Cocoa Pops

There are few better exemplars of Daveybloke's Big Society thingy than Daveybloke's own cabinet. From Willem den Haag's sterling efforts to protect an old man in Belize from being pestered by the taxman, through Andrew Lansley's meetings with private health care firms in order to tell them, face to façade, what's what about the NHS, to Daveybloke's own chats with Murdoch family wherein he impressed upon them the necessity for improved moral standards in Britain's news media, Conservative ministers have been assiduous in their concern for others. Now Andrew Mitchell, the Minister for Our Little Brown Brothers, has added his own name to the roll of honour. Since August 2006, Mitchell has received forty thousand pounds in donations from Armajaro Holdings, a firm which had been banned from trading in Ghana because of allegations about smuggling. Armajaro's owner, a hedge fund gambler named Anthony Ward, informed Mitchell of his difficulties, children starving in the street and so forth, and ordered Mitchell to get the Ghanaian government back with the programme. Mitchell telephoned the British high commissioner in Ghana and, at Mitchell's request, a Foreign Office minister lobbied the Ghanaian vice-president; whereupon, mirabile dictu, the trading ban was largely lifted. A spokesbeing for the Foreign Office said that "all representations made by the government in this case were entirely proper and consistent with our support for legitimate British businesses abroad"; which is undoubtedly true, since besides the donations to Mitchell himself, Armajaro Holdings also donated fifty thousand pounds to the Conservative Party.