William Hague offers me £2 million

Look what I found in my junk email this morning. The thought of William Hague handing out £2 million to a selection of random individuals via a Hotmail account appealed to my sense of the absurd. 

All I have to do is reply to the email with all my personal info. Aye, right. 

OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER
TREASURY AND MINISTER FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE,
LONDON,UNITED KINGDOM.

Our ref: BRT/3470/IDR
our ref:..06/02/2013

BRITISH GOVERNMENT (2013) POVERTY ALLEVIATION AND FINANCIAL EMPOWERMENT PROGRAM.

On Behalf of the British Government,i wish to inform you of your selection as one of the Beneficiary for the on going 2013 British Government Poverty Alleviation and Financial Empowerment Program worldwide. All participants/beneficiaries were selected randomly from Worldwide online networks Directories as a beneficiary of £2,000,000.00 (Two Million, Great British Pounds Sterling).

So, this letter is to officially inform you that two(2) option of payment has been opened for you.
1) Issuance of an ATM Card
2) Bank Wire transfer

Please do indicate your PAYMENT OPTION.

As this office will mail you a Visa/ATM CARD which you will use to withdraw your funds in any ATM MACHINE CENTER or Visa card outlet in the world with a maximum of £5000 GBP daily or our contracted paying bank here in London,United Kingdom will make the transfer to you depending on your OPTION OF PAYMENT you have indicated.Further more,You will be required to re-confirm your Bio-Data as stated below to enable; Rt Hon William Hague MP,Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs,begin in processing your awarded funds.

1) Full names:
2) Address:
3) Country:
4) Nationality:
5) Phone #:
6) Age:  
7) Occupation:
8) Zip Code
9) Sex:
    
Forward all your details reply to:
-------------------------------------------------------
Rt Hon William Hague MP
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
uk.gov_ssfa@hotmail.co.uk
Tel:+44 703-592-5923
Fax:+44-742-356-7161
------------------------------------------------------

Regards,
Mrs. Elaine Rooker Smith.
Liaison Officer On Foreign Payment

Just stop the killing in Gaza

Ok, I've had enough. Will somebody please take Israel by the scruff of the neck and get them told that bombarding Gaza, causing immense suffering and a humanitarian crisis, is just not on. I'm looking at you, Barack Obama and William Hague. Then can they just get all the key players together and not let them out until a peaceful way forward has been found?

Israel needs to understand how its actions have contributed to the current situation over many years. There's no evidence that they are learning anything. If any member of our Government said that our forces wanted to return anywhere to the Middle Ages, then I'd hope they would not only be unequivocally sacked, but made to resign from Parliament as well. That's not the case for the Israeli Minister of the Interior who still appears to have a job after making such a shameful comment about Gaza.

That says to me that the agenda goes way beyond defending Israel from Palestinian violence. In the Middle Ages there was no electricity, technology, antibiotics, surgery to speak of, hospitals, hygiene, education if you weren't rich. How could anyone wish a return to that sort of society on any other human beings? Talking about them with such obvious hatred is not remotely acceptable and surely it should be dawning on the Israeli Government  that treating these people badly is counter-productive. Israel has been getting away with way too much over the last 40 years with impunity because its powerful mates let it. Enough is enough. I just don't want to watch this tortuous cycle of the people of Gaza suffering blockade, bomardment, picking themselves up only for more innocent lives to be lost.

We're not going to get any sort of lasting peace in the region without Israel giving some stuff up and they are going to have to be made to do it. And the only way they will be made to do it is if people like you and I lobby our governments to drive this forward. Write to your MP, to William Hague, take to the streets if there's a protest march near you. It's time to sort this troubled region's problems out once and for all.

In support of William and Ffion Hague - politicians have a right to a private life

I know I'm a big softie, but when I read William Hague's unprecedented personal statement, I actually had a tear in my eye. It must have been really difficult for both him and Ffion to be so frank about their personal situation.

I certainly don't have much time for him politically - he took the Tory Party into a very bad place on issues like immigration and fought a very nasty campaign in 2001. It's worth remembering that Charles Kennedy had the good sense not to pander to the Daily Fail lobby, hold his ground and kept to a liberal message. We defied expectations and held onto the huge number of seats in the south of England that we'd won in 1997.

Since his stint as Tory Leader, we've seen a much softer, more charming, funny side to him.  However, his voting record on equality issues, particularly gay rights, is, like that of many Tories, pretty abysmal. Personally, though, he comes across as very genuine and affable.

Today, after a couple of days of internet  innuendo, with the eye of the storm at Guido Fawkes' blog (which I'm not linking to cos I don't want to give him the Wikio love), William Hague issued a personal statement in which he cast some light on the allegations. Yes, he had shared a hotel room with the guy who until today was his special adviser, no, there was nothing untoward about it, and, actually, his marriage is fine, despite the strain put upon it by years of disappointment in their attempts to have children. He outlined that they had suffered several miscarriages, including one quite recently.

I've seen a fair bit of comment on this online, but none so perceptive and understanding as that written by Sara Bedford. She eloquently describes what you go through and why she feels for the Hagues.

It is bad enough finding that you cannot conceive a much longed for child, or that you lose such a child before you have told most people that you are expecting.  When it happens time after time, you do not know where you find the strength to go on with life, but you do. Having unsuccessful fertility treatment is in many ways even worse – the high of seeing all those beautiful embryos, then finding out that your body is not good enough to look after them.

 Only those who have been there repeatedly know just what it feels like. The endless well-meaning comments, asking when you are going to start a family, with the warning not to leave it ‘too late’. And if you are lucky enough to have one child, the remarks about not allowing her to be an only child soon follow, with dire warning about what will happen to her if you fail to provide her with a sibling.

The pressure of living a life not being able to tell people why you are not taking part in a particular activity, or why you are feeling unwell or look a little pale, is immense. Just as I don’t think those who have had the family they desire without too many problems can understand the very real pain of infertility, so I cannot imagine what it must be like to go through all of this with uninformed sniping about your relationship and sexuality.

This case  is an example of how real pain can be caused by unfounded speculation and innuendo. Not just the undoubted stress that William and Ffion's decision to reveal things they would undoubtedly have rathered remained private. You have to remember that a young activist, who has done nothing wrong, now has to work out how he's going to pay his rent this month.

I am worried, though, about what this whole sequence of events means for politicians' private life, and in particular this part of William Hague's statement:

This speculation seems to stem from the fact that whilst campaigning before the election we occasionally shared twin hotel rooms. Neither of us would have done so if we had thought that it in any way meant or implied something else.

In hindsight I should have given greater consideration to what might have been made of that, but this is in itself no justification for allegations of this kind, which are untrue and deeply distressing to me, to Ffion and to Christopher.

He has now told me that, as a result of the pressure on his family from the untrue and malicious allegations made about him, he does not wish to continue in his position. It is a pity that a talented individual should feel that he needs to leave his job in this way.

I am worried that we're going to get to the stage where politicians are scared to ever be alone with anyone for fear of innuendo being made of it. That would be utterly wrong - we need our politicians to be real human beings, capable of proper human interaction, not sterile, remote, aloof Stepford children who are scared to do anything in case it offends someone.

You can tell that Guido has never done a day's decent activism in his life. As a veteran of many election campaigns, I know that on the rare occasions you get to see a bed during the run up to an election, the only thing you want to do is sleep in it. I found it quite weird that Josh and Donna, and indeed many of the other Santos campaign operatives, found time to do otherwise at the culmination of an almost year long slog on the stump in the West Wing.

And as for Iain Dale, I do wish he wouldn't condemn the entire political blogosphere because of the actions of one prat. Especially when he devotes such huge amounts of time and energy into organising his blog awards. I mean, you don't decry the editor of the Guardian because of yet another outrage by the Sun. You don't say it's a bad day for books because Jackie Collins publishes a new novel. The existence of Green and Black's dark chocolate isn't demeaned by the appalling, bland Hershey's Kisses.

The way our politicians should be judged is on what they do in office. Tony Blair, for example, was exemplary in his private life which must have annoyed the tabloids no end, but he did some terrible, terrible things. He restricted our civil liberties, played merry hell with habeas corpus and set in course a train of events which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And he's so bloody arrogant, he'd do it all again.

I like the frankness so far exhibited by this Government, especially in foreign affairs, with David Cameron describing Gaza as a prison camp and Nick Clegg decrying the lack of international aid to Pakistan. It's inconceivable that these things would have been said without the say so of the Foreign Secretary.

On the other hand, the failure to sign up to the latest European Directive on Human Trafficking is a big fail as Stephen has pointed out. This needs sorting and fast.

It's public deeds, not private lives that should define our politicians.

Hague takes sexist swipe at Harman over husband's selection

It's fashionable in some circles to think William Hague has redeemed himself over the past 9 years since he resigned as Tory Leader in the wake of a hefty defeat after he led a narrow minded, bigoted campaign. Since then, he's become a funny, cuddly national treasure, the doyen of the Have I Got News for You circuit and is a million miles from his earlier persona. His change mirrors the metamorphosis of the Tories to an inclusive party which embraces equality. Aye, right.

Today at PMQs, or perhaps it should have been renamed the Ashcroft Debate, Hague made a really obnoxious comment to Harriet Harman about how she's supposed to stand up for gender equality yet her husband can get selected for a safe seat.

What a nerve! I doubt he'd have made such an issue if it had been Gordon Brown's wife who'd been selected so why is Harriet fair game?

Is Dromey's parachuting into a safe Labour seat not more to do with his lifelong association with one of the country's biggest unions?

Hague's judgement may have been affected by the egg that was running down his face on the Ashcroft Affair, but still, it shows that behind the nice cuddly tree hugging Tory Party image beats the old, bad heart with the old, bad values.