If Jenny Tonge resigned then so should Jeremy Corbyn

I first knew Jenny Tonge when she was a Liberal councillor in Kew, and I liked and respected her.

In part the pariah status she came to occupy for a younger generation of Liberal Democrat activists was precisely because of the generation gap.

When I was a student, anyone with any claim to being on the left was instinctively sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Nowadays young Liberal Democrats display little influence in it.

But Jenny has also been the author of her troubles, notably in 2010 when she called for an investigation into claims that Israeli forces sent to help in Haiti after the earthquake had been harvesting body parts to send back to Israel for transplant. Surely that was vicious nonsense?

She finally resigned from the party last week after a video of her chairing an event in parliament.

In the words of Guido Fawkes, she did not

interject when an audience member claims Jews 'antagonised Hitler' and that the Holocaust was caused by 'Judea declaring war on Germany'.

We've all sat in meetings and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the nutter to finish. But, yes, Jenny should have protested and she should have been more careful about the company she kept.

But if Jenny was right to resign - and I fear she was - then what do we make of the video above. It shows Jerermy Corbyn playing at being a TV host on Press TV, the propaganda channel funded by the Iranian regime.

Note than when the caller appears to be saying something positive about the US, Corbyn pulls him up short. But when he calls Israel a disease, his only reply is "OK".

If Jenny Tonge was right to resign, then so should Jeremy Corbyn.

And you can be sure that the Conservatives are studying his Press TV appearance in readiness for the next election campaign.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Cooking hedgehogs for Nick Clegg

Could it be that Lord Bonkers knew Malcolm Saville?

Cooking hedgehogs for Nick Clegg

One does not have memories of last year’s general election campaign so much as flashbacks, but I do recall visiting a hedgehog sanctuary with poor Clegg and Paddy Ashplant. While Clegg was being shown how the inmates are cared for and educated, Ashplant took me to one side and confessed that he used to eat the creatures when he was in the Special Boat Service.

Having invited Clegg to dinner this evening, I hit upon the happy idea of reminding him of those days by serving hedgehog. Cook is not keen – “nasty, flea-ridden things that don’t belong in a Christian kitchen” – and claims not to know how to manage “all they prickles,” so I enlist the help of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, who quite charm her. They tell us that the trick is to bake the beasts in clay so that when they are done to a turn you simply break the clay open and then peel it and the spines clean off. The Elves also agree to catch the hedgehogs for us using high elven magic (or possibly Pedigree Chum).

I have no doubt that the evening will prove a success and that our hedgehog recipe will appear in the next Liberal Democrat Cookbook alongside Pressed Tonge and Norman Lamb Hotpot.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

A shadow cabinet maker

Giving Isis one up the snoot

Andrew Neil's press gang

Corbyn sends for Christopher Robin Milne

Six of the Best 506

Jay Rayner on the uncharacteristic silence of Keith Vaz.

"Boosting economies and vindicating the human rights of women and girls is the very real impact of aid in developing countries. The UK being the first G7 power to enshrine in law a commitment to spend 0.7% of its gross national income (GNI) on aid every year is something of which the British people should be justifiably proud." Jenny Tonge celebrates overseas aid.

Did Nick Clegg drop two clangers yesterday? Keynesian Liberal thinks so.

"Adolf Hitler said: 'I have sent my Death’s Head units to the east with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of the Polish race or language ... Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' Giles Fraser asks why the government is so afraid to speak of the Armenian genocide.

Frank Furedi rehearses his familiar (and correct) argument that modern society curbs children's freedom to a ridiculous extent.

Duncan Weldon examines the economics and politics of Thomas the Tank Engine.

The different treatment of Chris Rennard and Jenny Tonge

Have I got this right? The Liberal Democrats asked Alistair Webster to decide whether there was a better than even chance that an inquiry would find beyond reasonable doubt that Chris Rennard had intended to harass women in the party.

So we didn't hold an inquiry: we asked a QC to guess what would happen if we did.

If it were not so damaging to the party's reputation, our adoption of this byzantine approach would be comic.

This is a difficult issue for me to write about, because I have known Chris Rennard for almost 30 years. When I first heard of the allegations against him my reaction was to hope they were not true. I make no comment on them now beyond what is contained in Alistair Webster's statement.

But I am struck by the difference between his treatment and that of someone I first met even before I met Chris.

When Jenny Tonge suggested that Israel would not last for ever in its present form, she was given an ultimatum by Nick Clegg: apologise or resign.

When she failed to apologise, Nick told the Guardian:

"I asked Baroness Tonge to withdraw her remarks and apologise for the offence she has caused. She has refused to do so and will now be leaving the party."

If Nick has the power to force someone out of the party like this, why is he not exercising it now?

The kindest explanation I can think of is that Nick is scared of Alex Carlile.

Six of the Best 271

Nouse, the University of York student newspaper, interviews Jenny Tonge: "Yes, I think Nick is right to say he will not go along with the Boundary changes when the Tories have stitched us up on AV and House of Lords reform. I wish he had behaved similarly on other issues too. Perhaps he is waking up at last!"

Mike Smithson at Political Betting finds that disenchanted Liberal Democrat voters in Corby are overwhelmingly turning to Labour and concludes: "Those in the blue team who think that appeasing the right is the route to electoral success are fools – but my guess is that they are likely to prevail."

Nic Prigg's Blog is deeply unimpressed by a leaflet from the Scottish pro-Union campaign Better Together.

Remember the Tory MPs who believe British workers are “among the worst idlers in the world”, that the UK “rewards laziness” and that “too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work”? Vox Political believes that they are the worst idlers of all.

Andrew Bibby, writing for the Guardian, reports a new wave of interest in workers' co-operatives.

Is Mark Pack the Kevin Pietersen of the Liberal Democrats? Read Guido Fawkes and judge for yourself.

Was Jenny Tonge forced to resign for stating an obvious truth?

In the introduction to his Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies remarks that "All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced."

It's a good thing he is not a Liberal Democrat. Because, though it is hard quite to discover quite what it was that Jenny Tonge said that led the leadership to announce that she would have the whip withdrawn unless she apologised, press reports suggest that it was her statement that "Israel is not going to be there for ever in its present form."

The Roman Empire disappeared eventually, so did the Ottoman Empire and I would not bet too much on the United Kingdom still existing in its present form in five or ten years' time.

I have known Jenny for almost 30 years, from the days when she was a councillor and I was a young activist in Kew. Perhaps that makes me biased, but I cannot understand why she has been forced to leave the Liberal Democrat group in the Lords.

What is the company she was keeping? Was it something else she said during her speech at Middlesex University?

We are owed an explanation by the leadership. Over to you, Nick

Jenny Tonge "sacked as health spokesperson"

Writing on the Jewish Chronicle website, Martin Bright reports:

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has sacked controversial peer Jenny Tonge as the party’s health spokesperson in the Lords over her demands for an investigation into allegations of body parts harvesting by the Israeli Defence force in Haiti.

Her remarks followed an article making the accusations in the online journal Palestine Telegraph, of which Baroness Tonge is a patron.

I cannot find the article on the Palestine Telegraph website, but I presume it relates to this clip on Youtube. Surely the corneas have been sent to Haiti, not harvested there?

Bright also says that Jenny's comments "prompted outrage from fellow Liberal Democrats who put immediate pressure on Mr Clegg to act against Baroness Tonge". Unfortunately, he does not say who these Liberal Democrats were or offer any evidence of this outrage.

Tony Blair's own goal

Tony Blair is back in "man of the people" mode. A few weeks ago he turned up to meet a crowd auditioning for The X Factor. On Saturday morning he was on the Football Focus sofa.

Writing in the Observer, Euan Ferguson says:

We learnt that Blair is, undoubtedly, a fan of the programme. Ten past 12, every Saturday he can, he's watching Football Focus, and we know this because on a number of topics - ticket prices, the FA/Premiership fallouts - he referred back, with mention of "as you guys were saying last week", "that discussion you guys had a while back".

Except that it proves nothing of the sort. It is entirely possible that someone at Downing Street made a point of watching the last few editions of Football Focus and prepared a briefing for the prime minister. Indeed, it is easier to believe that than to credit that Blair makes the time every Saturday to take in the programme's bland chatter.

This picture of Tony Blair as a great soccer fan has never really convinced. Football may be classless today, but when the young Blair was at prep school and public school it was less common for someone of his background to follow the game.

Certainly, thanks to this Peter Oborne article in the Spectator (you can see enough of it without subscribing - thanks, Boris), we know that as a young man Blair's enthusiasm was for cricket:

I used to play for the same cricket club as Tony Blair, though not at the same time. It was called the Cricket Pistols, named after the punk rock band which is still indelibly associated in the public mind with the names Johnny Rotten and the late Sid Vicious. My own association with the Pistols was comparatively brief. They were affable, faintly druggie types, many of whom had attended Cambridge university, and in some cases completed their degrees. At least one had spent time in borstal. The Pistols were fairly down at heel then, but have since made good and tend to live in large houses in Notting Hill Gate.

Tony Blair used to turn out occasionally about 25 years ago, when he was establishing himself as a barrister but before he became an MP.

Of course one can follow both sports, but Blair the cricketer rings truer than Blair the football fan.

There is another reason for doubting soccer Blair's credentials. In his early years as prime minister he was interviewed on local radio in the North East. He was talking about what a great Newcastle United fan he was and how he used to watch the team with his father in the 1960s. Naturally, the interviewer asked who his heroes were in those days.

There was a horrible pause before Blair managed to dredge from somewhere the names of Jackie Milburn and Malcolm Macdonald. The only trouble with that was that Milburn played in the 1950s and Macdonald played in the 1970s.

This embarrassing incident has grown in the telling. For instance, in 2000 Francis Wheen described it as follows:

he told an interviewer that his "teenage hero" was the footballer Jackie Milburn, whom he would watch from the seats behind the goal at St James's Park. In fact, Milburn played his last game for Newcastle United when Blair was just four years old, and there were no seats behind the goal at the time.

This must have rankled with Blair, for yesterday morning the original recording was played on Football Focus. And it can hardly have been the programme's editorial team who suggested exhuming it.

Euan Ferguson writes:

The BBC had helpfully dug out the original Radio Five interview, which quite unequivocally had the PM saying he'd arrived after Jackie's time.

But hearing the interview again did nothing to dispel the doubts. Here was someone who claimed to be a big Newcastle fan in the 1960s, yet was unable when asked to name a single of the team's players from that era.

If you want to know what a real football fan turned politician sounds like, you should have heard Jenny Tonge on Adrian Chiles' programme on Radio Five Live. She talked rhapsodically about obscure Baggies cloggers from the 1950s. For if you are a football fan as a child, the trivia from that era stays with you for life. I am still an expert on minor Chelsea stars from the late 60s and early 70s. (Derek Smethurst, anyone? Barry Lloyd? Bill Garner?)

I conclude from this that when Blair said he was a Newcastle fan in the 1960s he was not telling the truth.

Remember that a year or two before Blair became prime minister, Newcastle - with Kevin Keegan as manager - was briefly the most fashionable team in the country. Given Blair's wish to be down with the kids it is not surprising that this was the team he suddenly developed a life-long affection for. It also fits with his tendency to be just behind the beat. He embraced Oasis just as everyone else was realising how thinly the group's talent was spread.

All of this makes you wonder about another of Blair's soccer-related outings as Labour leader. He appeared with Keegan, played head tennis and proved very proficient at it.

It may be that he was a keen footballer all along. But I have a horrible suspicion that Alistair Campbell had him out practising every evening for months, like a crazed American determined to make his young daughter a tennis champion.