Liberal Burblings

Archive for January, 2007

There, we’ve done our bit for the Big Birdwatch weekend. That was the count of birds by my daughter and I during a 30 minute birdwatch at Speenhamland School, Newbury this morning. (That followed some intensive bird-feeder manufacturing and bird collage sticking.)

Hat-tip to Recess Monkey and William Hickey of the Daily Express, and, yes, I know I am slow on the uptake, but this is a beaut. It was kindly recorded verbatim by Hansard without the usual “polishing”:

Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon) (Con):The local area agreements offer important opportunities and possibilities. As the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport said, there is bound to be debate on who is embraced by the local area agreement. If one is not careful, one gets an absolutely gigantic sort of jellyfish of an orgasm— [Laughter.]

I wondered how many of my colleagues were awake. I am agreeably surprised. I meant “organism”.

The New York Times reports that key supporters of John Kerry are moving their loyalties to Barack Obama, now that Kerry has announced that he will not run for Presiddent in 2008. The latter announcement is to be welcomed, as the field is already a little crowded at the moment.

The Guardian reports:

The cash-for-honours investigation took a fresh twist today as Downing Street was forced to deny claims that it had a secret computer network from which potentially crucial emails had been deleted.

Iain Dale has suggested that we are entering Watergate-type territory. Well, there was a 18.5 minute gap in tape three of the subpoenaed tapes in the Watergate scenario. In the end, it was the unwiped tapes which did for Nixon. However, I doubt whether there will be any emails in the current situation which cannot be recovered.

I am not a techie but I have been immersed in IT and sending/receiving emails for twenty-three years now (yes, email has been around in some form for more than that length of time now). The safest assumption to make is that you cannot delete an email once you have typed it in.

If you gather up all the hard drives of all the people to whom the email was sent, plus presumably the ISPs through whom it was sent, and then use a sledgehammer or an incinerator to physically destroy all those hard drives, then you might have a sporting chance of deleting those emails.

You might think you have deleted the email by “deleting” it on Outlook, for example. But you haven’t. As a simple step, the mail can be recovered from the deleted folder. As a more complex step, it can be recovered from your hard drive. And you can’t really wipe the hard drive unless you are using extremely serious high-tech industrial specialist software or, indeed, use the proverbial sledgehammer mentioned above.

I very much doubt that anyone on the political side in Downing Street knows how to really delete an email, even if it were possible.

If in doubt, ask Monica Lewinsky about this. She thought she had deleted emails to do with Bill Clinton and “Staingate”, but she hadn’t. The FBI recovered them. She has said:

They were things that I thought I had deleted. I certainly came to see that obviously I was wrong. While you may think it’s deleted, it isn’t. I mean it’s there permanently.

It is a different matter if, strictly theoretically, someone in Downing Street thinks they have deleted an email which they might conceivably, allegedly and strictly theoretically prefer not to see the light of day. They are probably wrong, and, therefore, could possibly, allegedly, conceivably and strictly theoretically be “cruising for a bruising”.

Could it possibly have been that the judge in Mold, North Wales was accurately following existing guidelines and actually felt that Derek Williams did not need to be jailed and instead should be put under supervision on a suspended sentence? Perish the thought.

Could it be that the judge took the opportunity to do a bit of grandstanding to re-immerse multiply-immersed John Reid in the proverbial doo-doo? Shurely shome mishtake?

Perhaps it might be educational to look at someone else who stood before Mold Crown Court yesterday:

A man who was obsessed with his estranged wife has been jailed for eight years for her attempted murder. Christopher Deakin, 37, travelled from Scotland to Llandudno, Conwy, after telling his wife Jane he was going to kill her, Mold Crown Court heard. She was stabbed 22 times with kitchen knives, two days after the couple’s seventh wedding anniversary when they met and he left her a love poem.

Or we could look back to January 20th:

A Mid Wales gunman who terrorised two police community support officers after he took the law into his own hands has been jailed for two years. Russell Price Ellis thought the police in Newtown were not doing enough to catch the people responsible for thefts from his late mother’s house and he warned officers he was going to go after those he thought were responsible. But when he crept up to one intended victim’s house and found the two PCSOs on watch outside, he turned his gun on them, Mold Crown Court heard yesterday.

So it does appear that those wacky judges at Mold Crown Court are still sending people, which they regard as dangerous enough, to jail.

Of course, it is possible that the judge made a mistake in the Williams case. He could have been so over-awed by the almighty Scots dynamism of our “bruiser” Home Secretary that he was shuddering in his shoes when he decided on Williams’ sentence and felt he could do nothing except follow what he thought were Reid’s orders, against his better judgement. But this is unlikely, to say the least.

The point of all this is that, unless you actually sit through a trial, as the judge and jury do, it is very difficult, not to say silly, to second-guess the judgements of the court. The judge sat through all the details and made a judgement based on guidelines that have repeatedly been emphasised by the sentencing guidelines panel. We have to leave it at that, unless we want all sentencing done by the editor of The Sun, whose brain, of course, is fully intact.

Someone might be able to help my ailing memory. Iain Dale wrote yesterday:

As Sir John Junor used to say, ‘there will be dancing on the streets of Auchtermuchty’ this evening, as the Conservatives announce the apparent demise of the ‘A’ List

I left a comment saying:

Iain, I thought it was Bill McClaren who referred to “dancing in the streets of (insert name of appropriate Scottish town) tonight”?

Sir John Junor used to refer, of course, to the maids and lads in Auchtermuchty but in all my years reading his pieces in the Sunday Express and Mail on Sunday, I can’t remember him referring to dancing in the streets of Auchtermuchty.

Indeed, the only previous net reference I can find (http://tinyurl.com/3djoqr) to “dancing in Auchtermuchtie” (you spelt it the right way I hasten to add) has been corrected by someone writing:”Please, it’s Auchtermuchty.And they don’t dance ……”

Anyone able to help? Did Sir John Junor ever forecast dancing in the streets of Auchtermuchty? Am I going mad or was Bill McClaren the originator of the Scottish public twilight hoedown forecast?