Alex remembers some inconvenient facts:
A question, though. Tessa Jowell is Secretary of State for the Cabinet Office as of last night. Really? Blears bites the dust for using taxpayers’ money to speculate in property while avoiding capital-gains tax; has everyone forgotten that Jowell did much the same, but with the crucial distinction that she used money paid to her husband as a bribe by the mafia, in the person of Silvio Berlusconi. I believe I was first on this story in December 2005; I’m going to be the last off it.
Because, to resounding silence in the UK, David Mills was convicted by the Italian courts a couple of months ago of corruptly accepting the money from il cavaliere. This is Italy, so it is unlikely he will be punished in any way. Yes, she suddenly discovered irreparable cracks in their marriage, rather in the way that the RAF suddenly discovered them in the Nimrod MR2s, and kicked him out of the door. But I am not aware that she renounced any of the profit involved.
But but, why should she pay back this money? It’s not as if she stole it from British taxpayers, now did she?
Though what David Mills was convicted for back in February was much more serious than the various petty enrichments which have ended the career of so many deserving Labour and Tory bigwigs, the problem is that it just doesn’t fit the story’s template. Some fucker claiming thousands of pounds for a duck island is easily explained, but to delve into what’s ancient history, get the facts right and explain them to your readers, while staying clear of the libel laws is just too complicated. Anyhow it was in another country and besides the wench was dead.
On a more cynical level, the David Mills story is also much more dangerous to the political and financial elites in the UK. Venal and grasping MPs only out for what they can get and fuck the country are almost expected: what shocks us is just how much they have their snouts in the trough. But Mills was a high class lawyer and husband to an important minister and here he was having taken bribes from Berlusconi, somebody as Alex says only one step away from the Mafia at best. He took these bribes in the nineties, but was only caught out in 2005; what has he been up to in the meantime, how much did his wife know and how much was she involved. More important: how many others are similarly corrupt? You’d think any newspaper worth its name would love to get its teeth in such a story, but since the same people who run the papers run the politicians, they’d rather not bother…