Malcolm Blair Robinson

This morning this Blog said Fiona Woolf would not survive the weekend as chairman of the child abuse Inquiry. In fact she did not survive the day. So we were right in principle but wrong on detail. But who cares. We are just a blog.

But Ten Downing Street is not just a blog. It is the heart of our government, the office and home of the Prime Minister. Yet, once again on a major public issue, the Prime Minister has made an error of judgement and one that is utterly transparent. David Cameron is losing credibility at a time when he should be forging ahead. He has a clear run against Milliband and Clegg, but not against Farage. Nobody understands why he and his advisers make these mistakes. Remember Andy Coulson, Butler-Sloss and now Woolf to mention just the big ones. Whatever the reasons it does not give confidence in a man of sound judgement. Moreover it reinforces the notion that the whole Westminster machine as now set up is not fit for purpose. To whom will voters turn? Well in Scotland they are turning in tens of thousands to the SNP. And in England? Just wait and see.

My latest thriller, Purple Killing, is coming very soon. It is written in a modern style in a scene by scene format, with punctuation which follows reading flow rather than traditional rules. This creates a compelling  narrative, easy to read and hard to put down. This book is a work of fiction, but at its heart there is a real historical cover-up. This drives the plot, but almost all the events and characters are fictional. Some characters appear also in Hitler’s First Lady, but that is a novel much more closely linked to known historical facts and the true story of a family, which appears in both books as the Benedicts. Here most of their story is fiction, as are all the modern characters within the family and in the world beyond.

About the Book

Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. She has a British connection through her estranged father Saul, an English thriller writer. Saul, whose parents were of Anglo-German origin, has spent much of his life plotting to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years. As the time approaches for him to make his move to expose duplicity, murder and lies at the heart of the British State, he seeks Rachael’s help. This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.

Set equally in the United States and Britain, the narrative grips from the first page, transporting the reader to the heart of government both in Washington and London and on into the darkest corners of the secret states on each side of the Atlantic. Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history and from her own roots, she has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.

Theresa May’s star shone bright at the Tory Conference and any leadership ambitions she may have harboured were burnished even brighter by her performance there. Moreover she had been able to brush off the unfortunate affair of the fumbled Butler Sloss appointment. The star of Fiona Woolf  was in the ascendant too; a highly respected City lawyer, magistrate and Lord Mayor of London. For these two women of outstanding achievement and unimpeachable integrity things could hardly get better. But they could get worse. And they have.

Theresa appoints Fiona chairman of the child abuse inquiry in the wake of Butler Sloss. Fiona flags up she is a dinner buddy and neighbour of Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary over whom a question mark hangs about warnings connected to child abuse in high places. She thinks that she ought to send Theresa an official letter to explain this just in case. The Home Office decides to draft the letter. Why? It is to them, not from them. A letter written by or on behalf of the recipient is not a genuine document. There are seven drafts each of which appears to reduce the significance of the connection between Leon and Fiona. Seven drafts. Just think about that.

Then the story leaks and Fiona appears before the Home Affairs Select Committee. They are not happy and demand another letter, which they publish together with the seven drafts. Victims groups  lose confidence in the integrity of the whole set up and demand Fiona stands down. She hangs on at the time of writing this, but she is unlikely to survive the weekend.

What this all reveals shocks everybody outside Westminster and will have a profound political knock on effect. It demonstrates that these two women, while together a powerhouse of achievement all should admire individually, like the Establishment of which they are vital component parts, when it comes to judging what torments victims of child abuse and drives opinion outside their charmed and pampered circle, have not got a clue. The shambles of the setting up of the child abuse inquiry is becoming as big a story as the appalling revelations of the abuse itself. The Home Office appears as a dishonest fixer. Make no mistake there is going to be a price to pay for this.

Talking of Public Inquiries, where is Chilcot? Don’t worry; like everything else it is probably being fixed.

My latest thriller, Purple Killing, is coming very soon. It is written in a modern style in a scene by scene format, with punctuation which follows reading flow rather than traditional rules. This creates a compelling  narrative, easy to read and hard to put down. This book is a work of fiction, but at its heart there is a real historical cover-up. This drives the plot, but almost all the events and characters are fictional. Some characters appear also in Hitler’s First Lady, but that is a novel much more closely linked to known historical facts and the true story of a family, which appears in both books as the Benedicts. Here most of their story is fiction, as are all the modern characters within the family and in the world beyond.

About the Book

Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. She has a British connection through her estranged father Saul, an English thriller writer. Saul, whose parents were of Anglo-German origin, has spent much of his life plotting to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years. As the time approaches for him to make his move to expose duplicity, murder and lies at the heart of the British State, he seeks Rachael’s help. This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.

Set equally in the United States and Britain, the narrative grips from the first page, transporting the reader to the heart of government both in Washington and London and on into the darkest corners of the secret states on each side of the Atlantic. Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history and from her own roots, she has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.

Norman Baker, the Lib Dem home office minister, has rightly suggested that to dismiss out of hand a report which the government itself commissioned, which finds that making drug taking a crime does not reduce its use, is both short sighted and counter productive.

Just as America discovered that banning alcohol was no way to combat drunkenness and that all it did was to establish organised crime as a significant element of its economy, so we have seen after nearly half a century of failure that criminal sanction does not stop drug users, but it does create a vast operation of organised crime among the suppliers. Indeed the drug industry is now so large it has to be included in the nation’s GDP; this is one of the reasons why an angry Cameron has been hit with a two billion euro surcharge which he is refusing to pay.

The modern post Thatcher Tory party has managed to gather into its tent the opposite of the old tradition of one nation Toryism. Every kind of prejudice which exists in the political firmament, exists in the Tory party. A drugs policy leading to the most overcrowded prisons and the largest organised crime network in Europe is the least imaginative approach to a serious social issue which needs therapy to be the driver of a better outcome.

The Lib Dems are swimming against the tide in the campaign run up to the general election when few of their current MPs are likely to survive. Norman Baker deserves to be one of those survivors and he probably will be.

My latest thriller, Purple Killing, is coming very soon. It is written in a modern style in a scene by scene format, with punctuation which follows reading flow rather than traditional rules. This creates a compelling  narrative, easy to read and hard to put down. This book is a work of fiction, but at its heart there is a real historical cover-up. This drives the plot, but almost all the events and characters are fictional. Some characters appear also in Hitler’s First Lady, but that is a novel much more closely linked to known historical facts and the true story of a family, which appears in both books as the Benedicts. Here most of their story is fiction, as are all the modern characters within the family and in the world beyond.

About the Book

Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. She has a British connection through her estranged father Saul, an English thriller writer. Saul, whose parents were of Anglo-German origin, has spent much of his life plotting to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years. As the time approaches for him to make his move to expose duplicity, murder and lies at the heart of the British State, he seeks Rachael’s help. This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.

Set equally in the United States and Britain, the narrative grips from the first page, transporting the reader to the heart of government both in Washington and London and on into the darkest corners of the secret states on each side of the Atlantic. Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history and from her own roots, she has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.

There is further anxiety today because reports indicate that the UK authorities have a huge backlog of unresolved immigration files, and worse have entirely lost track of tens of thousands of people refused entry but perhaps  still here. The usual demands for this that and the other to be done are all over the media. This blog takes a different view and in so doing it is out of tune with majority public opinion in the UK. If you are a member of a club you have to stick to all the rules and you cannot stick to some and avoid others. If you do not like the rules you should not be a member.

The political, cultural and economic benefits of being part of the EU are enormous, but they will only accrue the full measure of  advantage if Britain embraces the whole project hook, line and sinker, including the free movement of citizens of the EU to move from one country to another. There has to be a change in the way we see our relationship. We must see ourselves as insiders, with all the other member states, looking out, not outsiders looking in, as we do now. We would then see that issues of communities being allegedly ‘swamped’, benefit tourism, housing shortages, overstretched services, education and language difficulties, cultural and religious tensions and all the other things complained of are not the fault of outside interference from Brussels. They are instead due to years, even decades of economic and social mismanagement from London.

There is no point in trying to tinker with EU rules through negotiations, nor having tantrums about sudden bills which we forgot were coming, nor blaming unemployment on the Poles. We either knuckle down in good humour and stay or we have the courage of our convictions and go. If we choose to go there is  just one more question to answer.

Where to?

Each of these books is different and not part of a sequence, but all of them have the common ability to draw you into the story and keep you turning the pages from start to finish. Click on any of the images for my page on Amazon UK and here for Amazon.com

The debate about NHS funding has been going on since the day it was founded. The nature of the project is that such a debate is part of its culture. Unfortunately the measures introduced to find efficiency savings involve the creation of a huge bureaucracy, which uses up in its own costs the savings it manages to make. However there is one set of measures which were not tackled at the very beginning and until they are the problems will never be solved. These involve the NHS’s relationship with its doctors.

At the beginning GPs refused to join and were eventually persuaded to do so by being allowed to remain private and self employed, but under contract to the NHS to provide a service. The hospital doctors and other specialists likewise were difficult, so they were bought off by being offered a lavish salary package as NHS employees, while being allowed to go on making big money in private practice. The only condition was that they give 40 odd hours  per week to justify their salary. Thus it is that GPs work business hours and not at weekends and huge waiting lists exist for hospital procedures. A friend of mine who needed an operation was recently told by her consultant that she would have to go on a list and wait about four months, but if she went private, he could operate the following Wednesday. The reason the NHS does not work as it should, except in emergency, is because all but junior hospital doctors work part time.

The craven class of politicians now in vogue at Westminster quake at the thought of taking on the doctors. Even Thatcher, who took on the Unions, the Argentineans and the IRA, shrank form challenging the medics. To sort them out is very simple. Make them all full time employees of the National Health Service and ban them from moonlighting. Then we would get our ops in timely fashion and be able to see a GP whenever we were ill. The waiting list industry would be closed down and suddenly money would flow directly to patient care. Here it would be found to go much further.

To do this you do not need political brains or PR skills. You need courage.

It an atmosphere when anything that happens with Labour is all Milliband’s fault, it is no surprise that the failures of Scottish Labour to step up to the plate during the referendum campaign leading to panic across all parties at Westminster, is now blamed by the outgoing Lamont on Milliband. The fact is she was in charge, she did not at any time look credible when the fight was on, and since it has been over, there has been an avalanche of people joining the SNP, who stand to take a tidy number of Labour’s Westminster seats in 2015. If that happens Cameron is set to win and would be on course to doing so, were it not for the UKIP joker in the pack, which makes the election impossible to call.

In an age when buck passing has become an art form and the key ingredient of career progression, it is this blog’s view that the buck for the condition of ailing Scottish Labour stops with its leader, Johann Lamont. It is right that she should go and the fact that in doing so she blames everybody else, tells us all we need to know about why she is going. This is not to say that she is other than a worthy person, a good politician and motivated by the highest ideals. She was just the wrong person at the wrong time. A Kind of Scottish William Hague.

But this is a moment for Scottish Labour to think again and think big. The original Scottish First Minister after devolution was Donald Dewar. He was a Labour politician of national standing and huge reputation at Westminster and known across Europe. He died tragically early in his term of office. Scottish Labour then turned to local talent, which not only did not shine but opened the road to power to another politician of national standing, Alex Salmond. If Scottish Labour does not see its future as playing second fiddle to the SNP and unless Westminster Labour is confident that it can do without half its current forty two Scottish Labour members, which it is not, Labour in Scotland has to have a big time leader whom Scots admire and to whose call they rally. One who rescued the whole NO campaign from likely defeat and carried it to a convincing victory.

Exactly. Gordon Brown.