What the hell does Gerald Haworth, Conservative MP for Aldershot, think he’s doing with comments like this? It must take a very special degree of shameless self promotion to get a dig in at the government on the back of the drowning of some forty thousand people, just two days after the event. But he managed it, though. Apparently Jack Straw should “investigate” the Foreign Office’s “inadequate arrangements”.(link)
You’d think that if you were going to make a political point out of this, it would have to be good. But this is sad stuff. After all, they have been arranging to have locksmiths meet evacuation flights from Thailand for those evacuees who have lost the keys to their homes, so the scope is not fantastic. And was this the best he could really come up with: a self-investigation into why, if lots of people call the same telephone number, they may find it hard to get through. You’d have thought he could be making better use of his time – querying the bizarre suggestion that 3,000 British troops, many his constituents, might be sent to Darfur when they’re already meant to be going to Afghanistan, perhaps, or getting his local party to collect money for the victims.