Tony Blair’s Labour party got beaten like a borrowed mule in local UK elections this week, and some of his cabinet ministers are paying the price. The party lost several hundred seats, including many in overwhlemingly Labour districts, and including some to the nativist British National Party.
Foreign secretary Jack Straw, who has been vocal in his opposition to military action against Iran — contrasting with his support for the invasion of Iraq — has been demoted to Leader of the Commons, a post roughly equivalent to the House majority leader in the US but with Cabinet status. It’s the same post Robin Cook, Straw’s predecessor as foreign secretary, held before his resignation from the government in protest of the Iraq war, and the move would seem to reflect Blair’s more hawkish stance. It’s a discomfiting move for anyone hoping for a more rational UK policy on Iran than was the one on Iraq.
Home secretary Charles Clarke, whose position is akin to that of the Homeland Security chief here, was fired in the wake of a scandal involving the unsupervised release of immigrant criminals from UK prisons, one of whom is a suspect in the murder of a British police woman. Deputy prime minister John Prescott has been demoted coincident with his own scandal involving an affair with his secretary. There were a number of musical chair moves as well.
Although the UK local elections aren’t really comparable to our mid-term ones, it’ll be interesting to compare what happened to Labour with the impact all the various percolating scandals in the US government, along with the potential for an attack on Iran, will have on the mid-terms (if we haven’t already blown up Iran by then). Although Bush’s approval ratings continue to drop and the most recent AP/Ipsos poll on whether the country is headed in the right direction shows a whopping 73% answering “no,” Americans seem to have developed something of an immunity to all but the most devastating scandal in the years since Watergate.
The news of CIA director Porter Goss’s resignation adds even more interest to the scandal aspect of the elections; neither he nor Bush offered a reason for the resignation beyond Goss’s remark that the agency is now “sailing well.” If Goss friend and associate Kyle Foggo, now the agency’s number three, resigns, it’ll be a strong indication that this has something to do with the widening bribery scandal surrounding now-jailed former Congressman Duke Cunningham. If not, it still seems likely that something else is going on that won’t reflect well on Goss and the administration.
The odds against Goss receiving the Medal of Freedom are rising like a rocket. Stay tuned …
Have you commented on Cole’s complaints to Slate on the use by Hitchens of apparently private information and the “what are you whining about” reply? Seems somewhat connected to your concerns about the NYT ombudman.
I see this is addressed in some fashion in the comments. The connection to the other issue is interesting anyhow.
I mentioned the general issue in my Hitchens/Cole post, but that was before the Cole/Weisberg exchange. I’ll have more on it in the next few days.