(too lazy to pick up the phone to Kenneth Clarke, that is), BBC Views Online’s weekly Magazine Monitor: Ten Things column lapped up and repeated the story that:
5. The croquet set John Prescott so memorably used at Dorneywood was presented to the grace-and-favour house by previous resident Kenneth Clarke.
Except of course he didn’t, as anyone who saw Kenneth Clarke being interviewed on Sky News in the middle of last week knows. And here was me thinking that Beeboids while away their hours at ‘work’ watching Sky News…
Alice Miles, writing in Saturday’s Times, confirms The truth about that croquet set:
THEY probably thought it was just a bit of spin: John Prescott’s special adviser, Joan Hammell, tried to roll those embarrassing croquet balls back out of sight last weekend by claiming that Conservative ministers used Dorneywood far more than Labour ones ever had, and, “in fact, the croquet set was given to the house by Kenneth Clarke when he was the resident there”.
Blame it on the Tories. What sounds like just a piece of political trivia is in fact an extremely good example of an outdated instinct that Labour desperately needs to kick and can’t: pointing the finger for everything, be it chaos at the Home Office, deficits in the health service, or even croquet, at “18 years of Tory rule”.
This mantra, honed in Opposition when a lot of problems probably were the product of 18 years of Tory rule, simply doesn’t wash any more, as Tony Blair is discovering at Prime Minister’s Questions week after week. The formula is dated, predictable and increasingly ridiculous after nine years in power. Only Labour seems not to have noticed that.
Oh and incidentally, Mr Clarke didn’t buy the croquet set.
So there we have it. I expect the Beeboids at BBC Views Online will get round to publishing a correction to this piece of blatant Labour spin that they so eagerly fell for.
Also on Saturday, fellow blogger Iain Dale exhorted Check your facts BBC News Online!, noting typical BBC attention to detail, as well as unattributed lifting of chunks of an exclusive David Cameron interview from ConservativeHome.com, tsk, tsk.
I had no idea croquet was so fraught with, er, um — what is it fraught with again?
We played croquet as kids. We’d get out the game, argue over who got to be what color, find some of the pieces were missing, set up the remaining bits in a random order, stop playing “croquet” about halfway through and start playing a sort of golf/baseball/polo thing with imaginary horses. Then as it got dark we’d use the stakes to stalk vampires.
I guess we’re lucky the British press wasn’t around to report on these bacchanals.
Seriously: what the hell?
Angie,
Croquet is fine by me, as I think I have mentioned! (Though I never can remember the rules.) The reason Prescott gets a roquet on his backside from the press for playing it is not, as he would like you to believe, because he is a working class guy who has risen in the world and they want to punish him for being uppity. It’s because he has made his career from being a class warrior. Whenever Blair’s excessively centrist policies and smooth ways have started to annoy the Labour base too much, Prescott has been ready to help out with a nice populist jab at Oxford or some outher outpost of the class enemy, or yet another anecdote about how he failed the 11+ and had his life blighted for evermore, except for becoming deputy prime minister.
Now here he is, him of all people, larking about like Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited.
On the lawn of a grace and favour mansion, too, that he had kept despite losing his ministerial post. That was the real reason the reptiles were hanging around his hedge with their telephoto lenses.
That was the real reason the reptiles were hanging around his hedge with their telephoto lenses.
Plus, with Blair out of the country, he was nominally running the nation.
Bunking off for some leisure activities at exactly this time didn’t make people too happy as he has sod all else to do nowadays.
John Prescott as Sebastian Flyte ???
Now that would be a very odd piece of casting. I’d love to see the series remake with Prescott and his teddy bear.
Louche he may be, but there are limits.
The irony is, there’s very little for the PM or DPM to do these days. Most of our policy – and hence law – is dictated from Brussels and the rest is designed and implemented by unelected and unaccountable advisory boards and quangos. Ministers barely get a look in most of the time. Agriculture is a dead portfolio, and defence will be superfluous if and when the EU manages to push through its “defence agency” thingy. Ever wondered how Blair can afford to swan off around the world so often? He’s got nothing else to do…
archonix
Nothing else he is allowed to do, you are right. Although I dont think you are right that he is hiding behind Europe. Most of the most serious long term bad things that have happened here, are of Gordon Browns making, and his alone.
We all remember how Margaret Thatcher liked to see herself portrayed as an “Iron Lady.” Later to find out that in many ways she was quite liberal and far more easily swayed by ministers than we thought.