Reply #7: What is entertaining at times like this ...

[non sociopath skin]

... is watching the subtle shift in opinion. From being an invaluable and respected colleague and a much-loved public figure, Blunkett is morphing slowly but surely into the hubristic, ill-advised, right-wing authoritarian poser that some of us suspected he was all along.

Charles Clarke will not be an improvement. As the Bliarite Christian Democrats have as little respect for good employment practice as they have for anything else, they have done the classic bad-employer strategy of going for the nearest clone they could get to the outgoing employee rather than using the changeover as an opportunity to think outside the box and move on. Clarke is an arrogant, unpleasant man who despite his privileged private-school and ivy-league upbringing likes to pose as a working-class street-fighter and regular guy beer-buddy (American friends will recognise the profile!). Typical of his style was a refusal, as Education Secretary, to accept the traditional invitation to address the Annual Conference of the UK's largest Teachers' Union about his unpopular reforms on the pretext that he had better things to do with his time

As for being more liberal on dope because he's smoked it, forget it. The greater likelihood is that he'll be tougher on soft drugs because of it. What it's always helpful to remember is just how deep the embarrassment of ChristDem ministers about their leftish/ "bohemian" pasts runs - that's why they hate democratic socialists and trade unionists much more profoundly than the "paternalistic" Tories who see them merely as tribal aberrations of the Great Unwashed. Fortunately, Tony Bliar, a lifelong conservative without a radical bone in his body has no such difficulty.

The Skin