From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 04:07:00 MST
On Sat, Dec 18, 1999 at 10:46:12PM -0500, EvMick@aol.com wrote:
>
> > Not that I'm a fan
> > of Tony Blair, either, but _any_ political party that can produce forty or
> > more financial and sexual scandals in just five years, and have one or
> > more ministers subsequently jailed for perjury and attempting to pervert
> > the course of justice, seems to be trying for a very special record.)
>
> They did that?
>
> Wonder why I didn't hear about it on the nightly news?
Because you weren't living here (in the UK)?
You didn't even hear about Stephen Mulligan? (Conservative MP and
parliamentary private secretary who, at the height of a "back to basics"
sexual morality campaign being run by the conservative government, was
found dead at his home -- wearing suspender belt and stockings, with
a tangerine in his mouth and a polythene bag over his face.) Or Neil
"envelopes full of used twenty pound notes" Hamilton?
Yeesh, you guys have been missing out!
Back in the late seventies there was a fun little satirical novel, the
title of which escape me, which supposed that under one government in
the early eighties all the political skeletons would come out of their
closets -- the resulting dozen or so scandals brought the government
down and triggered a bloodless revolution. By 1995 this was looking like
a major failure of imagination; the Major government came to power with
an intake of new Conservative MPs who were, not to put it too bluntly,
trough-guzzling opportunists -- joining a party that had been in
power for twelve years in the expectancy of lining their pockets.
> Every time Margaret
> Thatcher did the least little thing I heard about it on the "nightly news'...
Margaret Thatcher didn't make a dime from her time in government -- she
didn't need to. (Dennis being a self-made multi-millionaire and well able to
support his wife's little hobby of running the country.) On the other
hand, whisper "Al-Yammanah Contract" and "Mark Thatcher" in the ear of
any Special Branch officer in London and you will get yourself invited
into an interview room so fast your feet don't touch the ground, and
the boy Mark himself is perhaps wisely staying out of the UK this
decade. According to rumour -- and Private Eye -- the kickbacks in that
arms contract ran to something like UKP 70 million ...
> Oh....Margaret Thatcher was a conservative....and the above mentioned villian
> was not.....kinda like Reagan and Clinton?....
The above mentioned villains were _all_ conservative. (Including Blair,
if you examine his policies for continuity from the preceding conservative
government rather than listening to the rhetoric.)
-- Charlie
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