As ever, Starmer had a carefully crafted speech for deployment on Thursday. He vehemently - very vehemently - wants us to believe that whatever Parliament thought it had secured the day before, it's really all about a catalogue of "Mandelson's lies" which Starmer "had wanted to hand over yesterday" (if PC Plod hadn't told him not to hand them over; yeah, right). Nice try, Kier; but what your MPs actually want - and won't easily be deflected from - is what McSweeney's role in all this was, blow by, errr, blow.
And what McSweeney was up to is clear enough - orchestrating a sham of a vetting process. How do I know this? Because on top of outright secret sources (and who knows what they knew?), within the security services is an OSINT desk - open-source intelligence gathering. People whose job is to trawl everything available from open sources. And in this day and age of Bellingcat and the extraordinary online resources they've tapped into and made public, and when you have the resources of HMG, GCHQ etc at your disposal, OS is one helluva resource, properly marshalled. Be it immediately added that imposing QA on what is found online etc is a very significant analytic task, when all the OS stuff is assembled, tinfoil-hat dross / disinformation / Маскировка and all. But that's not the point in this case. What can be said for certain is that whatever was available in OS, worldwide, on Mandelson - and everybody knows that includes, e.g., the Deripaska affair - it was ready to hand within Whitehall. And cumulatively, it was all anybody needed to know to conclude he was a non-starter for Ambassador by any rational criteria.
Ready to hand - but seemingly not deployed. In other words - and let's charitably dump this all on the convenient fall-guy - McS ran a sham exercise in which Mandelson was invited to tell whatever lies he liked; and he was then taken at his word, without the security services being tasked to give it the old red-ink marginal annotation routine. Because if Mandelson had simply given them a big assemblage of lies, they could have demolished it, line by line.
The alternative explanations - that all his lies were indeed fisked, or even that he simply didn't lie at all - and still Starmer made the appointment, well, that would be even worse for Starmer. But since PC Plod is conveniently withholding the list of lies, we can only speculate...
ND
1 comment:
(i) Is Mandelson qualified to flee to Israel which would then refuse to extradite him? I like to think of his finishing his life labouring on a kibbutz.
(ii) Could McWhatsit be an IRA agent?
(ii) Or is it just that everyone involved in government is so hopelessly incompetent that attempts to rationalise their behaviour are bound to lead to false suspicions?
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