Posts Tagged ‘Frederic Michel’

David Cameron’s political judgement makes him the real Hunt of this story

25/04/2012, 07:10:40 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Why does Jeremy Hunt still have a job? His holding statement last night was so full of holes it could be used to sieve the peas.

Hunt’s words were carefully chosen, and as ever when politicians’ parse, it is what is not explicitly ruled out that counts:  “some of the evidence reported meetings and conversations that simply didn’t happen “.

So, some of the meetings and conversations did happen.

That’s enough. A cursory reading of the e-mails suggests that for Hunt to survive, Frédéric Michel would have had to have been a complete fantasist. Jeremy Hunt has already said he is not.

The depth of trouble in which Hunt finds himself can be gauged by the way the Leveson cache of e-mails is being reported: almost always with a prefix such as “devastating”, in the same way Andrew Lansley is normally “gaffe-prone” or “under pressure”.

Naturally, Jeremy Hunt thinks he can ride out the storm. After spending the best part of the past two decades scrambling to climb the greasy political pole (so to speak), he and his advisers will desperately be looking for a way through the minefield. It’s an understandable human reaction.

But what makes less sense is the response from Number 10.

Quite apart from the substance of the issue and the appalling privileged influence that the Murdochs clearly enjoyed, there is something potentially even more damaging in the Downing street reaction, certainly in the medium term: their failure of political judgement.

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