The Blame, Again, Falls Mainly On MacShane… November 27, 2008
Posted by bensix in Uncategorized.trackback
There’s an interesting bit in Inayat Bunglawala’s new Guardian column, in which he claims that a 2001 article published under the name of Khalid Mahmood MP was actually written by my fave politishun Dennis MacShane. Bunglawala links back to a diary entry by Matthew Norman…
“We much enjoyed Khalid Mahmood’s trenchant pro-war piece in the Observer. As he is one of only two Muslim MPs, the member for Birmingham Perry Bar’s defence of the bombing and dismissal of five “myths” about Islam (such as most Muslims opposing the bombing) will carry some weight. The fact that the article was identical to a piece sent last week to one of our three Muslim peers, the Rochdale chippy Lord Ahmed, is just another of those meaningless coincidences that afflict politics and media all the time.
Why Lord Ahmed declined to sign the piece, which reached him on crested Foreign Office paper and was written by FO minister Denis McShane, and pass it to a newspaper, is unclear.”
This later entry is even more interesting…
“What a year Lord Ahmed is having. Not content with turning in FO imbecile Denis MacShane for threatening him with MI5 surveillance after he refused to put his name to a pro-war article…”
The latter allegation stems from a 2001 story, in which Ahmed claimed that MacShane had confronted him, waved a handful of papers in his face and said that “we know what you have been saying, who you have been talking to. Everything you say is circulated to ministers”. An aggrieved MacShane protested that he had been misinterpreted, and they had merely had “a fairly robust political conversation but one we left with smiles”.
Would you leave a conversation smiling if you thought that another had told you he was bugging your house?
I didn’t even know this episode existed. How interesting eh… though I’m not sure why Inayat brought it up now…
[...] exists these days as an unmissable target for abuse on Comment is Free. Back in the day though, he was an utter shit. Here’s the Guardian Diary column from 2001: We much enjoyed Khalid Mahmood’s trenchant [...]
That, Ben, is a quite stunning headline.
Neither did I; I’m still catching up with the last eight years (horribly depressing task).
Ben
Heh, thank you Duncan. I was quite unreasonably proud of it.
Ben