Forced out for acting with ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity’?

Thursday blog

Bye bye Angie

So the independent, totally uncorruptible bureaucrat, who reviewed the Angela Rayner property kerfuffle, reported that Rayner acted with ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity’ throughout her property dealings. I’ve seen quite a few people fired (I’ve been fired a few times) during my excuse for a career, but I’ve never seen someone forced out for acting with ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity‘. Though, of course, I realise that Rayner was judged to have made the mistake of not taking the appropriate legal advice. However, a small mistake like that does seem to me to be a rather flimsy reason for Rayner, who acted with ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity’, losing her job and a big chunk of her ministerial salary.

Sadly, with Rayner’s departure to the back benches, we’ll never get answers to such niggling questions such as:

• why was the value of Angie’s constituency home increased during the property-dealing shenanigans making Angie’s home worth much more than other homes in the area?
• was it this ‘up-valuing’ of Angie’s home which allowed her to put down such a chunky deposit on her new seaside residence?
• was Angie moving to Hove as part of a ‘chicken run’ – an attempt to get away from a constituency where she was likely to be booted out by Reform at the next election and instead get her a nice safe Labour seat?
• was the money used to pay the deposit on the Hove flat part of a fund intended for the care of one of Angie’s children?

In case any readers haven’t seen it, here’s a short video I made about Keir and Angie which has been banned by YouTube but is still available here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OwIFLJRoCqF5N3p58RszkObBFm6J0Ksf/view?usp=sharing

Lord Mandy, yum yum

And while we’re on the subject of people acting with ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity’, it would be remiss if we didn’t take the time to mention Lord ‘Mandy’ Mandelson – apparently a great chum of child-molester Mr Epstein, yum yum. We also know that Lord Mandy stayed on Epstein’s ‘Orgy Island’, yum yum.

All the papers have reported a couple of unfortunate incidents in Lord Mandy’s past such as the fact that Mandy was forced out of government not once but twice due to apparent ‘misunderstandings’ about his financial affairs or something like that. So there’s nothing I can add to those reports which you can read elsewhere.

However, I noticed that there was another ‘misunderstanding’ in Lord Mandy’s past which, as far as I can see, nobody has mentioned. If I remember correctly (and at my age one cannot always rely on one’s memory so please don’t sue me), when the lovable Lord Mandy was EU Trade Commissioner, he holidayed at least once on the luxury private yacht owned by a Russian metals billionaire. Around the same time, the EU dropped trade restrictions on aluminium produced in Russia and imported into the EU thus making the Russian billionaire even wealthier. In 2008, the Guardian reported:

Lord Mandelson was forced to issue a fresh denial yesterday that he granted favours to the Russian aluminium magnate, Oleg Deripaska, while he was European trade commissioner.

The business secretary flew to Moscow to start a four day official visit as it emerged that only a month after he accepted hospitality on Deripaska’s £80m yacht, he advocated the removal of trade restrictions which hinder the oligarch’s aluminium business, Rusal.

As the controversy over his links to Deripaska moved into a third week, Mandelson told Sky News: “A lot has been said about the relationship I have with one particular Russian businessman. All I would say about that is that he has never asked for any favours, I have never given him any favours and that is what the European commission in their examination of the issue has very firmly put on record.”

On Saturday he said he first met Deripaska in 2004 – two years earlier than his office had previously stated. But he said he “made no personal intervention to support the commercial interests of Mr Deripaska”.

Unkind voices have suggested that our Lord Mandy seems to get into these regrettable scrapes because he is attracted to rich (sometimes possibly dubious) people like flies are attracted to a pile of fresh steaming sh*t. I, of course, would never be so unkind or uncouth to imply such nonsense.