When you’re walking around with a couple of pound coins in your cock – um, pocket...” Eleanor Head tweeted: “Oh, Sally Nugent.. your first time giving BBC breakfast news and you say cock rather than pocket on live television! freudianslip.” And Tim Marben said: “Four pound coins in your cock...” Oh, BBC Breakfast, you please me no end.”

A quick search of Twitter reveals no user by the name 'Tim Marben' exists; there are a number of users called Eleanor Head but none of them tweeted about Sally Nugent. It appears that the Daily Record decided to add an angle to the story by pretending people were talking about it on Twitter. Which they are not. There's only one tweet about Sally Nugent, to do with her legs. She's the new Angela Rippon it seems. Here's an edited version of the moment:

Slips by female newsreaders that get a lot of publicity often relate to sexuality, usually penises. From earlier in the year this was getting a lot of attention:

Meanwhile this newsreader seems to associate policing with masculinity:

Male newsreaders also enjoy explicitly referring to the penis:

Lessons in Memory Stick Zen

A Catholic priest is 'co-operating', with an investigation into an "inadvertent" display of gay porn, apparantly caused by an auto-loading memory stick left in a laptop, during a presentation at a primary school in County Tyrone. Father Martin McVeigh projected the images onto a screen during a meeting for parents in Pomeroy in preparation for First Holy Communion. According to the head of the Catholic church in Ireland:

The priest has stated that he had no knowledge of the offending imagery. The archdiocese immediately sought the advice of the PSNI who indicated that, on the basis of the evidence available, no crime had been committed.

"He was visibly shaken and flustered," said the parents. "He gave no explanation or apology to the group and bolted out of the room"; the co-ordinator and the teachers then continued with the presentation. The meeting continued in his absence, however, the parents who viewed the pictures were horrified and distracted. "Twenty minutes later he returned, he continued with the meeting and wrapped up by saying that the children get lots of money for their Holy Communion and should consider giving some of it to the church."

From BBC News Northern Ireland, 2 April 2012

Police are just another gang

Manchester Police

They may have the backing of the state but they act like just another street gang fooling around with guns.

A story today in the Daily Mail, the well known Hitler-supporting newspaper otherwise known as the Hate Mail, reports some armed officers in Manchester have been 'ordered to leave their unit after the discovery of a picture showing them fooling around with a shotgun'.

It has especially riled, according to the Hate Mail, the family of Pc Ian Terry who was killed, shot in the chest, on a training exercise with Manchester police. The BBC report of the time quotes Garry Shewan, Assistant Chief Constable of GMP:

Since Ian's death we have made a number of changes to the way in which we train officers to ensure that all firearm training exercises are carried out in the safest possible way by reinforcing procedures and existing policies.

Words which ring false today. No word from the Hate Mail as to how the families of non-police officers shot dead by this gang of state thugs might be feeling right now, especially when the supposedly 'independent' police complaints commission puts out grey and black propaganda about their fallen kin.

More twitter ye not - the #blackbusters affair

Well, twitter has exploded today thanks to Labour leader Ed Milliband's extraordinary slip up. It began when Diane Abbot, Labour MP, was having a Twitter conversation in which she tweeted, amongst other things:

White people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism

Predictably, her words were used against her but, as 33Revolutions blogs, accusing her of racism for them doesn't convince in our Universe. The Labour leadership however was keen to get her to apologise; here's Diane in mid-interview about the tweet, taking (so it is said) the phone call from her leader:



So far, so boring. Then Bob Holness, a broadcaster well known in the UK for hosting 80's game show Blockbusters, died, and Milliband tweets:

Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters

Oh dear. Some feel this may have been a deliberate ploy to take the heat off Abbot. Most people view it as a typo, probably by someone who tweets (or used to) on Milliband's behalf. But coming as it does after the Abbot incident, it's a fascinating slip. The Telegraph argues "the slip-up suggests yesterday's 'race row', in which Miliband was compelled to rebuke Diane Abbott, is still weighing on the Labour leader's mind" - or the mind of his tweet-monkey. A reasonable argument given how difficult it is to mistake a for o on the keyboard, even on a phone. Let's try and unpick it a little more. It seems obvious to suggest a relationship with the Abbot controversy, and if that connection holds it does suggest unconscious racism on Milliband's part, having only 24 hours earlier himself 'busted' a well known 'black'. Another factor of interest is that Holness was a white South African, born there, raised in the UK, but returning there to begin his broadcasting career right at the beginning of the apartheid era. Did that obscure fact play into the slip too? #Blackbusters is now a trending topic on twitter, as well as people complaining of a storm in a tea cup. It will be interesting to see how much this damages Milliband in the long term, compared with say Gordon Brown's incident in which he was recorded describing a member of the public as a 'bigoted woman'. Will this embarrassment stick to Milliband, despite the voices of reason and calm? Can he live it down? An interesting test case for public slips.