Lord Bonkers called for Hilary Benn to be Labour leader in 2006

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Hilary Benn's summing up for the opposition in the debate on Syria this evening was a triumph.

Its defence of liberal civilisation and emphasis on international cooperation are precisely what have been missing from the debate this week.

Many will see him as the Labour Party's king over the water and reason that only Jeremy Corbyn's vanity and three-pound Trots stand between them and a respectable result at the next election.

So let me point out that Lord Bonkers advised them to turn to Benn back in 2006:

A word of advice to the New Party: if you do succeed in tipping Blair out of the window, don’t replace him with that dour Brown fellow. Try someone younger and fresher like Tony Benn’s charming daughter Hilary or one of the Millipede brothers.

Jeremy Corbyn forms his first Shadow Cabinet

"What is the correct Liberal Democrat reaction to Jeremy Corbyn?" I asked Lord Bonkers.

He thought for a moment. "I think we should point at him and roar with laughter."

Of course, things aren't so funny if you are someone being hit by Conservative policies and hoping for change at the next election.

But in the mean time, watch this...

Lord Bonkers advised Labour against having Gordon Brown as leader

If I am unable to sleep, I turn to the diaries of Lord Bonkers - they usually do the job quite quickly.

Every now and then, however, I come across something that brings me up short. Like this from 2006.

Saturday 

It is hard not to sympathise with the New Party’s MPs: Blair has clearly gone barking mad – his public protestations of love for a chimpanzee, all those foreign wars, his plans to send children to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, before they are born – but their constitution makes it impossible to get rid of him. 

We Liberal Democrats recently had leadership problems of our own, but Kennedy’s fondness for drink never put the country in peril. Yes, he might fall asleep in meetings, sing raucous Highland ballads or try to kiss Alan Beith, but life was still more restful than under his predecessor, Paddy Ashplant, and – dash it all – I am rather fond of old Beith myself. 

A word of advice to the New Party: if you do succeed in tipping Blair out of the window, don’t replace him with that dour Brown fellow. Try someone younger and fresher like Tony Benn’s charming daughter Hilary or one of the Millipede brothers.

Liveblogging Dispatches: Politicians for Hire

"MPs offer political favours in return for thousands of pounds a day."

Tony Blair has made millions since leaving Downing Street.

Sir Alistair Graham: "The first principle for MPs is selflessness". Ho ho.

The programme approached more than 20 MPs. Ten agreed to meet the "company" -Anderson Perry.

Sir John Butterfill offered company his CV at the start of the meeting.

The programme quotes David Cameron saying lobbying is the next big scandal waiting to happen.

Butterfill: "I can organise a meeting in a minister's office or possibly ... he could come to you."

Said he could arrange a meeting with David Cameron.

Asks for more than £30,000 per year for sitting on the company's board.

Margaret Moran, for it is she. Keen to take paid work from "Anderson Perry".

Boasts of her contacts with special advisers.

Ready to start at once: "I'm free now."

She has not voted in Parliament in May and has not been seeing her constituents because of bad health. The programme was told by her office that she was too ill to see constituents.

So she is a liar.

Stephen Byers coming up. "I'm a bit like a cab for hire."

Since resigning from the cabinet he has developed a high-flying business career.

Already working as a consultant while an MP.

"I do a bit of work for Rio Tinto." Neither that interest nor the one with National Express is registered.

How much would he expect? "Between three and five thousand a day." "Sometimes I can charge more."

Tony Blair's earnings since leaving government have reached an estimated £20m.

Byers says he may be able to get Blair along for a drink.

Ooh look, it's Robert Maclennan.

Since the last election 46 minsters have been approved to work in private sector. Almost half work in areas they used to be responsible for.

Patricia Hewitt works for BT, Boots, Barclays and BUPA.

"I'm interested in taking on another major board position."

Robert Maclennan was against her being allowed to take up certain posts as a former minister. He is on the body that oversees such matters - The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments.

How easy is it to arrange meetings with ministers and civil servants? "It is very doable."

The ways:

1. Hospitality
2. Use a think tank - sponsor a seminar "and for your money you get to sit next to the minister".
3. Sponsoring events at a party conference
4. Straightforward invitation
5. Meet them via your presence in the constituency.

Persuaded review of mental health in prisons to talk to the private sector. Got a private sector representative on the task force. "I've kind of got them into the system."

Back to Stephen Byers. The general election is a great time to see civil servants.

Boasts that he helped National Express get out of its East Coast Mainline franchise without high penalties or losing its other franchises. He spoke to Andrew Adonis ("you have to keep this very confidential") on their behalf.

They agreed Adonis would talk tough in public but National Express would get off lightly - i.e. the would not abide by the contract they signed.

Now Tesco. Hilary Benn wanted to chose food labelling. Tesco rang Byers to get it stopped. He rang Peter Mandelson to complain about it. Mandelson got it delayed then amended.

Byers later emailed to say he had not spoken to either Mandelson or Adonis. Tesco and the Department of Transport both also said no such exchanges had taken place.

It seems his defence was that he was lying.

Coming next: Byers on defence.

Looking forward to translating his contacts into a way of making money.

Now Baroness Sally Morgan.

Gets £135,000 for jobs outside politics.

The programme had hired offices where Tony Blair first hired them after leaving No, 10.

Sally Morgan asks £5,000 per day.

She knows lots of senior civil servants because they worked at No. 10 when they were younger.

She can have conversations with people and push the direction of policy travel without lobbying.

Offers to put the company in touch with ministers. "I do anything as long as I am reasonably transparent about it."

She has interested in diabetes treatment but did not declare them when asking a Lords question.
She helped an educational charity win a £50m government contract.

Back to Sir John Butterfill.

"It is quite likely that I will go to the Lords." Perhaps less likely now.

"It gives me another string to my bow, as far as you are concerned."

That got that wrong. Geoff Hoon does not have a constituency home. His seat is in Nottinghamshire and he lives in Derby. Southern journalists do not understand Midland geography.

"I do not want to be seen to leave politics and then go back as some sort of lobbyist."

Still has Ministry of Defence contacts that might prove useful to clients.

He is helping American firms take over European companies.

£3000 a day "seems about right". After parliament is dissolved, "I am yours." Offers to chair the board.

All very depressing. As far as what the MPs doing is unobjectionable, that should be part of the job they are paid to do.

Byers' only defence is that he lied to the TV people. And can't Margaret Moran be prosecuted for something?

Hilary Benn on Top of the Form

The TV Cream page on Top of the Form says:

Grammar-school only institution, with singular absence of “new” comprehensive representatives. Prize was simply “taking part”, the swines.

This cannot be true, as the photograph on the page has Holland Park (a deeply fashionable comprehensive in the 1960s) as one of the two schools taking part.

Now go to that page, click on the photograph to get a larger version and see who is second from the left in the Holland Park team.

House Points: Defra questions

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. In my experience you cannot go wrong with fish-related humour.

Fish business

Ben Bradshaw ("The Haddock’s Friend") is no longer Minister for Fish. He has moved on to higher things at the Department of Health. I hoped that questions to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs last Thursday would show who has taken his plaice. But MPs insisted on talking about trivia like climate change, foot and mouth disease and floods, so fish never got a mention.

Not all is lost. Thanks to the Scottish Labour MP Tom Clarke we learned of another of Defra’s concerns. He told the House that a company based in his constituency exports sausage skins to many parts of the world. "Europe, Africa and so on," he added brightly.

The company needed certificates of clearance so that it could continue to export skins from their plants in Moodiesburn and Bellshill during the recent foot and mouth outbreak. Clarke said Defra had been enormously helpful and passed on the company’s thanks.

No one pointed out that it would have been even more helpful if the government had not allowed the virus to escape from its Pirbright laboratory in the first place. No doubt they didn’t like to carp.

But what about the sausage skins? The company’s website reveals that most are made of collagen - the same substance that is injected into the lips and buttocks of celebrities who are trying to stay youthful looking and so remain on their perches.

A survey on the same website tells you that 55 per cent of consumers do not know and most have never considered the origin of a sausage skin. Perhaps it is just as well.

Defra questions also saw the Lib Dem MP Martin Horwood asking about building on the flood plain, a big worry in his Cheltenham constituency and other parts of Gloucestershire.

In reply the Secretary of State, Hilary Benn, said around two million British homes already stand on a flood plain. "The building that we are in now is on a flood plain," he said, "but it has a defence."

I disagree. The Palace of Westminster has no defence. And we’ll be back to the fish one day. For Gordon Brown, the whiting’s on the wall.

"An incredibly foolish false economy"

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Flooding fibs

On Monday the new secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs made a statement on the floods. Hilary Benn thanked everyone he could think of – "the staff of the fire, ambulance, police and other rescue services, our armed forces, local authorities, the Environment Agency, the voluntary sector and local communities" – and said over 20,000 properties could be affected and flood-related insurance claims could run to £1bn.

What he failed to do was admit the government’s role in the floods. Last summer, Defra was forced to cut its spending by £200m because of the mess it had made of the new system of farming subsidies.

The Environment Agency in England was one of the bodies affected, losing £14.9m from its budget for flood defences. Its chief executive Dame Barbara Young said the cuts would mean delays to some projects, including mapping for floods and improving warning systems: "Everyone is very much aware that even in the middle of a drought floods are never too far away and climate change is making that worse."

Someone else who spoke up at the time was Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat shadow environment secretary. He said people in areas at risk from flooding would pay for Defra’s incompetence and called for the losses on farm subsidies to be covered from government emergency funds, not budgets for other environment work.

He told the BBC: "This is an incredibly foolish false economy when we know that storms are becoming more extreme and flood risk is increasing due to global warming."

And he was right.

Chris has developed a useful capacity to get under the skin of government ministers. On Monday he reduced the normally urbane Benn to bluster: "It is pretty churlish of him to have a go at the new Prime Minister."

But it was the new Prime Minister, when he was the old Chancellor, who insisted the farm subsidy fiasco should be paid for from within DEFRA’s own budget. So he must share the blame with Margaret Beckett, then the environment secretary.

On holiday in Norfolk I visited Happisburgh, where government seems to have given up altogether and the village is falling into the sea. If we don’t pay taxes to stop flooding, what do we pay them for?