David Blunkett - A very modern minister

Most informed people would have washed their hands of this unpleasant piece of work long, long ago and I apologise for raising his name again this morning. The media has been abuzz regarding his autobiography published last week and gave coverage to his criticism of General Sir Richard Dannatt, so I feel I cannot let the following story pass without comment.. On this morning's Today programme on Radio 4 there was an extraordinary interview with a former senior Prison Official, Martin Narey, who had been ordered by Blunkett to bring in the army and machine gun prisoners regardless of possible risk to his own staff. He read the former Home Secretary's account of this incident in Waterstones Bookstore and found it completely at odds with his first hand knowledge of the incident. A report is also in today's The Times, linked here. The critical passage is the following: David was certainly furious. He was also hysterical. He directed me, without delay, to order staff back into the prison. I told him that we did not, at that time, have enough staff in the prison to contemplate such a move but that many more staff were on their way from other prisons. I insisted, however, that although I was determined to take the prison back as quickly as possible, I could not, and would not, risk staff or prisoner lives in attempting to do so. He shrieked at me that he didn’t care about lives, told me to call in the Army and “machine-gun” the prisoners. He then ordered me to take the prison back immediately. I refused. David hung up. The electorate must consider that their own backbench MPs are complicit in this corruption of Government. Blair's public commitment to give our troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan whatever equipment they need is an economic impossibility and therefore a lie, yet his own party MPs connive in his continuation in power, while one of his main supporters and twice humiliated Ministers is publicly demonstrated as a bare-faced liar on national morning radio and in the press. Conservative backbenchers set the standard for such governance during the Matrix Churchill affair, where Government Ministers were prepared to lie and let innocent businessmen go to jail to protect their own posts and later continue in positions of influence within their party. Can politics in Britain sink yet lower?