Chris Smith: Flood Damage

Following the floods fiasco in Somerset, Daily Mail attack-dog Andrew Pierce was unleashed from his kennel to do a hatchet job on hapless Environment Agency Chris Smith. He had no shortage of material, Lord Smith of Finsbury being gay, socialist, green, an ex-Islington councillor and a luvvie cum laude with a PhD in poetry.

Pierce swiftly bashed out the required 900 words - only for an urgent command to arrive from the 'Eagle's Nest', aka editor Paul Dacre's office on the third floor, instructing newsdesk lackeys to spike the piece. Other Mail columnists were also ordered to steer clear of Smith in their own pieces.

What conceivable reason might Dacre have wanting to keep on the right side of the former culture secretary? The possibility that Lord Smith must be kept sweet at all costs as he's lined up to be appointed chair of IPSO, the new Independent Press Standards Organisation, is of course too silly to contemplate!

Private Eye.

Update: Or does Lord Smith have plans to be the next BBC Chairman?

Mail On Sunday: Why???

Mail On Sunday.

Small print: They bought some mugs and gave some money to Birmingham Pride. The horror, the horror!

This evil gay is personally responsible for all the floods.

In no way are these figures made up!

Floods: Farage Speaks Out!

Farage has actually said something even more stupid, and called for the UK foreign aid budget to be cut and the money given to those affected by the floods.

PS Seeing as they've just passed equal marriage shouldn't it be Scotland that's being flooded?
Or is the Envioronmental Agency's gay head honcho Lord Chris Smith to blame!!?
Just thank our vengeful Lord that Eric Pickles is so reassuringly heterosexual...

Chris Smith: A Gentlemen's Agreement

Britain’s first openly gay MP Lord (Chris) Smith of Finsbury, has spoken up on the difficulties he faced coming out about his HIV status, revealing that the Sunday Times had agreed not to publish any stories on the matter for two years until he was ready.

Appearing at BNP Paribas Diversity Week as a Keynote Speaker Lord Smith was asked how easy or hard it was for him to speak up on his HIV status.

Smith, who was the first MP to publicly acknowledge that he is HIV positive in 2005, told the audience that it was “a whole lot more difficult” than he had anticipated.

He said: “One of the things that happened was the Sunday Times found out and they were going to run a story and I talked with the editor.

“This was a couple of years before I eventually decided to speak out about it. And I said, actually, I don’t think I’m ready to do this yet. I can absolutely promise you that when I am, I will come to the Sunday Times to do it but it is against the editorial code that you reveal someone’s health details without their consent, and I’d much rather you didn’t.”

Pink News. 

Note Chris Smith doesn't say how the Sunday Times found out about his HIV status.

And this sounds like the sort of soft blackmail the tabloids are fond of; informing a public figure that they know something about them, tell them the evidence they have acquired (through often devious means), and ask them to tell their story - or be outed.

Hard to prove, but Fagburn suspects many stars - "Yes, I'm gay!" - So brave... etc etc - "coming out" stories still come via this route.

Oh, and Smith wasn't really "the first openly gay MP", he was the first to come out of his own volition.

Many had been outed or arrested sucking off a guardsman in Regent's Park or whatever before.

Labour MP Maureen Culquhoun, was openly lesbian in the late 70s - then was deselected.

PS Smith also said that Tony Blair was initially nervous about launching his programme of gay law reform; “I have to say the Prime Minister Tony Blair did require a little bit of persuading. He was initially very nervous about things like equalising the age of consent, getting rid of Section 28, introducing civil partnerships and so on. He was really nervous about some of these very basic things, like equal age of consent because he thought it would play badly with the public.” Pink News, yesterday.

Marriage: Here Is The Latest Non-News

'The Advertising Standards Agency has been accused of bias after its chairman publicly campaigned for gay marriage while it has placed advertisements from opponents of a change in the law under investigation.'

An almost record-breakingly inelegant and unwieldy sentence from the Daily Telegraph there. 
So what's the story?

'The watchdog rejected calls for Lord Smith of Finsbury – the former Labour cabinet minister, Chris Smith – to resign last night but accepted that he had a “conflict of interest” on the matter and therefore would not vote.

'It emerged last week that the ASA is investigating an advertisement from the Coalition For Marriage (C4M), which campaigns against changing the law, following claims it is “offensive” to homosexual people...' 

Erm, the "calls for him to resign" have come from one single - and seriously barking - blogger.
Since when did deluded rants from the wilder fringes of the blogosphere carry any political weight?
Fagburn hereby calls for David Cameron to commit hara-kiri live on The One Show on Friday whilst whistling Dixie.
Are you going to turn that into a news story?

Matthew Parris: "I'm a completely crap gay"

The openly amphibious parliamentary sketch writer, Matthew Parris, is interviewed for TotalPolitics by Iain Dale.
They're both gay Conservatives, so it's all very chummy and polite.
Maybe it's down to his boyish good looks, but he's usually presented as one of the nice guys, though his politics are perfectly ghastly.
Parris talks about his admiration for scary right-wing nutjob Keith Joseph ("He seemed to say the things that I was thinking but no one else dared to say..."), and David Cameron - "I believe David Cameron is going to be a great prime minister."
His old boss - Margaret Thatcher - was fine with him being gay, and he offers a word of warning to gay men going into politics; "What gay men who are not really out need to beware of (and Peter Mandelson notwithstanding, this is a warning not a threat), is the status of being a little bit gay and suspected of being gay but not having admitted it, because it really whets the media's appetite. Either you stay right in the closet, or if you've edged a little way out, for God's sake, come all the way out quickly. There is no status, although Peter Mandelson hoped there would be, in your homosexuality being "private but not secret". It's public or it's nothing."
It's most odd that Dale didn't press Parris about his outing of Mandelson, especially as it's been back in the news again this week, but that's chummy interviews for you.
No, he doesn't want to be a role model ("I do hope not. I'm a completely crap gay") and wishes he'd come out earlier.
"I wish now that I had come out when I was a Conservative MP. I think I could have got away with it in retrospect, but it would have been a close run thing. I had the nicest constituency and the nicest association and it would have given them an awful shock. A lot of them, I'm sure, had their doubts already and I think I could have ridden the storm. I so much admire Chris Smith for taking the risk."
Labour's Chris Smith is in the history books as the first MP to come out voluntarily, when he was a Labour MP in 1984.
Fagburn appears to be the only person in the world - including Matthew Parris - who seems to recall that Mr Parris actually came out a few years before Smith did, in a speech he made in the House Of Commons in the early 80s.
Problem was no-one took the slightest bit of notice, so Parris quietly went back in again.