And another thing…

Congratulations! Quite an achievement to be one of the five political blogs, up there with Guido, Dale, Redwood and the days old Prescott blog.

Anyway, I know that modesty will have prevented you from actually putting on this blog what they said about your’s, so I thought I’d put it in this comment. Loved the devil bit:-)

“The former transport minister’s blog has a feisty, cut-to-the-chase tone. Viz: “A committee of Lords (aka, the Great and the Good) has decided our civil liberties are threatened by CCTV cameras. Yawn.” We especially like the pic he has posted of himself dressed up as the devil, aged, oh, about 14.”

I’m quite surprised you haven’t commented on this story; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7890988.stm

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Apparently global warming is going to kill us all, all I tells you. We’re doomed, nothing can save us and our deaths will be slow and painful and imaginably horrific with boiling seas and global famine and the sky actually falling.

You should be chuffed! It’s a remarkable achievement!

As i’ve said previously, you have a remarkable little community here Tom. First and foremost we have you, a Labour MP with your feet firmly on the ground, with a common sense and wit that rises you far higher than your peers in my estimation, as well as your blog posts being throughly entertaining. Then you have the same commenters time and time again, to the point where we’re all starting to get a read on each other, what we’re likely to post, what we posted before etc…

You don’t get that anywhere else, which is why I have subscribed to your feed, and keep tabs on this place FAR more than I do any other blog.

Yeah, I like it here. Keep up the very good work Tom!

Good God! I agree with John! (I am an atheist – oh surely not).

Tom, you’re an absolute star. You make it worth finding out about what’s going on today, instead of tuning to the shopping channel with the bottle of sherry, which would be my preferred option.

Oh, Dale’s quite good, I’ve told him so, but you’re pulling ahead of him.

Er, no pounds intended.

Bloody Freud.

Tom, the fact that you got booted (made surplus to requirements, downsized, fired, retrenched, rationalised etc) from your junior goverment post would, surely, enhance rather than weaken any leftie top 100 ambitions you may have.
Likely make you look cool, hip and radical (or whatever phrases the left leaning hep cats dig nowadays) with the lefties.

Well done on making it onto the list.

Very well done Tom. Is Drapers or Prescotts in there?

Johnny – Prescott’s is the only other Labour blog included.

You deserve it, Tom: a Labour MP with a sense of humour (that’s not a sentence I’ve written before (actually, I believe it’s not really a sentence!))

I know it’s modish on here to praise Mr Harris for his integrity.

His blog is reasonably entertaining, particularly when compared to the dross any other Labour person produces on the web (and Dolly’sDailyDisaster.com aka LabourLost deserves special mention here).

However I’d be more inclined to fall over myself to praise his integrity had he not called on this blog for Peter Hain to be returned to the Cabinet; the same Peter Hain who narrowly escaped prosecution and received severe censure from The Commons Standards and Privileges Committee for his failure to declare donations. Why the hell should we the taxpayer have people like that inflicted upon us?

And of course Tom’s unrequited love for the serially venal and grossly incompetent Tony Blair (who of course gave him the transport Ministry) is particularly nauseating.

Mr Harris may be a notch or two up from some of the gruesomes that inhabit and have inhabited the Labour front benches, but I’m afraid he still has fleas from lying down with beggars.

Congratulations Tom, it’s fully deserved. Yours and Redwood’s are excellent examples of MP’s blogs.

P.S. Does your wife share the same level of chuff-ness as you, or was the news met with a exasperated sigh and; ‘well I s’ppose that’ll just encourage you to allow it to take up more of your bloody time’… or words to that effect

@bupendra bhakta

Peter Hain is a carpetbagger, so I agree on the point about him.

Tony Blair on the other hand was the best Prime Minister this country has had for quite some time. Whether you agree with Iraq or not, you can’t deny his credentials.

According to Tom’s wiki page however, he’s more of a Brownite than a Blairite. I hope that’s not true myself, because I, like the rest of the country, despise Gordon Brown.

All this demonstrates however is that people have differening opinions, and just because Tom is a Labour MP with differing opinions to you, it’s pathetic to make a personal attack in a thread which celebrates the fact that his blog is one of the top political blogs in the country.

Because I disagree with you about Blair, and you were actually wrong about one aspect of your post, how about I call you “an inept, barely coherent, anti-Labour troll”?

@ John – “Tony Blair on the other hand was the best Prime Minister this country has had for quite some time. Whether you agree with Iraq or not, you can’t deny his credentials.”
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I’ll quite happily deny his credentials. He presided over the single most corrupt and incompetent administrations in post-war history.

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He bankrupted the country by spending the proceeds of growth, allowed his chancellor to sell off all of our gold, gave massive preferential treatment to the unions, gave lordships and preferential legal treatment to rich party donors, created a vast client-state of benefit recipients and led us into a war which killed hundreds of our soldiers and thousands of innocent civilians on the strength of a pack of lies.
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Personally I’d say that Blair was the second-worst PM since the war.

hi Paul, yes your suggestion was pretty much what I said. Without the swearing of course.

Who say politicians don’t communicate well with the public? Tom Watson just called me an idiot for asking him to take Derek Draper’s blog off of his blogroll…
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Not certain whether I should be offended or pleased.

Well done Tom, I’m delighted for you, but I’ve this picture in my mind of you being kissed by lots of frogs for some reason. However, to add a light note to this Fawkes/Dale/Draper blogging spat, the most amusing comment so far must be the one from Fawkes himself, posted at Hopi’s, when he calls Draper belligerent, abrasive and a bullshitting shyster – you just couldn’t make that hypocricy/irony up.
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But the undermining reputation smearing tactics continue, as demonstrated here:
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anoneumouse
Friday 13 February 2009 at 11:29 am
Is the advertisement income from your blog going to be declared in the register of members interests sometime soon?
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Tom Harris
Friday 13 February 2009 at 3:02 pm
Anonemouse (11.29 am): “Is the advertisement income from your blog going to be declared in the register of members interests sometime soon?”
You got me! It’s a fair cop! And I would’ve got away with it if it weren’t for you pesky kid! There was me hoping I’d be able to pocket the money without anyone noticing! If only I hadn’t been so careless by… oh, I don’t know… allowing the adverts to be visible or writing blog posts on the fact that I was carrying advertising…
But nothing escapes your eagle eye, does it, Anonemouse’…?
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Obviously it does Tom, for what do we find on Draper two days after your response?
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Anoneu mouse @12:16 am Sunday 15th. Feb.
As an MP should Tom Harris not disclose his advertisement income to the Parliamentary register of members interests?

@Richard
“Tom Watson just called me an idiot for asking him to take Derek Draper’s blog off of his blogroll…”

Heh! Surely his insult should be directed at Dolly? Where did he say this btw? I haven’t read it on his blog?

Anonemouse (11.29 am): “Is the advertisement income from your blog going to be declared in the register of members interests sometime soon?”
——————————————————

No need – I have read the Parliamentary Rules Book in front of me: any income under £1.00 need not be declared.

There you go, another ’smear’ for Ani to get Antsi about.

(Psst, Ani, like to take a guess on which Party absolutely wrote the rule book on ’smearing’.)

@ John “I haven’t read it on his blog?”
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No, he actually took the time to email me directly. I’m quite charmed although I would have preferred it if he had posted my open letter (as per previous blog) so that it could be debated by his readers, like Tom Harris did.

@Richard,
Integrity has a number of meanings, one of those is: The quality of being honest.

Now; irrespective of the fact that I hold that anyone who defends this goverment or the previous ones under TB, and honestly believes his statements, to be delusional; in this regard Tom does have integrity.

He has never claimed to be anything other than a loyal acolyte of the labour party.

@ Chris’ Wills – Ah, but that begs the question over who is the bigger fool, the fool or the fool who follows him?

@richard
In this case Tom isn’t being a fool, he makes a good living out of his loyalty to the labour party under TB and GB.
Not only has he been granted a safe seat (>£60,000 and year as a backbencher, plus all the expenses he can obtain receipts for, plus other jollies; more when he was a junior minister) and he will receive a nice pension when eventually he decides to pass his seat on.

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Originally and even today “to beg the question” doesn’t mean that the question begs to be put.

To ‘beg the question’ was coined as a rather over-literal translation of the Latin phrase ‘petitio principii’. The Latin version was itself a translation of Greek text ‘en archei aiteisthai’ taken from Aristotle’s Prior Analytics.

To be fair, your mis-usage isn’t uncommon http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/beg-the-question.html

@ Chris’ Wills.

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Agreed, there are a lot of snouts in the trough at present. Of course, assuming the current polls hold, there are going to be a lot of Labour MP’s looking for real jobs for the first time.