Lord Mandy's sleight-of-tongue doesn't fool us

Maurice O'Brien • Published 17 Sep 2009 10:00 0 Comments

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WHEN they promised us Lord Mandy on the radio on Monday morning I started counting.

The Prince of Darkness was poised to tell us what he and his dogged assistant, Old Prudence, will do about public spending.

Or not.

Exactly 27 seconds passed before he told us what the Tories are going to do about public spending.

There were the usual sleight-of-tongue exchanges with leaden-footed Jim Naughtie; jargon and meaningless words suitable for re-arrangement into well known phrases or sayings.

But hard as Jim tried, Mandy was just busting to talk Tory blitzkrieg policy instead.

Which was remarkable really, because when the Tories talk about public spending they give the impression it's still a case of deciding whether to call heads or tails. And the mystery deepened minutes later when they wheeled on that old bluffer Ken Clarke who chortled throatily, snorted a bit, scoffed at spinning Pete and left us none the wiser.

But that's not the only mystery just now. The other one's got the sticky fingerprints of the Furtive Four - the aforementioned Mandy and GB, plus Yo B and Patty H, the woman who used her inspirational stewardship of the NHS to get a nice job at Boots.

Blair, Brown and Hewitt ensured the MG Rover basket case stayed afloat long enough to avoid being a vote-loser at the last General Election, while Mandy's been indulging in some typical sorcery since the appearance of last week's £16m report which we foolishly believed might explain why the company collapsed at a cost of 6,000 jobs and £1.3bn in debt.

Now everyone seems agreed that MG Rover's so-called Phoenix Four scooped £42m from the company between them and, unlike their former workers, are doing very nicely thank you. But apparently there was nothing fraudulent about their behaviour.

Having said that, Lord Mandy reckons they should all be ashamed of themselves and ought to be barred from holding company directorships ever again. But why? Either it's fraud or it isn't. Could it be someone somewhere fears so much sleaze would ooze from any trial of the Phoenix Four that the Furtive Four would emerge as a bunch of bungling incompetents?

- OLD Prudence can apologise for something that happened when he was barely three-years-old, but not a whisper about looting pension funds, selling the gold reserves on the cheap, or running the economy for 12 years on the never never.

- BEING forced to use a torch to see where I'm plugging in the telly, while I'm waiting for my so-called 'low energy' light bulb to warm up, may well be the EU's idea of progress. It certainly isn't mine.

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