David Blunkett, from what I’ve gathered, was a fairly high-ranking British governmental official. Last December, there was some scandal which caused him to resign. So far, so good.
Only now he’s apparently resigning again (linkarama). A few articles I’ve read thus far about it have implied that this is going to have a fairly serious impact on the Blair administration. I can see that just fine, but there seems to be a void between resignation one and how he managed to be again working in a high-level government office. Was he hired again after quitting the first time?
Yes, astonishingly enough he was. He first quit because in December some allegations about his affair with Kimberly Quinn, publisher of right-wing politics and news magazine “The Spectator”, coalesced into some direct accusations about favouritism - the most serious being that he had, in his position as Home Secretary (analogous to Secretary of State and crucially with specific responsibility for immigration policy) fast-tracked the visa application of his lover’s nanny. The smoking gun was an email from the senior civil servant to the effect that as requested the application had been processed as quickly as possible - 6 weeks instead of the usual year. That was sufficiently serious an abuse of powers that his position became untenable - although he resigned without admitting any actual wrongdoing.
Surrounding that there was also a fairly nasty paternity battle with Blunkett trying very hard to prove that he, and not her husband, was the father of Kimberly Quinn’s latest child. Following DNA testing, it turned out he was not.
He was out of government for 5 months, being brought back in as Work and Pensions Secretary after the May election. During that 5 months, he had full use of a “grace and favour” flat meant for the Home Secretary in London’s Belgravia - a highly expensive perk for someone who was not doing any government work. He also during that time accepted directorships for a number of companies, one of which was a DNA testing company. There is a code of conduct requiring ministers and ex-ministers to take advice from a committee on whether there is any potential conflict of interest in taking up such positions. Blunkett either ignored this advice or never solicited it - I’m not clear which.
He was busted today because having ridden out the intial scandal of being involved with one company inappropriately, he was found to have been involved with another over the same time period. His big sin was in fact one of ommission - when he had his first crisis meeting with Tony Blair over the weekend, he did not disclose the second indiscretion. Having once forced the PM to stand by you in face of allegations of wrong-doing, you simply cannot expect him to do it again 2 days later - especially if you have told him there were no more skeletons in closets.
He has not so far, to my knowledge, admitted to doing anything actually wrong.
Bumping my own thread, because I still don’t get it. Is his position (that he just resigned from) the same one that he held a Quitting 1.0? If so, is it an elected position, or an appointed one? Is the position he was in equivilant to the US’s Secretary of the Dept. of Labor?
If so, was there no outrage when he was appointed to such a position?
Blair has a track record of giving his friends another job a ‘decent interval’ (or not-very-decent) after they had to resign in disgrace from their last one. Peter Mandelson has had to resign twice now, and then was given a job on the European gravy train which should see him set for life now. Of course it’s treating Parliament with total contempt, but Blair hardly bothers to disguise his contempt for it now, save as an instrument to do his bidding. No one in his party dares to say a word for fear of being seen to be ‘disloyal’ and making the party appear disunited.
This is all IMHO, but it seems to me that David Blunkett is (was) the most important member of Tony Blair’s cabinet. No one else established genuine right wing credentials in the way Blunkett did; tough on crime, asylum seekers, terrorism, Harold Shipman etc. His pull with the middle england electorate was very significant and was probably the reason he was brought back into the cabinet so soon.
To the OP, David Blunkett is not the venal, grasping politician that recent news stories paint him to be. He’s a man undergoing meltdown, certainly, who has lost all perspective, self-discipline and self-awareness, but fundamentally he has great character who will recover to make a contribtion elsewhere. David Aaronovitch actually speculated in today’s Times (sorry, can’t find a link) that he may have suffered a nervous breakdown following the Kimberley Quinn affair. It doesn’t seem too far fetched to me, it was a sure sign that his judgement had gone to return to the cabinet so soon.
we don’t pay these people to make mistakes. They are supposed to be smarter than the average bear, that’s why we don’t just grab tramps off the street and bundle them into the House.