Michael White's Blog, page 46

Michael White's diary: Ségolène Royal's revenge: a dish best served cold, part I

And her timing was absolutely exquisite

• François Hollande's team has been smarting since a French newspaper claimed that No 10 "encouraged" the Daily Telegraph to ask M le Président about his private life at their recent Oxfordshire press conference. So Barack Obama's refusal to choose between Britain and France ("it would be like choosing between my two daughters," the Prez teased) when he faced the White House media with the lovelorn Hollande was a soothing irritant. Paris knows how neurotic London's patriotic tabloids are about being No 1 Chum. But the revenge is mild compared with Ségo Royal's comment on hearing what Valérie Trierweiler, her own rival for the portly Hollande's affections, said on being dumped. It was "like falling from a skyscraper", Val told friends. "No need to exaggerate – it was hardly 9/11," purred Ségo. Miaow!

• Timing matters. So it was not the best week for Ofwat, the water regulator, to seek an urgent cash advance of £1.5m to "help meet peak demand". More rain fell in Britain this last month than in any January for 250 years. And it ain't over yet.

• Michael Gove has challenged X Factor's tiresome Simon Cowell to educate his son at a British state school after the numbskull impresario told kids not to get educated but to "get lucky", instead. Not unreasonably, Peter Pan Cowell (54) protests that his sort-of girlfriend has not actually had the tot yet. It's never too early to get a child's name down for Bog Standard Academy, Simon. But will it still be open in 2025?

• No namby-pamby nudge theory from Hong Kong martial arts star Jackie Chan (59). Today's London conference on the trade in endangered species heard that African states are complicit in the illegal sale of ivory and horn, but that China is the biggest "insatiable" market for it. Chinese people who buy this stuff for health reasons should be told they'll get cancer and die, animal-loving Chan tells the fans.

• More successes for the intrepid TaxPayers' Alliance, whose research even boosters like the Tory blogmeister Tim Montgomery admits is "often highly populist and sometimes unrealistic". Fallen immigration minister Mark Harper is said to have paid his illegal cleaner a modest £7.50 an hour, which saves the taxpayer lots. And gay couples seeking to change their civil partnership plans into a Dave-blessed proper marriage are being told by some cash-strapped registry offices (Lewisham's, for instance) that they must pay the £80 fee again. Another triumph for cost-conscious housekeeping. Well done, TaxPayers' Alliance!

• Rare good news for TaxPayers' Alliance types from the spendthrift MoD, whose procurement contracts sustain some of Britain's most profligate welfare queens. With joke-free entrepreneur Philip Hammond in charge the kit budget is under control at last, despite a further £754m increase in the cost of those pesky new aircraft carriers with no aircraft. Auditors have spotted an extra £65m needed to buy paint (and scaffolding for painters) beyond original plans. That's a lot of grey paint, unless it comes from Osborne & Little, the chancellor's fashionable family firm, where it would just about decorate an oligarch's loo.

• No-nonsense Germaine Greer, the thinking PhD's Edna Everage, would have sorted out wimpish François Hollande's ménage. Promoting White Beech – her book about saving the rainforest – in her adopted hometown of Saffron Walden, she told adoring fans about the downside of feminism. "People think that because I'm a feminist they can't give me flowers, so I always get fruit. In hotel rooms I have to ask them to send some flowers up. Flowers are bisexual, for God's sake, fruit is just ovaries," declared the old trouper (75). Asked about women in sport, Greer wondered why there are so few female racing drivers. "Is it because they can't park?"

• Today saw the acquittal of Dave Lee Travis of sordid sex crimes (the embattled CPS's third such celeb defeat in recent months). Could it be that non-celeb private school staff are easier to put before juries?

Twitter: @MichaelWhite

Michael White
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Politics Weekly podcast: England's floods and 'Milibandism'

The torrential rain which has fallen on the south of England has contributed to the wettest winter since records began nearly 250 years ago. It has presented an immediate political problem for the government, and ministers have been slow to don their wellies and get to grips with it. But given such record-breaking bad weather, is it fair to blame the politicians?

Joining Tom Clark this week are the Guardian's environment expert Damian Carrington and columnists John Harris and Michael White.

Also this week: Ed Miliband was at Guardian HQ this week to deliver the annual Hugo Young memorial lecture. He chose to focus on public services and his plan to put ordinary people at the heart of any future reforms. But does it amount to anything more than opposition flim-flam?

Leave your thoughts below.

Tom ClarkMichael WhiteJohn HarrisDamian CarringtonPhil Maynard

Michael White's diary: Oh Alex, just think – you could have been the first minister of Panama

If things had worked out, Scotland would be the imperialist swines – but independent swines

• Yet more good news for Alex Salmond in his fight to build the Tartan Curtain. Take no notice of what George Osborne, Ed Balls and Danny Whatshisname say about not being able to keep the British poond. That hugely brainy thinktank, the Adam Smith Institute, says you don't need English permission. Just copy leftie Ecuador and Panama who use the US dollar without permission and have "far more prudent and stable" systems as a result of not having a financial safety net. Scary stuff even before prudent Scots recall that their ambitious plan to colonise Panama in the 1690s nearly bankrupted Scotland, helping to secure the 1707 union with the soft south. Part of the deal was a new Scottish bank: RBS.

• In any case the SNP press office ("we never sleep") was quick to moan that second-generation English migrant Ed Miliband never once mentioned Scotland during the devolution bit of the Hugo Young lecture he gave on Monday. Mind you, Alex himself is no great devolver having centralised fire and police service, plus McCouncil tax rates. He is still challenging diaspora Scot David Cameron to a TV debate, when both rival cabinets – his and Dave's – meet on opposite sides of Aberdeen on 24 February. For all his talk of the coalition's "undemocratic control" of Scotland, Tories and Lib Dems got 878,000 Scottish votes at the 2010 general election against the Nats' 491,000.

• This week's McKinsey acronyms prize for management speak goes to Antony Jenkins, whose new broom regime has raised bonuses while cutting staff and profits at Barclays. Among his faves are (no sniggering at the back) "the five Cs" – which stand for "Customers, Colleagues, Citizenship, Conduct and Croissants" (I made up that last one). Tony also invokes RISES (Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship) and TRANSFORM (don't ask), both splattered over the bank's Canary Wharf HQ. He wants to make Barclays the "go to" bank, as distinct from "go too, Tony".

• Jet2, the cheapo holiday airline with a big heart, asks passengers with a disability whether their condition might "distress other passengers". Guardian reader Alison Pickard, who has motor neurone disease, takes offence. Which of us could confidently pass such a distress test, she wonders? Certainly not Russell Brand.

• Crusty but rigorous art critic, Brian (take no prisoners) Sewell has abandoned hope of finding a living British artist who's any good now that Lucian Freud is dead. It's a "wasteland", where artists, critics (not you, Brian) and curators big up each other, he tells the aesthetically pleasing Watford Observer. What keeps Brian going at 82 is being persecuted, thumped and threatened with the sack. "I've been to exhibitions where the curators have turned the lights out so I can't see anything. Of course, these days one might take turning the lights off as a piece of art in itself," trills the old brute.

• Six weeks in HMP Brixton for expenses fiddling has not turned former Labour MP Denis MacShane, into a shrinking violet, more an expanding one. He emerged blinking into what passes for daylight this week and went straight ("fitter than I've been for 10 years") on to Twitter. Not since Jonathan Aitken rewrote Oscar Wilde's harrowing Ballad of Reading Gaol after a cushy two weeks in the slammer has self-justifying self-promotion been so MacShameless. A decade ago hyperactive MacShane, then an FO minister, denounced newly overthrown Hugo Chávez as "a ranting populist demagogue"in the Times, only to see the caudillo restored to power before the article appeared. A slow learner?

• Lovable cheesecake George Clooney ("I don't know much about art, I was born in Kentucky") lumbers into the Elgin Marbles row between the British Museum and Greece. "Give them back," he tells the BM of Lord Elgin's 1800 acquisition. Rigorously applied, the Clooney principle might create a useful precedent for Native Americans whose continent was acquired by light-fingered Brits even earlier and is arguably more valuable.

Twitter: @michaelwhite

Michael White
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Michael White's diary: A taxing birthday for the Taxpayers' Alliance

It likes to boast about all the 'waste' it has saved. But no mention of the slashed floods budget. Maybe it's modesty

• The Taxpayers' Alliance, Tory front organisation and purveyor of dodgy statistics, celebrates its 10th birthday today (pause for tax-deductible champagne all round) with a claim even dodgier than Monday's Bumper Book of Government Waste. The BBGW's £120bn annual "waste" tally included £1.4bn wasted overpaying GPs compared with French docs, and £1.5bn lost by an MoD "property giveaway" – probably to the TPA's own wealthy, tax-averse sponsors.

• Today's TPA birthday press release claims "part" credit for £37bn worth of tax cuts, including George Osborne's very own 50p to 45p tax trim (allegedly worth £5.6bn) and Nick Clegg's drive to raise personal allowances (£10.7bn). In fact, tax as a share of GDP has remained pretty stable in the TPA's decade, though millions of unrich "squeezed middles" have been dragged into the 40p tax bracket. And shouldn't the TPA be boasting about the "wasted" money it helped save by slashing the floods budget?

• Among the "Valentine's Day Ideas" being promoted on tax-allergic Amazon's website is a "Champagne afternoon tea at the Savoy for one or two". But if that sounds sad there may be a simple explanation. How many couples can afford £89 ("regular price £134") for tea if they both go?

• Hard to please, those patriotic tabloids. Whenever shots ring out they berate the BBC for being a bunch of whingeing commie peaceniks. But when a couple of BBC sports commentators got a bit carried away over Jenny Jones's Team GB bronze in Sochi this week ("Go on, the Jones!" raved one) they unleashed swivel-eyed readers to denounce "immature idiots".

• Tristram Hunt's decision to cross a lecturers' picket line at Queen Mary University of London to give a talk on Marxism has prompted Tom Watson MP to blog that Hunt should resign. Not as Labour's education spokesman, but from QMU. Serial resigner Watson once urged Rupert Murdoch to quit too. Like Rupe, blond bombshell Tris is defying Watson's fatwa, despite being called a "scab" by the Morning Star.

• Stung by disloyal leaks to the Guardian about the implementation of IDS's universal credit plan for benefit reform, Robert Devereux, top man at the DWP, has circulated staff to warn that the culprit's "betrayal of trust" will be tracked down. Ex-M15 sleuth Peter Mason, a former security chief at Westminster, has been called in to help, Bob wrote in an email appeal for snitches. It too has been leaked.

• Absent from a Commons discussion about the need to educate voters to the (irrelevant?) realities of nuclear weapons were senior sailor Lord West (busy sailing around stormy Cape Horn) and General Sir Mike Jackson (busy defending his home in stormy Wiltshire from potential floods). Those present heard warnings that climate change may be a bigger threat than nukes, al-Qaida or Eric Pickles.

• Talking of whom, "the only cabinet minister who can be spotted on Google Earth" (copyright N Clegg) is in the doghouse for his none too subtle dumping on both Labour's Chris Smith (OK) and fellow Tory Owen (No Wellies) Paterson (not OK) – while Eric was what Radio 4's Today called "stand-in floods" (geddit?) minister. Even the Mail hates Eric for saying that overseas aid money helps prevent worse floods here. Combined with the terrifying sight of Ukip's Nigel Farage in Somerset sporting waders, it was no wonder Dave staged yesterday's first No 10 press conference since the Leveson-dumping fiasco last March. He hates them.

• Bookies are sensibly offering short odds of 1/40 on Labour retaining Wythenshawe and Sale East in tomorrow's Manchester byelection. That figures. Popular local MP Paul Goggins died. Voters usually forgive that. When David Marquand sodded off to Brussels in 1977, Labour lost a 22,915 majority. On the same day Tony Crosland's marginal Grimsby seat (he died too) was held by Austin Mitchell who's still there, a thorn in his party's side.

Twitter: @michaelwhite

Michael White
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Michael White's diary: dodgy banking deals on the rise – just like the bonuses

Thousands of UK financial advisers and bankers have been sacked, and UBS suspends two over a Hong Kong hiring

• Official news that 5,873 dodgy UK financial advisers and bankers have been sacked or suspended for dishonest or reckless conduct since the 2008 bank bust is slightly encouraging, though miscreant numbers, like bank bonuses, are rising again. Another reformist twitch came yesterday from distant Hong Kong with the suspension by the Swiss bank UBS of two staff who hired Joyce Wei. Why? Because Joyce's daddy is chairman of Chinese chemical giant Tianhe, whose $1bn share sale UBS wants to manage. JP Morgan has already been burned on suspicion of hiring Chinese princelings as quasi-bribes to Dad. It was easier in the 80s when Rupert Murdoch, eager to take Star TV into China, paid $1m for the turgid memoirs of Deng Xiaoping's table-tennis playing daughter, Maomao.

• Less than bated breath at the British Library yesterday, as the shortlist was announced for the inaugural Folio Prize. It is the literary elite's exasperated response to the Booker, whose riffraff judges (yes, you, Chris Mullin) have been heard to praise a novel's "zip-along" pace. Folio's eight-strong shortlist, including Last Friends by 85-year-old Brit Jane Gardam, was under strict embargo until 4pm. Naive or what? Within five minutes it had been tweeted by gritty Paul Mason, Newsnight's economic doomster turned C4 culture editor. The author of Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere (it isn't) later made a full confession.

•Gorgeous Tristram Hunt, Labour's brainy education spokesman, fell foul of the University and College Union (UCU) strikers yesterday when he crossed a picket line at London's Queen Mary University of London in the East End, where he still teaches. Strikers have seen their pay drop by 13% in real terms since 2009, while vice-chancellors do quite nicely. Hunt once wrote a biography of Karl Marx's banker, the wine, women and fox-hunting Fred Engels. As a Victorian mill owner, he might well have done the same as Tris.

• Talking of this, the death at 82 yesterday of cultural theorist Stuart Hall leaves vacant the title of Britain's senior surviving Marxist. The charismatic Hall inherited it in 2012 when Eric Hobsbawm went to account for himself to the Central Committee Upstairs. Tariq Ali ? Terry Eagleton? Etonian Perry Anderson or Robin Blackburn? Chris Wickham at All Souls? Or even Arthur Scargill, who at least got his hands dirty?

• The unseemly deselection of daft-but-nice Anne McIntosh as Tory MP for Thirsk and Malton is not the first time the Curse of Eton has fallen on the rugged North Yorkshire seat. McIntosh has been replaced by Edward Legard, barrister and Etonian near-twin of Dave. Back in 1970 it was Eton that got the heave-ho. Charged under the Official Secrets Act for filching an embarrassing report on Britain's role in the Biafra tragedy, the then candidate, Jonathan Aitken (yes, him), was dropped.

• Crashed Tory high-flier Mark Harper has shopped himself and resigned as immigration minister after proving how hard it is for employers to check staff's status (as his own bill requires) by employing an illegal cleaner at public expense. In cunningly burying the news on a Saturday, rightwing Eurosceptic Harper must hope for a comeback. But not if Labour's avenging Savonarola, John Mann MP, can help it. He has called in the cops.

• Locally much-loved Middlesbrough FC (formed in 1876) has had its money troubles – but never one that required the Boro's coach, Spaniard Aitor Karanka, to grovel to a Holiday Inn over a fiver. That was the fee at Warmsworth library for last-minute printing of the matchplan before Saturday's 0-0 Championship draw with Doncaster Rovers. When they didn't turn up to pay, there was outrage. Karanka once said that being Jose Mourinho's ex-assistant would help him in the transfer market. Not if he trousers fivers, it won't.

• Uproar at Sinn Fein's annual conference in Wexford when a Derry delegate said that no village in Ireland was more than five miles from a railway track under the hated Brits. All much worse now (in Britain too).

BankingMichael White
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Chris Smith: the political herbivore under fire as Environment Agency boss

The thoughtful MP – the first to come out as gay and HIV-positive – has faced a deluge of criticism from flood victims

Among the recognisable beasts in the political jungle there are herbivores and carnivores, the former often cerebral and thoughtful, the latter driven to climb higher by testosterone and instinct. Chris Smith, whose 30-year career in frontline politics may be sinking in the flooded fields of Somerset, is one of nature's herbivores.

But he has always been a courteous one and sometimes a brave one. In 1984 the recently elected Labour MP for Islington South became the first to out himself as gay at a time when such an admission was still controversial. In 2005 he said he had been HIV positive since 1987. Some said he should have spoken out sooner, but he has never been an attention-seeker.

That may have been a drawback in recent weeks when the winter storms caused chaos and damage in the south-west, but Lord Smith of Finsbury did not don his chairman's wellies at the Environment Agency and tour the battlefronts. While the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, took a therapeutic beating from angry voters, Smith stayed indoors until Friday's foray to Somerset.

The thoughtfulness that made this Cambridge PhD (his thesis was on the romantic poets) a pioneering Labour environment spokesman under John Smith but not Tony Blair (too radical?) may also have been a handicap during his four-year tenure as culture secretary (1997-2001) when he reintroduced free museum entry and other successes but did not quite sparkle in a Blairite "New Brit" way.

He duly lost his job and moved to the backbenches and into quango-land. Though a suburban Londoner by birth he is a Scots-educated mountain climbing enthusiast too – eventually appointed in 2008 to chair the Environment Agency, his now sewage-poisoned chalice. In 2005 he had retired as an MP and gone to the Lords.

When the coalition took power and cuts began to bite big chunks out of the agency's budget, Smith made it clear privately he was going to fight the battle from the inside, and refused to badmouth ministers. He was rewarded with reappointment in his role in 2011 and has stuck resolutely to the softly, softly approach since. He earned £97,365 chairing the Agency in 2012-13, working a three-day week. He currently holds 11 posts, a mixture of paid and unpaid.

The current deluge of criticism of Smith and his agency is notably not coming from experts in the field of flood risk management. Virtually all of those working in the area say the EA is doing a tough job well, given the resources available to it.

During the crisis he has spoken of "difficult choices" between homes and farmland and the constraints on budgets which make it impossible to defend all coasts from rising sea levels and tempests.

However, with some ministers now briefing against him and no prospect of reappointment when his term ends in July, it would not be a surprise if his reticence ends and Smith tries to pin the blame on government funding cuts.

Given the unforgiving public mood that may call on more political nous than he commands to make the charge stick. He is a man who once compared the poetic achievements of Bob Dylan with those of his beloved Coleridge and Wordsworth. As with the cause and cure of floods, the jury is still out.

Environment AgencyFloodingWeatherMichael WhiteDamian Carrington
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Michael White's diary: A new boss for GCHQ – and of course a completely transparent recruitment process

Anybody outside Westminster who fancies Sir Iain Lobban's job will have to be eavesdropping pretty hard

• The job of the GCHQ boss – the faintly menacing Sir Iain Lobban – has now been advertised. But wannabe data-miners need not look in the Nigeria-born Everton fan's local Cheltenham newspaper, the Gloucestershire Echo. Or in any other paper. Because the advert has only been circulated internally across Whitehall. That is progress of sorts because so wide a trawl suggests the post will not automatically go to tipped MI6 graduates like Adrian Fulcher, or the gallant Charles Farr, counter-terrorism chief at the Home Office, where he failed to get the top job. Does that point to genial non-spook Robert Hannigan, the FO's intelligence gofer? Possibly not. Officials are keen to stress that Lobban (53) has not been purged like his US oppos in the wake of Ed Snowden's transparency drive.

• Why does mid-Atlantic motormouth Piers Morgan identify so strongly with ousted England cricket star Kevin Pietersen? Is it because (as Piers told Radio 4's Today programme) that "no one produced any evidence of wrongdoing", which has serial echoes in Piers's own career? Or because, he says, Kev shows that "the line between being a genius and a halfwit can be pretty thin"? That must be it.

• The refreshing sight of three once senior execs at the Anglo Irish Bank in a Dublin dock – over the bank going bust in 2008 – revives hopes that one day expensive City collars may be felt in London. How many RBS bankers, past or present, are being investigated for fraud, mis-selling or Libor rate fiddling, asks lefty Labour beardie Paul Flynn MP. "It would not be appropriate to give this information while investigations are ongoing," replies solicitor general Oliver Heald. But we only want a clue, Olly. Five? 50? 500? And by the way, the French treasury is hitting Google for a reported £830m in back tax.

• Crossbench peer Lord Gnome claims there is despair at Telegraph Towers over wacky ideas to refresh the brand unveiled by Jason "Sesame Street" Seiken, the new broom imported from the US. Roy Greenslade, the Guardian's Fleet Street gumshoe, paints a brighter picture. So do moderate Tory MPs after years of Ukip-fellow-travelling at the Torygraph. From attacks on Nigel ("Mine's a pint") Farage and Ed ("I haven't finished yet") Miliband, they detect a return of tribal loyalty to Dave. Did it take a Yank to spot that Tory defections to Ukip may be Ed's best hope of becoming PM in May 2015?

• A one-line note on the latest press release from Westminster's backbench committee gets coppers agitated on Twitter. Tory MP David Davis (the real one, not the one who defends Nazi drag artist and soon to be ex-MP Aidan Burley) is staging a Commons debate next week on reform of the Police Federation. On the day when the Met has to apologise for the off-duty officer who fitted up Davis's buddy, Andrew "Plebgate" Mitchell, the agitation is easy to fathom – even without that soft-headed employment tribunal's award of £440,000 for hurt feelings for the copper whose OTT attack on a Range Rover made him a YouTube star.

• It is not the Diary's job to arbitrate between excited tabloid claims that Bill Clinton and Liz Hurley, and Wendi Deng (formerly Murdoch) and Tony Blair, have been seeing more of each other than they should. All four are publicity hounds, and Clinton's predatory CV is well-documented. Blair's denials are buttressed by the knowledge that it was Rupert he tried so hard to bed. But the third Mrs Murdoch? As long ago as 2000 the Wall Street Journal, then not Rupert-owned, documented Wendi's gold-digging instincts. After Joyce and Jake Cherry, a US couple working in Guangzhou, helped with the visa that got Wendi (19) out of China, Jake (50) left Cherry and married Wendi. Four months later Wendi moved on.

• Tory ministers claim there's no Commons time to debate divisive issues, but MPs often go home at 5pm, leaving elderly peers to unpick mistakes in over-hasty bills. Commons library research says MPs spend one-third less time debating government bills than before 2010, protests Labour's eagle-eyed Angela Eagle.

Twitter: @MichaelWhite

Michael White
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Michael White's diary: Brave Cameron – he even does his own stunts

When Europe beckons, he'll do anything for the right headline

• For all David Cameron's talk of using the Parliament Acts to push through his half-baked backbench referendum bill, even Tory peers and MPs believe the whole affair has been a dishonest election stunt. For one thing, ministers would not have put a well-meaning amateur like Lord Michael (House of Cards) Dobbs in charge of the bill. He was just there to do TV soundbites. For another, government chief whip Lady Anelay (please don't say "Lady Anal-y", she told Labour's Lord Lipsey) could have brought the bill back this week, after Labour and Lib Dem peers amended it and it ran out of time last Friday. She didn't because Dave and Tory chairboy Grant Shapps want to print "THEY denied you a vote on Europe" posters for 7 May 2015.

• In any case, forcing a bill through using the override powers of the Parliament Acts would require Speaker Bercow to certify that it had been rejected by peers. It hasn't. But hope springs eternal. Cynics noted that Sarah Vine, aka Mrs Gove, wrote a (rightly) sympathetic column in the Daily Mail today about boisterous Sally Bercow's latest tabloid siege. All political wives long "to throw off the shackles of respectability", she confessed. Watch out, Michael.

• In the 19th century anthropologists shared an enthusiasm with missionaries to find lost tribes. Nowadays anthropologists like LSE man Matthew Engelke turn their attention on missionaries. In his new book, God's Agents – a study of the Wilberforce-inspired Bible Society – he reports precious insights into this Swindon-based tribe. They included unexpected tolerance: for several years the staff included a practising pagan.

• In last week's Edinburgh lecture Mark Carney may have dimmed Alex Salmond's hopes of keeping the English pound after independence. But the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has struck a more brutal blow than the Canadian governor of the Bank of England. Doubts about its "illegal additives" have just led exports of Irn-Bru, Scotland's second favourite tipple, to be banned in the chilly dominion. Did they take its "Made from girders" slogan literally?

• Jolly convenient when British Sikhs are such conscientious voters in marginal seats that a huge number of documents were shredded in 2009 as unimportant. They might otherwise have shed light on military advice given by Margaret Thatcher's government to Indian forces poised to recapture the Golden Temple at Amritsar in 1984. The shredding allowed Downing Street's Poirot, Jeremy Heywood, to report "no evidence" to support wilder theories. But why keep stuff for 25 years, then junk it just five years before the 30-year rule frees it to public inspection?

• The Health Department's "transparency tsar" tasked with persuading voters they can safely share their GP records with corporate "researchers" is one Tim Kelsey. In less reputable days he was a fearless Sunday Times hack, both loathed and admired. In pursuit of a story that may now haunt him, he once proved he could buy his own medical records. Lurid details of their contents were gleefully passed round the office.

• Permanent campaigner and natural blond, Mayor Boris Johnson, is picking more fights than usual this week. As non-Londoners enjoy the spectacle of pampered metropolitans suffering a Tube strike (they may learn what rotten public transport feels like) Mr Mayor has been goading David Cameron to get tough with the RMT's Bob "Brazilian" Crow while taunting Bob to surrender. Not to be outdone, the equally shy ex-MEP Stanley Johnson attacks one of son Boris's transport projects – HS2. Engineers have just told Stanley the high-speed train's tunnel will pass six metres from his lovely £4m (must be a small one) home in bijou Primrose Hill. "They said, 'Don't worry, we are going to have ground anchors under your houses and gardens to hold the whole thing up,'" Stan confided to a protest meeting. The anchors were tested in the sea wall at Fukushima. "My house shudders if I walk upstairs," he wails.

Twitter: @MichaelWhite

Michael White
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In the row over politicisation of top jobs in public bodies, who's right?

Ofsted chair Sally Morgan was independent of party loyalty – big mistake. When it comes to quangocrats, the parties expect appointees to be 'independent for them'

Who's right then in the battle over Sally Morgan's removal as chair of Ofsted and the wider row over the politicisation of appointments to public bodies? Labour for detecting a purge of non-Tories? The Lib Dems for saying Labour Morgan's professionalism justified her reappointment to a second three-year term? Or the Tories who say it's a bogus row and a hypocritical one too because most political quangocrats are Labour ones?

They're all right, of course. But the Conservatives probably win today's Humbug Prize because their narrative doesn't stack up very well. Sack someone (that's how it was briefed) who is said to have been brilliant at her job and (bonus point) a low-key, highly competent woman to boot and it doesn't quite sound convincing. But we've been here before – often. Remember the row over NHS boards in the Tory 90s?

Michael Gove is a highly political politician (not all politicians are) who will have had ulterior motives (the coming election?) of his own in provoking a coalition dispute by not consulting his brainy, high-self-esteem Lib Dem deputy, David Laws, about making Cap'n Morgan walk the plank. Laws duly exploded in a non-coalition, pre-election sort of way.

As the feuding pair's department's ex-permanent secretary (2006-12) Sir David Bell – himself a former Ofsted chief – wrote overnight, Gove is in danger of surrounding himself with yes men and women. He's a natural ideas man, a cheerfully chattering ex-hack easily led astray by ideologues and the sound of his own headline-generating conviction politician's voice. No wonder – so Andy Sparrow reports today – some Conservatives are asking if Gove's getting to be a liability.

Tory commentators and MPs reply that the education department under whatever title (it had three during Bell's tenure) is inert and statist, part of the "Blob" problem in bureaucracies everywhere. There's probably some truth in that. Gove is wrong about lots of things but his weekend call for headteachers to be more confident of their own authority in school strikes me as right. Asserting proper authority in our chaotic society is a widespread problem, as David Cameron's backbench rebels regularly prove.

So the Lib Dems are entitled to make a bit of a fuss over this. Morgan was and remains a Blairite reformer ex-teacher whom Gove could properly replace after three years while treating properly – as he should have done – Laws. Remember, Morgan's blast alleging a wider pattern of discrimination on Radio 4's Today was a reply. She didn't start this spat any more than Ofsted's chief inspector, charismatic ex-headteacher Sir Michael Wilshaw, did in complaining about Whitehall whispers against him last week.

But expect a lot more of this as the coalition marriage breaks up between now and 7 May 2015. The couple aren't sharing a double bed any more, Nick Clegg has moved into the spare room, etc. Time to abandon this metaphor, Mike. You get the picture. Gove is highly partisan. He wants a proper Tory government in 2015. And as someone says today, Nick Clegg and David Laws would like to get some teachers' votes back.

It probably means that when a Lib Dem-chaired panel (its chair, Paul Marshall, is a Lib Dem donor) picks a new Ofsted chairman, it won't be Tory private equity man and donor Theodore Agnew – who had been tipped for the job. He has rather an interesting CV .

But politics can be a rough old game, even for a Theodore.

Where does that leave Labour? Accused of humbug for daring to complain about partisan appointments since the Tory press and blogs today are full of charts showing how most politically declared quangocrats are Labour. Obligingly, up pops ex-Blair culture secretary Chris Smith, now Lord Smith, head of the Environment Agency, explaining to Telegraph readers today – they won't like it – that he has to choose between homes to protect or farmland. They don't see the choice as that binary on the flooded Somerset Levels (they're right) and Smith may soon become a suitable scapegoat.

Where I think Tory commentators and politicians get it wrong – clever Dominic Lawson offers a good example in today's Mail – is in making the same category error as existed in county councils of my youth. Many were still "independent" of party and proud of it. But that usually meant "independent Tory" – facing in shire counties, so I recall from youthful reporting days, a single, noisy Labour alderman, defiant but safely ignored.

Nothing wrong with independence, you may say. Non-partisan quangos are not meant to be parti pris either, they have a remit to do a job as best they can. Labour people who complained this weekend about ex-Tory MP David (son of Jim) Prior trying to shake up the NHS via his new chairman's role at the Care Quality Commission (CQC) make a poor point. Labour in office did the NHS many good turns, but the CQC was very much a work in progress, not doing well at Mid-Staffs or elsewhere. Both sides have plenty of ammo – claims of dirty deals. Back in the mid-90s, when the Tories were trying to make the NHS more money-conscious by appointing business types to hospital boards, Labour made a terrific fuss about bias in quangoland.

So when lovely Frank Dobson became health secretary in 1997 he reversed all sorts of policies – and appointments – some of which the reformist Alan Milburn later reversed. Milburn is cited today as proof that Tories appoint Labour people (he runs the fairness agenda), and he certainly remains Labour despite his Blairite credentials.

But it's a safe bet that on most committees and boards he now sits on, he is always a token Labour figure. The higher up the tree you go, the more obvious this is.

So Labour pushes supporters who have done well in life in the same way that feminists push able women – to compensate for inherent structural and cultural biases which often mean that the older and better-off people get, the more establishment they are likely to become. That doesn't mean joining the Tory party – who does these days? – but it does reflect a small-c conservative outlook in an independent mindset.

And there's the final rub. Ex-headteacher Wilshaw and Labour's Morgan were appointed to be independent too. And they were. That's what displeased the more ideologically minded in Whitehall. When we say "independent", we expect you to be independent for us.

OfstedMichael GoveConservative and Liberal Democrat cabinetConservativesLiberal DemocratsLiberal-Conservative coalitionLabourMichael White
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Politics Weekly podcast: UK economic growth best since 2007

On the latest edition of Politics Weekly, Tom Clark is joined in the studio by the Guardian's leader writer Anne Perkins and social affairs editor Randeep Ramesh and on the line by commentator Michael White to discuss the news that the UK economy grew 1.9% in 2013. Trebles all round, Mr Osborne.

Also up for discussion: Ed Balls' plans to reintroduce the 50p top tax rate – albeit on a temporary basis – as well as David Cameron's assertion that he has taken a big pair of scissors to government red tape, and the campaign to rid our high streets of fixed-odds betting terminals.

Have a listen, and have your say on the blog below.

Tom ClarkMichael WhiteRandeep RameshAnne Perkins