Perma-tan Sir Phil outdone by ‘Day-Glo’ Hain? How galling!
DO they get the Parliamentary TV channel in Monte Carlo? If so, one shudders to think what happened on a certain gin-palace yacht at 2.43pm yesterday when Lord Hain (Lab) rose in the House of Lords.
Under Parliamentary privilege – ie, immunity from expensive lawyers – he named Sir Philip Green as the businessman in the latest Press gagging scandal.
Lord Hain felt it his ‘ duty’ to out Sir Philip, given that the media had been subject to an injunction silencing a story ‘clearly in the public interest’.
For the benefit of peers allergic to the public prints, he explained that it was about ‘a powerful businessman using non-disclosure agreements and substantial payments to conceal the truth about serious and repeated sexual harassment and bullying which is compulsively continuing’. Blimey. That must have elicited a few yelps of nautical language down by Monaco marina.
Let’s hope Long John Silver didn’t hurl too many matelots overboard in the ensuing rages.
One doubts Lord Hain’s remarks were greeted with relish in the swankier legal chambers off Chancery Lane, either.
What is the point of having lovely illiberal defamation laws, all that juris-- machinery? What is the point of all those wiggy fellows on winking terms with the top beaks, previously able to stop Grub Street oiks from printing and being damned, if a single parliamentarian can go and blurt out an injuncted name?
Once that happens the rest of us are entitled, quite legally, to report what has been said, because the legislature is a public place. Injunctions not so super after all, m’Lud! As for Sir Philip, it must be galling, as a member of the perma-tan club, to be undone by Westminster’s very own orange man, Peter ‘Day-Glo’ Hain. What happened to the solidarity of the sunbeds? Eheu!
Lord Hain made his remarks at the end of a session which, paradoxically, had seen the House of Lords at its worst: a stringy, whingey debate about how they nearly all wanted a second referendum on our membership of the EU.
Ex-Whitehall poohbahs such as Lord Butler and Lord Kerslake piled in to take this view, their line being that the voters had not been clued up enough to know that voting to leave the EU was a dreadful idea.
Whitehall’s hatred of Brexit is puzzling. Our looming independence from the EU will actually make the civil service more powerful because it will be able to make more decisions free from Brussels interference. You’d have thought they might like that.
But the high point of the debate, at least in comedy terms, came not during speeches by grandees such as Ming Campbell or even ciggy voice ex diplomat Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (he argued that ‘nobody voted for the Brexit we’re going to get’ – true, mate, because people like you have tried to muck it up!). No. The pinnacle of the day’s intellectual engagement, its Ciceronian oratory, its Noel Cowardesque sophistication, came when fighty bantam Lord Sugar (Crossbench) jumped to his size sixes to give us his, er, wisdom.
After an opening in which he succinctly torpedoed the bad-losers nature of a second referendum, he proceeded to tangle himself in logic, rather as a kitten will become tied up in wool.
HE argued that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove should have gone to prison for selling Brexit on a false prospectus.
Then he said that Brexit would possibly not have been voted for by 17.4million people had he, the mighty Sugarlump, only accepted David Cameron’s invitation to lead the Remain side’s arguments in the referendum campaign’s closing TV debate. ‘I know that in my forceful manner,’ he jawed, ‘I’d have made Boris admit he was lying. Who knows, maybe that could have swung the vote.’
Ever the charmer, he also took a swipe at former Labour MP Gisela Stuart for supporting immigration sceptic Leave. How dare she? She herself was merely ‘ a German immigrant’!
Lord Kerr, sitting beside not-so-sweet Sugar, was deliciously hard to read.