Nice and Sleazy

Does anyone know if David Mills is litigious? If, for example, someone was to call him a sleazy, corrupt, unscrupulous liar, how would he react? Hypothetically?

The Daily Mirror reported yesterday that he and Tessa "no questions asked" Jowell are well on the way to a reconciliation. To be fair, it's often worth taking Mirror stories with a pinch of salt. In this case, however, it's a tough one to call. Who to believe?

A man who counts Alistair Campbell as a "tremendous friend"?
A man who's business dealings with Silvio Berlusconi are under close investigation?
A man who writes fictional letters to his accountant describing events as if they'd actually happened?
A minister who habitually remortages her home without asking why?
A couple who "split up" because, as the husband put it, "I was simply being used as a stick to beat my wife with and the only thing to do was remove the stick. It’s awful. I hope that with peace and privacy and time things will return to normal, but we’ve both been through the most ghastly trauma"?

Or a newpaper which doesn't always get things right?

Hmm...

Pencil in the first "Mills and Jowell Spotted Together" story for anytime after the council elections. The formal announcement of reconciliation might take a bit longer though

Perhaps I'm just being a cynic. Blair's government, so he says, is whiter than white.

Blair has been the biggest dispenser of political patronage in the Lords since life peerages were created in 1958. Between 1997 and 2005 he created 292 peers, compared with 216 by Margaret Thatcher during her 11 years and 171 by John Major in his seven years.

Nearly all Labour donors who have given the party more than £1m since 1997 have been given a knighthood or a peerage, including Sir Christopher Ondaatje, Lord Drayson and Sir Ronald Cohen. Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man, is the only donor who has given more than £1m who has not been knighted or made a peer.

Well, at least everyone knows where they stand with donations. It is, if nothing else, easy to spot which people bought a peerage when they do it through donations. Loans, on the other hand, as specifically asked for by Blair's muscle Lord Levy, can be kept secret.

I'm trying to think of a way to illustrate someone exploiting their own loophole through the wonders of my feeble photoshop skills. At the moment, I can't come up with anything which is suitable for work though.

It appears, by the way, that the loans were not on "commercial terms" in the normally recognised sense (ie, a commercial lender would not have provided them on the same terms).

The Labour party may not have been able to obtain similar loans from a bank because they were not secured against property or assets.

A Labour source said: "We have never taken loans from people like this before. The situation with the bank was difficult. Basically the bank was squeezing the party and we didn’t get any more borrowing."

Tags: News, Politics, Sleaze