Mick Temple’s Blog

LA HAIN

18-01-2008

“Go on then,” we said to Mick Temple.  “Tell us what you really think about Peter Hain and his undeclared donations.”  So he did.

A few months ago I posted a blog on Labour’s deputy leadership contest where I compared Peter Hain to the pigs in Animal Farm. Like them, he appeared to have come full circle from downtrodden porker to plump, patrician capitalist farmer. A former liberal activist had become all the things he had once despised.

Some censured me for such unfair comments. The events of the past few days have only made me regret I was so kind to the manipulative and misleading member for Neath.

A campaigner against apartheid taking money from supporters of separate development in South Africa? The Welsh Secretary taking money for his campaign from Welsh businesses bidding for government money? A think-tank which ‘channelled’ donations to his deputy leadership campaign and which has never filed an account yet alone thought of anything? As Richard Littlejohn repeatedly says, you couldn’t make it up.

Does anyone have any confidence in Hain’s decision-making or his ethics? Not his boss, apparently.

He took his ‘eye off the ball’ said Gordon Brown. As any cricketer knows, take your eye off the ball and you’re either rapped in the box or on your way back to the pavilion.

Brown is afraid to sack him and afraid to back him.

The  Prime Minister has publicly admitted a member of his Cabinet’s incompetence. Hain lacks authority, credibility and trust. No matter what the Electoral Commission decides, his position is ‘untenable’ and he must go now.

Should Hain go now?

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