Quote Of The Weekend

William Hague on the first day of the Tory party conference:

The last Labour government was "a government that raised taxes 178 times, raided the pension funds, sold the gold, and borrowed more than all previous governments put together, but still managed to leave more people on welfare, school and health inequalities wider, severe poverty growing and poor communities suffering most from crime"

Scaping the Political Celeb Barrel

The Wife of The Speaker

This William Hague story seems to be forcing the media to scrape the barrel to find vaguely political personalities to offer their mostly irrelevant and always vacuous opinions. I was subjected to the-bloody-Hamiltons on the TV news, yesterday. I guess the subconscious message they wanted to put across was "a return to Tory sleaze". All very silly.

I-Mu speaker. Sally's 2nd husband?

But The BBC has outdone its media rivals by wheeling out a woman who has no other qualification to comment on political matters than being unable to get selected to run for Labour as a councillor and being married to the shortest speaker since the I-Mu - Sally Bercow. As reported in The Telegraph she opines that William Hague should not have issued such a detailed personal statement in defence of the rumours of him having an extra-marital gay affair with a special advisor. It's been a line of attack used by the political opponents of the Tories and others a lot over the past few days in order to keep the story alive and add to the perception that there is more to this than Hague is letting on.

Firstly, it ill behoves someone who issued an undeniably unnecessary personal exposé of her life when she was in her mid-twenties to lecture someone else on being to revealing in their public statements. Either in the hope of making a name for herself or spiking any negative stories that may have come out about her, she admitted to being "out of control" and "binge-drinking; having one night stands".  Frankly, I didn't give a frig (although she probably has been given a few in pub car parks etc.), it all sounds fairly normal to me, this is not Victorian England, after all. But the column inches it generated helped build her celebrity far more than just being "the wife of The Speaker of the House of Commons". Job done

Secondly, there is a good reason for Hague to bring up the intensely personal information such the heart break that he and Ffion have suffered over the years with multiple miscarriages as they attempt to start a family. That they were childless after 13 years of marriage was a fact that is being used to insinuate that the marriage was a sham. It is the most tawdry part of this whole saga and exposes the rumour mongers (including those making money from appearing in the media to comment and keep the story alive) as the turds they are.