lest we remember

It’s not up on their website yet, but the Observer profiled John Reid yesterday. It found many things to praise, with a few mild caveats:

No particular speech or book helps us to identify him; he exists simply as a sometimes charming and certainly politically effective operative in the current era.

Actually, there are a number of things that help identify him, as a quick trawl through Guardian Media’s own files would have revealed. There’s this for instance, from 2002.

The things that Toolis managed to remember are as follows: covering up for his son’s influence peddling; using parliamentary allowances to pay staff campaigning for Labour and then -

In the course of the inquiry, it emerged that Reid had held "discussions" with other witnesses, which in plain unparliamentary language sounded a lot like threats.

This was followed by his censure by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. And then of course, there’s this:

In the international arena, Reid, during his drinking days, fell into bad company in the Balkans with the Bosnian Serb mass-murderer Radovan Karadzic, who tops The Hague's International War Crimes Tribunal list of wanted men. Reid has admitted spending three days in 1993 at a luxury Geneva lakeside hotel as a guest of Karadzic. "He used to talk to Karadzic, he admired Karadzic. He mistook the Bosnian Serb project as the inheritor of the united Communist ideal," says Brendan Simms, a Cambridge academic and author of Unfinest Hour: Britain And The Destruction of Bosnia.

That was three years ago. In September, Reid was also profiled by Tom Bower in a piece that opened as follows:

In 1991, John Reid's reputation appeared to be in tatters. Drunk one day in the House of Commons, he tried to force his way on to the floor to vote. When an attendant stepped forward to stop him, Reid threw a punch. What the MP for Motherwell North did not realise was that he had taken aim at a former SAS soldier. As bemused colleagues looked on, he was effortlessly wrestled to the ground.

Bower also adds that Reid’s visit to Karadzic was paid for by a lobbyist and not declared in the register of interests, that he was a serial womanizer while at university and married to his first wife and that he joined the Communist Partry at the time out of naked opportunism (though I suppose these days that’s considered a recommendation).

Absolutely none of this is mentioned by Euan Ferguson in yesterday’s profile, though he does take up Bower’s theme that Reid is the man who came in from the cold, so to speak, giving it a more emollient gloss . It’s quite a feat in a way. First airbrush the record, then praise Reid with faint damns as a man who rose without trace in “an age of constant re-invention.” There’s a school of thought that says Reid has left too many hostages to fortune to be a credible candidate to succeed Blair. That assumes that people will make an effort to remember them when he does so emerge.

Toolis goes on to sum up Reid as follows:

If we had a Politburo instead of a cabinet, Reid would probably be running the State Security Division. And he'd probably be good at it.

Well, that’s just an opinion and hardly definitive. I wonder if it's the sort of opinion the Observer would print about the Home Secretary now?

Comments

[dsquared]

NB that Euan Ferguson is, of course, top drinking buddy of Nick Cohen and has mentioned the fact in his columns.

[Gracchi]

Great column- Reid is a thug. Incidentally why is he the only PhD that goes on about having a PhD don't notice Brown demanding to be called Dr. Brown. That one thing shows the nature of the man.