BBC: Blunkett quits as home secretary

Reporting on BBC TV seems prety definite about this now too.

seems the slagging he gave his cabinet colleagues is the main reason and not the affair(s). Mind you, the affair precipitated the whole debate it seems...oh dear, one loose screw and the cabinet falls apart.

edit: the visa allegations too it seems

Now there's a perfect candidate.

The home office dude is sooooo powerful for regular people, cannabis
smokers, immigrants and all sorts of everyday things, that his
departure leaves open the possibility of "even worse".... which
leaves me concerned.

I need reassurance that whomever takes over will be a great hearted
person. I don't know charles clark.... is he an OK sorta guy?

he has admitted to using it himself, and as a Home Office junior minister, said he accepted it for medical use.

I don't see that much difference between Clarke and Blunkett. But then I don't think I liked Blunkett as much as you did.

I can't say i loved him... i liked jack straw, and have only known
the 2 of them since blair took power. Compared to the american
equivalent, all of them have been like living with saints. Ashcroft
was as demonic as they come.

Perhaps it was less a "love" and more the psychology of the prisoner.
Will the new prison guard beat me... and all that. I am never quite
sure what the policy is on cannabis, whether it is labour that drove
that, or blunkett, or blair secretly... as the torys have made no
bones about their intention to re-criminalize life in general, there
is clearly a much "worse" party out there... and i should count
my blessings.

As for blunkett's use of the terrorism laws, i was less impressed,
but geez, i have not the history of seeing IRA imprisoned by the
hundreds, and perhaps bunkett was a most lenient one, when all the
stats are filed.

... is watching the subtle shift in opinion. From being an invaluable and respected colleague and a much-loved public figure, Blunkett is morphing slowly but surely into the hubristic, ill-advised, right-wing authoritarian poser that some of us suspected he was all along.

Charles Clarke will not be an improvement. As the Bliarite Christian Democrats have as little respect for good employment practice as they have for anything else, they have done the classic bad-employer strategy of going for the nearest clone they could get to the outgoing employee rather than using the changeover as an opportunity to think outside the box and move on. Clarke is an arrogant, unpleasant man who despite his privileged private-school and ivy-league upbringing likes to pose as a working-class street-fighter and regular guy beer-buddy (American friends will recognise the profile!). Typical of his style was a refusal, as Education Secretary, to accept the traditional invitation to address the Annual Conference of the UK's largest Teachers' Union about his unpopular reforms on the pretext that he had better things to do with his time

As for being more liberal on dope because he's smoked it, forget it. The greater likelihood is that he'll be tougher on soft drugs because of it. What it's always helpful to remember is just how deep the embarrassment of ChristDem ministers about their leftish/ "bohemian" pasts runs - that's why they hate democratic socialists and trade unionists much more profoundly than the "paternalistic" Tories who see them merely as tribal aberrations of the Great Unwashed. Fortunately, Tony Bliar, a lifelong conservative without a radical bone in his body has no such difficulty.

The Skin

I'm not sorry to see him go. He was a disaster as leader of Sheffield City Council and I don't think he was much good as a cabinet minister either.

It does amuse me though, that somebody such as Blunkett, who is always banging on about immigration suddenly needs to bend the rules he has created when it suits him. Does "do as I say, not as I do" always have to be the politicians motto?

And judging by the sympathetic treatment of his resignation in the press today I think it's fair to say that he will return at some point in the future.

he just got the visa processed far faster than it would normally have been done.

I agree that a lot of the press (including, strangely, the Daily Mail who published all his comments on the Cabinet) seem to be on his side. If Blair gets a sizable majority, and things are OK for a year, I think he would try to bring Blunkett back, a la Mandy. Possibly just to piss Brown off.

had his biographer Steven Pollard writing in there. Now he was interviewed in Metro yesterday (You know, that free thing you find lying around on trains) and Pollard was adamant that Blunkett would not go. Just shows how much he knows I suppose.

But yes, the coverage has been very sympathetic indeed.

... knows how galling it is when someone else gets preferential treatment. It may not be breaking the rules but it sure as hell is bending 'em.

Get tough with immigrants but not "our" immigrants, know what I mean, John (nudge, nudge).

The Skin

"In the final analysis, Mr Blunkett presumed too much on the patience of those around him. His cabinet colleagues and his party had become too twitchy about where it would all end. A difficult general election is massively on all their minds, and Mr Blunkett was beginning to be part of the problem not the solution. Notoriously sentimental the Labour party may be, but it handed Mr Blunkett the ivory-handled revolver last night with as little emotion as the Tory party did to Margaret Thatcher 14 winters ago.

The hard reality is that, whatever sympathies many of us will always have for this very remarkable man, his departure will be widely welcomed, and not solely for the hard-nosed political reasons that brought it about. Many people sincerely believe that Mr Blunkett was one of the most destructive and dangerous home secretaries of modern times. No politician of modern times has had greater contempt for the rule of law or been readier to express it in public. None has been less in awe of the independence of the judiciary. Few have been as cavalier in their disregard of civil liberties or appeared to play faster and looser with the language of liberty and rights"

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/comment/0,11026,1374845,00.html

I think this specific incident has been blown up a bit, and that it's partly a matter of his ex's vindictiveness. But he was an awful Home Secretary, who seemed to be taking his policies from "1984", and had previously been a horrible Education Secretary. Clarke was also a horrible Education Secretary, and both are far too right-wing to be Labourites (someone whom I know commented that "the only difference between Charles Clarke and Ken Clarke is that Ken Clarke is a bit more left-wing").

I agree that they're probably not as bad as Ashcroft, but not many people are!

... except that, although I know what you mean about being too right wing to be Labourites, I fear we must accept that the old Labour Party - anodyne though it was - is now dead and buried and that the odious right-wing populism of the obnoxious Clarke and increasingly pathetic Blunkett is the mainstream of the Christian Democrat monstrosity which has replaced it.

A thought. If someone had made a movie about a once-left-wing disabled Labour Minister turned right-wing rabble-rouser who screws a rich, married Tory bitch who bankrolls a right-wing scandal sheet, edited by a malevolent Sebastian Flyte pose-alike MP, and then is shafted and ruined by her, the critics would complain about the heavy-handed and amateurish symbolism, wouldn't they?

Not only is Bliarism stranger than fiction ... it's less competent.

The Skin

Blunkett shafted and ruined himself. He was playing the Glenn Close part in this unsavoury drama, stalking the partner who wished to end the affair - yet perhaps because of his disability (and his Fathers for Justice pose - another modern sacred cow for reasons which must baffle the tens of thousands of women struggling to survive as single parents without any support from errant partners) it is apparently required that we sympathise with him! So we get a rehash of all the old male-centred legends that blame women for everything - with Quinn (a thoroughly liberated woman, and none too pleasant with it: so a threat to the male dominated establishment in parliament and the media) portrayed as a Lady Macbeth or Eve or a succubus and burned at the stake of the gutter press in revenge.

Nor am I convinced that any "sympathy" for Blunkett arises from his disability or public sympathy for wronged fathers. Or that distaste for Quinn arises from her being "liberated."

Bottom line is that these were two affluent, arrogant people who had an affaire which went nasty on them.

I would be surprised if there were any real lessons here for most of us.

The Skin

"Bottom line is that these were two affluent, arrogant people who had an affaire which went nasty on them."

Exactly.

So the disturbing thing is the way that a majority of people are taking sides with Blunkett in this. Bush's "You're with us or against us", things are either good or evil, black or white mindset seems all too prevalent in contemporary society. It makes it all too easy to demonise the other party using age-old stereotypes, so that Quinn becomes a satanic seductress or Muslims become barbaric monsters. In the populist upsurge post 9/11, so carefully encouraged by politicians surfing on the power of nightmares, the witch-hunt no longer need hang its head in shame.

Of course Blunkett is also popular because of his illiberalism - bashing hate figures like immigrants and judges attempting to preserve some semblance of impartiality and fairness in the law always goes down well when authoritarian and xenophobic impulses are aroused.

What a way to start a New Year!