Not Quite So Impressive As A Dead Sheep

The Murdoch empire may crumble; journalists at The Sun may demonstrate solidarity with arbitrarily sacked colleagues; the corpse of Vincent Cable may be resurrected in a transcendental glow of I-told-you-so; but even in these interesting times, a few things never change. Among these eternal verities are the ineptitude, abjection and self-pity of the Reverend Tony's Glorious Successor. The Glorious Successor, who spent thirteen years in a government which dedicated almost every particle of energy left over from pleasuring the White House to appeasing the right-wing press and spying on its own citizens, has made a speech in the House of Commons denouncing the Murdoch press for spying on him. "Many, many wholly innocent men, women and children who at their darkest hour, at the most vulnerable moment of their lives, with no one and nowhere to turn, found their properly private lives, their private losses, their private sorrows, treated as the public property of News International," mourned the Glorious Successor, who blamed the Cabinet Office for doing nothing about it. He himself was, after all, merely the Prime Minister. "If we do not act now on what we now know," warned the Glorious Successor, now that other people are acting on what we now know, "and if we do not act forcefully and with clarity, friends around the world who admire our liberties will now ask what kind of country we have become." It is just possible that admiration for the liberties we used to have is one reason why some of those friends have chosen to live elsewhere. Even the timing of the diatribe is pure Glory-come-lately, as if Geoffrey Howe had delivered his attack on Margaret Thatcher a year or so after the old bag resigned.