Steve Hemingway

There is a huge amount of coverage of Lord Browne's departure for lying about how he met his gay lover, Jeff Chevalier. (It seems he met him through a male escort website). The facts seem to be that:

* Browne provided BP resources to help his lover set up a phone ringtone business
* Browne was well known to be gay and surrounded himself with gay assistants
* Browne made unsubstantiated allegations about Chevalier's use of drink and drugs. The evidence for drink was that Browne's butler told him that the stocks in his wine cellar were dropping more quickly than would be expected
* That Browne's resignation may cost him as much as GBP 15m,
* That nobody seems to mention that the culture of cost cutting that Browne created resulted in 15 people losing their lives in the Texas refinery explosion
* That Browne once lived next door to a gay lover who was an investment banker
* That Browne paid fees for Chevalier to study, in order that he could stay in the country on a student visa

I find the following things particularly annoying:

1. the reports are presented as if Browne's sexuality was well known. He has had a great deal of coverage in the press over the years, and I'm pretty sure I didn't miss any reference to his being gay. It was repeatedly reported that he lived with his mother, and went to social functions with her. It seems that he was frequently accompanied by his gay lovers too,
2. that Browne, in spite of unbelievable private wealth, thought that he could steal from his employers computers and staff to run his boyfriend's private business
3. that some parts of the press considers that the Daily Mail has no right to publish this kind of article because there is no public interest in Browne's private life

The great thing about the blogosphere is that all kinds of interpretations are put on these things. The most intriguing one is that this story has been allowed to break to avoid linking Browne's departure with the Texas explosion and bad management of BP, and that he will somehow been fully compensated for the loss of the gbp15m in exchange for taking deflecting publicity away from BP. I'm not convinced, but it's an interesting analysis. Certainly it would explain why Browne has so egregiously resigned for lying when most others who are caught just try to brazen it out. Certainly it's hard to imagine him as being a particularly honourable man, or one for whom money isn't everything.

I have previously used livejournal - steve's livejournal blog. In the usual way of things, livejournal has failed to move on and now I find myself using another platform.

This time I chose a platform because it was the only one offered by my long-term hosting company Pair Networks. Pair seem fairly expensive, but at least they are durable and never go down. They have a tiny range of installable scripts, compared to siteground, for example, but what they do provide seems pretty much bombproof. (Not that Siteground are in any sense flaky).

I will bring my LJ journal up to date and then (probably) use this. It will have the benefit that I can have more control over outbound links.

I am claiming the blog with Technorati, hence the following:
Technorati Profile.

Well, Tony has announced the day of his resignation. I think it is about six weeks in the future. This will give time for the clunking fist to slug it out with all comers to decide who is to take his place.

The news coverage is blanket. Tony, ever the 'performance politician' has stage managed a resumption of power sharing in in Northern Ireland to coincide with his announcement. We must all hope that it continues for longer than his farewell tour.

I am of course intensely jealous of such a successful near contemporary. Like most Oxbridge types, I cannot understand why someone who seems so ordinary should be so feted. I especially cannot understand why qualities which he has, which I don't have and that I set at no value, are so praised and so important to everyone. The most outstanding of these is the famous reaction to the Death of Diana.

My own feelings at the time were that she was a rich, spoiled woman, who had entered into a contract to be a properly-behaved wife of an ornament of our constitution and that she had broken that contract and brought the whole institution of the monarchy into disrepute. Even I could see that she was behaving in a vindictive and provocative way towards her former husband.

That a major part of Tony's legacy should have been the success he had in reflecting the mood of the country after her death shows how remote I am from ever understanding the mood of the average voter. Alistair Campbell was, and probably still is, a major influence on Blair, and I suppose it is the attitudes of the tabloids (or 'red tops' as I now must call them) that I cannot, or will not, understand.

There are endless verdicts on Blair. The consensus seems to be that he was OK apart from the fact that we picked the wrong side in the USA vs The Rest of the World argument about Iraq.

Neil Kinnock described TB as a 'performance politician'. I heard that his speeches are brilliant and that he learns them by heart. My own feeling is that he is more of a matinee idol than an intellectual and has therefore made many policy errors. Certainly almost everything he has touched which has involved deploying any kind of computer system has turned to dust. From the ID Card Scheme, Biometric Passports, CSA, Family Tax Credits, Rural Payments Agency, Connecting for Health, PAYE, IR Self Assessment, MoD Helicopter training, railway safety systems, NATS, Government Gateway, Land Registry, virtually all the departmental websites, even to David Milliband's blog. The Public Accounts Committee regularly identifies gross mismanagement of these practical government projects, but HMG always prefers to listen to Accenture and the other IT-building consultants who are the beneficiaries of these huge overspends. But I suppose what is a cost of twelve and have billion pounds spend on connecting a few hospitals together electronically compared to the national benefit that results from TB leading the nation's mourning for the loss of Diana?