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Margaret Hodge MP at the British Museum in Bloomsbury |
I dig this job! MP Hodge’s day looking at relics
MARGARET Hodge MP got her hands on some rare booty on Tuesday at the British Museum in Bloomsbury.
Among the items on display was the massive recent Saxon find in Staffordshire, and the Culture Minister was shown a selection from a Viking find in Yorkshire dating from 928.
As I watched her quiz the curators and listen open-mouthed to their narrative, I couldn’t cynically help thinking that despite the sob stories of how tough it is to be an MP, days out like this make it a hell of a lot more cushy than the rest of us have to put up with in our lives.
While I am on this subject, Sir Christopher Kelly, the man hunting down errant MPs, can often be spotted striding down Highgate Road.
Sir Christopher, who is incredibly tall and strikes an imposing figure, has lived in Dartmouth Park with his wife Alison for many years. Alison has been on the governing body of William Ellis school.
Keeping eye on lawyers at Foot awards
IRONICALLY, the spectre of libel was hanging over an award ceremony for investigative journalism held on Monday.
Two firms had sent legal letters to Private Eye threatening a lawsuit if a citation for one of the candidates on the shortlist was read out at the ceremony at the Media and Spin Bar in Millbank.
I cannot say more for fear of bringing the wrath of a particularly sharp set of lawyers down on my head.
The ceremony is held annually in memory of that great investigative journalist Paul Foot, who lived in Canfield Gardens, West Hampstead.
“People say journalism is fish and chip paper the next day,” Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, told the assembled journalists. “Well, that isn’t always true.” He listed some of Foot’s stories, including the “ludicrous detail” of the investigation on the Lockerbie bombing that has recently resurfaced.
Hislop added: “Investigative journalism needs encouraging for obvious reasons, particularly in a recession. It’s difficult, it’s slow, it’s expensive, it’s risky. There’s no advertising. There are very few local newspapers that indulge in it.” Of course, he didn’t have in mind the fearless New Journal!
Volunteers kicked into touch?
I CANNOT believe it has been 10 years since Joy Fraser set up In Touch.
It is one of those services – effectively run by volunteers – which has gone from strength to strength, and costs hardly anything.
At the moment, it is helping 110 housebound people socialise with each over the phone.
It is staffed by a handful of splendid volunteers, around 70 people, offering their time for free.
The phones are manned by two volunteers at a time in a small office – a former locker room – near a health centre in Gospel Oak estate.
What a wonderful organisation!
Now, unbelievably, I hear it is under threat from civil servants at the Town Hall.
And the result? Those wonderful, selfless volunteers – the sort of people we need more and more of in Camden – have been told they will have to stop giving their services to In Touch.
Though funding, apparently, comes from a national voluntary body, the council has always provided the office free of charge. Now, a double whammy has hit In Touch – funding has dried up, and use of the small office is to be ended by our learned council officials.
Does this remarkable voluntary body have to die in this fashion?
Does the generosity shown by the 70 volunteers have to be treated in such a contemptuous manner?
What’s more, aren’t councillors always making speeches about how much they cherish the work of volunteers in the borough?
But then do councillors know of this threat to In Touch?
Perhaps I have stumbled on another example of an individual official, or a small cabal of pen-pushers, who have taken a decision which should be taken, if at all, by our elected councillors.
Hampstead Hill history lesson
IT was a trip down memory lane for old pupils of that excellent little school Hampstead Hill when they got together for its 60th anniversary.
I gather that more than 200 ex-pupils joined in the celebrations.
Few may have known that the school was founded by the mother of the current headteacher, Andrea Taylor.
Andrea’s mother, Hazel Riches, in fact was a former maid in service, who founded the school because she was unable to find a suitable school for her young daughters.
“She opened the doors with us in tow,” Andrea told me.
“I think the school had about 16 pupils then, one of whom was Julia Neuberger, who became a rabbi and was later ennobled as a Dame.
“At that stage it was a little school in the grounds of a thriving church before St Stephen’s became derelict in the 1970s.”
Andrea took over and built a new branch for five to eight-year-olds in the 1980s, first in Willoughby Road, then Courthorpe Road, before moving back to the original Pond Street site.
Grave concern at ‘bully’ office
SHOULD one speak ill of the dead?
In keeping with tradition this reporter has always shied away in obituaries from churning over someone’s murky past. I was surprised therefore to find that in a blog of a journalist I came across years ago, Dave Osler, there is an “unedited” contribution from an old hand in the Camden Labour party, Bob Pitt, that does not speak well of Redmond O’Neill (see page 4).
Pitt, who worked in the old office of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, writes how there had been a bullying atmosphere in the mayor’s office of which O’Neill had not been innocent. Apparently, a “grievance” procedure had been started against him at the time Livingstone was voted out of office. Pitt then paints a picture of factional in-fighting, and in all of this O’Neill played a part.
Pitt, who now works for London Assembly man Murad Qureshi, reports that there are not a few porters and other “non-political” employees at City Hall nowadays who “actually find it pleasanter working under Boris Johnson’s administration than under Ken’s”.
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