The Joy of Six 1446

Cicero's Songs, making a welcome return, has naught for your comfort: "The decadence of the American Empire is upon us, and the consequences will be dire, unless the EU can manage to secure the defeat of Putin without American support.  Quite possibly the USA may now seek to obstruct the Europeans in their attempts to bring Putin's murderous misadventure to a close."

The allegations against British special forces operating in Afghanistan will not go away, argues Mark Urban.

John Sweeney says Reform's 19-year-old leader of Warwickshire County Council is skating on thin ice: "[George] Finch’s comments have the potential to jeopardise a fair trial and that, of course, would harm the victim and her family – and waste a huge amount of public money. ... Most people know that after someone has been charged for a serious offence, you must take care not to publish or say anything in the public square that could prejudice the criminal proceedings. ... Finch appears to have forgotten this."

"Here’s a rule I have developed for myself: never talk about a culture-war topic with anyone who only wants to talk to you about that topic. These conversations can only be helpful if they happen as part of a relationship. If you’re going in cold on a very hard topic, you will not be able to experience each other as people, only as opinions or symbols." Naomi Alderman offers 12 rules for online survival.

Dezeen chooses 10 key buildings by high-tech pioneer Nicholas Grimshaw.

"Screwball elements run through their films like runaway socialites: eccentric leads, unexpected reversals, physical comedy, chase sequences, false identities; best intentions go hilariously awry; hard-bitten cynics battle zany dreamers in matters of romance and will." Amber Sparks celebrates the Coen brothers' 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy 

The British Establishment is a House of Straw

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The witness before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry these past two days has been has been Alice Perkins, who was chair of the Post Office board between 2011 and 2015.

She also became a director of the BBC in 2014, which made her position ticklish when Panorama began investigating the Horizon scandal.

As John Sweeney, journalist and now Liberal Democrat candidate for Sutton Coldfield, wrote in Byline Times in January, this mean that in May, June and July 2015, Perkins had:

lived with the mother of all conflicts of interest. I have trawled through the relevant BBC minutes for that period and I can find no declaration of it.

But I'm not alleging any wrongdoing here. Having listened to Perkins before the inquiry, I am sure that she will have simply forgotten that she was a director of the BBC.

Yes, she followed the pattern for appearing before the inquiry that was established by Post Office leaders. In a really tight corner, blame you underlings, and otherwise claim you don't remember.

If the Post Office is at all typical of the standard of British management, then this inquiry has laid bare a major reason for our poor economic performance.

Alice Perkins is married to Jack Straw, and is the mother of Will Straw CBE, mastermind of the useless Office Remain campaign in the EU referendum.

Another hold up with the Lib Dem selection in Sutton and Cheam

There's news of a further hold up in the attempt to find a Liberal Democrat candidate for the eminently winnable seat of Sutton and Cheam.

Early yesterday Michael Crick tweeted:

🟠 SUTTON & CHEAM: one source says the hustings have been postponed because two comp
laints were received, and the source suggests John Sweeney and Trish Fivey may now have been added to the shortlist. Can anyone confirm or deny any or all of this? https://t.co/CVJdQbVwZK

— @Tomorrow'sMPs (@tomorrowsmps) April 21, 2024

According to Inside Croydon, the original shortlist for the meeting had only two names on it: former London mayoral candidate Luisa Porritt and Sutton councillor Luke Taylor.

Radical Bulletin in the latest Liberator (issue 422) reported after the original call for applicants was issued:

This presumably means that Sutton & Cheam’s former prospective parliamentary candidate David Campanale has finally been ousted from that role after an interminable series of appeals that began last summer when the constituency first sought to remove him.

Although Campanale was originally a Liberal Democrat he left to join the highly socially conservative Christian People’s Alliance and rose to be its leader and author of its 2010 general election manifesto. Some of this was unexceptionable but it also said: “A new hierarchy of rights has put the needs of sexual minorities above religious freedom” and inveighed against “sex in view of families enjoying parks and open spaces” (Liberator 416).

He stood as a Lib Dem candidate in Spelthorne in 2019 - though few outside the area appear to have noticed - but Sutton & Cheam is a rather more serious proposition as the party held it from 1997 to 2015.

Some Sutton members felt they should have been better acquainted with Campanale's past by the party before the original selection meeting and were unimpressed to be told they should have looked on Google.

The current Conservative member for Sutton and Cheam, Paul Scully will not stand at the coming general election. In 2019 he had a majority of 8351.

As Liberator says, the seat was held for the Lib Dems, in the person of Paul Burstow, between 1997 and 2015.