TELEGRAPH 18.4.09
The Home Secretary is a walking disaster
The preposterous Jacqui Smith is a disgrace to the office of Home
Secretary.
By Simon Heffer
I know that people like me are supposed to write newspaper columns
because we have a certain command of the English tongue. However,
there are times when even the most experienced of us is forced to
struggle. How, after all, can one describe Jacqui Smith, our Home
Secretary? The adjectives come thick and fast, but all seem
insufficient to describe this ambulant catastrophe. Preposterous,
corrupt, dim, incompetent, sleazy, incapable: none of them is quite
the job.
Miss Smith began by looking corrupt, when it was revealed that she
was occupying a room at her sister's house and charging for it as her
main residence. She then looked sleazy, dim and preposterous when it
emerged that her husband, incarcerated at what was allegedly her
second residence, was watching porn films and charging them to the
taxpayer. Incompetence and incapability can now be added to the
charge sheet following her role in the raiding of the office of
Damian Green, a Conservative MP and the party's immigration
spokesman: and perhaps one other adjective too - disgraceful.
If we had a respectable Government of serious and decent people, Miss
Smith would not hold the great office of state she now occupies.
Indeed, it is hard to believe she would ever have been selected to
fight a general election and to become an MP. She is where she is for
two reasons. First, she is a woman. There are perhaps more able women
in this country than there are able men, but the great problem is
that comparatively few of them are insane enough to want a career in
politics. Hence there is a disproportionate chance, in this age of
quotas and tokenism, of those who do clambering up the greasy pole.
Miss Smith also had the second and more important qualification
required these days to achieve political power. She is a friend and
slavish toady of Gordon Brown. We know from the recent disgusting
episode with Damian McBride how well and with what care Mr Brown
chooses his friends. Miss Smith is another glittering triumph in that
regard.
We cannot doubt that Miss Smith should have resigned already: how
someone can be responsible for law and order in this country and be
exposed for a form of legitimate peculation is beyond me. But her
role in the Green case ought to be the final nail in her coffin -
though, sadly, it quite probably will not be. I believe her behaviour
has been utterly disgraceful and completely at odds with the
responsibilities of her role as a Secretary of State.
Despite her Pontius Pilate act, it smells to me as though Miss Smith
detected an opportunity to damage a political opponent and was quite
willing to use elements in the Civil Service and in the police force
to do her dirty work for her. This sort of impropriety has no place
in the governance of Britain, which is not a party-political matter.
Instead of worrying about crime going out of control and prisons
bursting at the seams, or trying to reverse the tide of illegal
immigration, she chose to seek to destroy an opponent who, using
methods popularised by Labour during its last spell in opposition,
was striving to prove that her department was not doing its job
properly.
A politicised and fearful Civil Service would not challenge her on
the point. A police force anxious to play the political game went
along with the madness of raiding Mr Green's Commons office. It was
an attack not just on him, but on Parliament and liberty: not that
this would matter a stuff to Miss Smith, even if she had the
intellectual grasp to appreciate the fact.
The people who govern us have gone out of control. No freedom, no
convention, no aspect of our democracy is safe in the hands of these
power-crazed, pathologically dishonest misfits. If Gordon Brown won't
sack Jacqui Smith for her outrageous conduct, then perhaps someone
should try to prosecute them, too.
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And as someone "responsible for law and order in this country " she
permitted - encouraged? - ordered ? - THIS under her nose in an
illegal raid! Or was it that here too she "detected an opportunity
to damage a political opponent" [separately also in Telegraph]
Human rights chief targeted in Commons raid
The detectives who arrested Damian Green were after information on
Shami Chakrabarti, one of the country's leading human rights
campaigners.
Police in Commons raid searched emails for Liberty head
Police who arrested Damian Green searched his private emails for
information on Shami Chakrabarti, the civil liberties campaigner
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