Saturday, May 20, 2006

The Traditional Friday Scandal

On Thursday, the news broke that five illegal immigrants sent to work at a Home Office immigration enforcement office by a cleaner contractor had been arrested. What could have been an extremely embarrassing incident was defused reasonably sucessfully by John Reid. He toured various TV and radio studios to assure us that these arrests showed that Home Office security measures were working effectively.
"They did not go in to work in the Home Office. We carried out security checks and we stopped it happening."
His comment took the sting out of any accusations of incompetence at the Home Office. These people were caught as soon as they attempted to enter the building. Perhaps the H.O. should vet its contractors more carefully but there's not much in the way of scandal going on here. It's not like they'd been working illegally at the Home Office or anything. File under minor incident and move on; that was my view.

It didn't occur to me, and I really should know better by know, but it really didn't occur to me that Reid was being "economic with the actuality".

Techclean, the contractor involved, released a statement today.
Each of the five individuals has worked at premises of the IND on a number of occasions; one of them for about three years.
Oh my lordy lord.

I'm almost at a loss for words.

Er...

Reshuffle anyone?

PS. Friday afternoons, eh? I mean, some BBC journalist has had to write this page at 8pm on a Friday evening (after seeing Channel 4 News at 7pm presumably). And they'll certainly know that relatively few people will read it on a Friday evening. What a downer...

Coincidence? Well, if you think the Techclean management, desperate as they undoubtedly are not to lose their government contracts, hasn't taken advice from the sultans of spin on the best way to minimise the embarrassment to the H.O., you're probably also the person who checks to see whether the word "gullible" really has been omitted from your new dictionary. It wasn't and it hasn't.

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3 comments:

Blair said...

I have just gotten used to the fact that the pols will release some horrid thing on Friday so that I am forced to mull over it all weekend and the media forgets how awful it is by Monday when some new cute baby photo op has taken their interest...
damn them.
How are you by the way?

20/5/06 8:58 am
Blair said...

nope, sorry, thought about it (for about one minute) and realized that I am not getting used to it at all!

20/5/06 8:58 am
Garry said...

Fine thanks. I've sent an email.

It is slightly difficult to come to terms witn the sheer cynicism of our great leaders. They still manage to surprise on occasion.

20/5/06 10:10 pm

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