Alas Woolas

Generally speaking, a party in opposition has little opportunity to demonstrate its suicidal lack of political judgement.

Even, however, where little opportunity exists, Labour MPs will heed its gentle knock, which is perhaps why they are lining up to voice their support for disgraced former ballot-swindler Phil Woolas.

Phil, who has only appeared in these pages or the public imagination once previously - whilst being verbally spanked to universal delight and approbation by renowned Gurkhaphile Joanna Lumley - has again been the victim of public matriarchal chastisement. This time it was at the gloved hand of Harriet Harman, who told the Resident Intellectual that while a judicial review might reinstate the mendacious Phil, it could not exonerate him of the accusation that he knowingly lied in order to win an election, and he would therefore not be reinstated as a Labour MP under any circumstances.

By any sane standard, this should have seen an end to the story, but seemingly not so, and for reasons that may point to a deeper schism in Labour ranks.

Harman, bug-eyed sophomore grandee of the Labour rump, has also become its Cassandra: universally vilified despite doing the obviously right thing. Having presided over a leadership election process that delivered the "wrong" Miliband as leader, she was marked for death when the loser, David, visibly reproached her for applauding his brother at the Labour Party Conference.

If Harman, however, is regarded as an Ediband loyalist, then her antagonist is a doyenne of the Daviband insurgency. When Daviband needed someone to run his sleazy leadership campaign, he turned to Phil, who proceeded to bring to national politics the approach that had worked so well at Oldham East and Saddleworth. Although the wholly negative campaign, which depicted Ediband as a raving Marxist, has Phil's grubby fingerprints all over it, he actually nominated Diane Abbott, in what he termed "an act of pluralism" (a.k.a. "an attempt to dilute the left-wing vote").

The man whom the rest of us regard as a festering canker on British politics is, to the Davibandians, a poster-boy for political effectiveness.

Of course, this cheers Sordel as a rotting pear does the fruitfly. What could be better for the cynical onlooker than the hyenas of Millbank angrily contesting the last bone of political power?

It is worth acknowledging, however, that for Elwyn Watkins, the Liberal Democrat candidate mercilessly defamed by Woolas, the smear campaign was perhaps less entertaining. A sober account of the judgement in the Saddleworth News reminds us that the thrust of the lies was to imply that Watkins was pro-Islamist in a constituency with racial tensions, which goes rather beyond the rough-and-tumble of regular politics.

There is only one group of people in the world who will question the severity of Phil's punishment, and they all take tea with David Miliband.

Oh, Oh, Oh What A Lumley War ...

Until last night, it had never been worth anyone's while to commit to memory the name of Phil Woolas, the United Kingdom's immigration minister. He may well have been calculating that, with a year to go of Labour Government, a prominent place on the Shadow Cabinet would be his for the asking after the bloodbath that will doubtless follow the next General Election. It was all going so well.

Searching for Phil Woolas on Youtube (that new instrument so beloved of Downing Street) it is possible to find a video of him on the receiving end of a custard pie. Those were the good old days, however, for now he finds himself unwittingly in the vanguard as Brown and company charge the Russian guns. "Someone had blunder'd" indeed.

The guns in question belonged, of course, to Joanna Lumley who - short of setting about them with a closed umbrella - could scarcely be doing a better job of treating our political masters as the pack of whelps and curs that they are. Our government is much happier to deal with the Great British Public in general, believing (quite against overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that you can fool all of the people some of the time. By saying that she trusts the prime minister, however, Ms. Lumley eloquently conveyed precisely the opposite, and Mr. Brown would do well to view the retribution visited upon his hitherto-anonymous lackey as merely a foretaste of what will come if he does not approach the issue of the Gurkhas with the same pre-emptive haste that he previously showed on the subject of MPs' pay.

Which reminds me.

Harriet Harman - who (let us recall) unsuccessfully introduced in January a Commons proposal to exempt MPs' personal expenses from the Freedom of Information Act - was on Newsnight last night defending her fellow cabinet members as a consequence of the Telegraph's revelation that some of them had been sucking over-enthusiastically on the national teat.

(Evidently the Prime Minister and his brother have been mucking out at the Augean stables, since they found it necessary to spend £240 a month of our money cleaning something. If Lady Macbeth had committed that scale of investment she might have been able to sleep better at night.)

Ms. Harman is, it seems, the government apologist of last resort, and this sets up a potential title bout that might cast the Rumble in the Jungle into the shade.

Harman vs. Lumley.

Let it be.