From the Daily Mash...
Hazel Blears: Britain's most powerful Borrower. Lives inside the skirting boards at Number 10 where she chews through the modem cables and eats off an old bobbin. Can make a Babybel cheese last for a month
Wounded chipmunks can be very dangerous animals. Corner them, and they'll fight back. Viciously. The Brownites would do well not to underestimate Hazel Blears. She knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote her article for The Observer. And most people knew she was speaking the truth. Sure, for a Cabinet Minister to go out on a limb like that was extraordinary, but she did it out of pure frustration that things were going wrong and no one seemed to be doing anything to resolve things. She will have pored over every single word of that article. Every dot. Every comma. Every Youtube. No one could have submitted that column without realising it would be like lighting torchpaper. And for that reason it was disturbing to see Ms Blears resile from her words quite so quickly after an intervention from Number Ten. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a humiliating climbdown - it wasn't, but it showed that hazel Blears hadn't thought through her strategy very well. The reaction from Camp Brown was eminently predictable. She should have wargamed her response.
So as she chews her nuts in Salford this bank holiday Monday and prepares to go out on her motor bike, what happens next? Let me paint one scenario. Blears wants to be a player in the post Brown Labour Party, whether it is next month or in a year's time. She'd love to be leader, but recognises that she doesn't have the depth (or width) of support to pull that one off. Unless...
Hazel Blears is not a woman to be pushed around lightly. She may calculate she has very little to lose by speaking out. After the Euro elections she may well decide that there is nothing to lose by being the one to wield the knife. If she resigned from the Cabinet on the basis that Brown is leading the Labour Party to disaster, she's instantly become the focus for people to rally around. The Heseltine maxim that he (or she...) who wields the knife never wears the crown is all very well as far as it goes, but conveniently forgets the 5ft 3 inch high female who wielded the knife against Ted Heath back in 1975. It is her example which Hazel Blears would do well to follow.
Let's face it, Gordon Brown is never going to promote Hazel Blears beyond her current position. He dearly wanted to drop her completely at the last reshuffle but was dissuaded by wiser counsel. She must realise that she is going nowhere at the moment. Which is why she has absolutely nothing to lose by speaking her mind and being a brave little chipmunk.
Time to order a batch of T shirts, maybe...
UPDATE: Tom Harris has posted In Defence of Hazel. Another very carefully worded article :). I also have to say that I have much enjoyed Kerry McCarthy MP's twitterings on this over the last 24 hours. This was a classic...
In café reading Hazel's piece in Observer and failing to see what all the fuss is about .
No, not obvious at all. To anyone. And then later, it is apparently all the media's fault...
C4 News grossly distorting Hazel's article - ridiculous & dishonest editing so it looks like she said using Youtube was 'lamentable'.
Er, that's exactly what she was saying. Because it was.
UPDATE 11.33pm: Oh God, things are really bad for Gordon now. They've wheeled out Stephen Pound (UPDATE: who they are referring to as a"senior Labour backbencher") to man the barricades on Sky News. Luckily I had the sound turned down.
