In all the ‘excitement’ of the hung or balanced parliament it may have been missed that one Jack Dromey has been elected member of parliament for Erdington in Birmingham, England. I wouldn’t have noticed his success myself had I not happened to switch on the telly to find Paxman being reduced to laughter, or tears, by the man, only just become an MP detailing why, with 50+ fewer seats and 2 million odd fewer votes, Mr Brown was, in fact, the man that hard working British families wanted to take them through the hard days ahead.
Yeah whatever Jack, back to the kitchen now and get Harry’s tea on!
Jack, I should explain for those not in the know, is the husband of Harry Harperson, the would-be, but never was, deputy prime minister whom he met on the picket line of an infamous strike over women’s trade union rights in the mid 1970s.
But Mr Harperson-Dromey is famous for more than that. Oh yes. Mr Dromey, in the position of Treasurer of the Labour party, not a job I’d have wanted, appeared to know not from whence had come £3.5m in loans from would-be lords.
Well, you can’t account for every £3.5m that’s lying around, can you?
In 2006 he came to prominence having claimed that neither he, as treasurer, not the chairman (should that not be “chair”) of the National Executive Committee, Sir, yes, SIR Jeremy Beecham (well, if you can’t beat them, join them I say) had ever been consulted about this money. It must have just been sitting there, heavily disguised as, well, something else.
Then in 2007 he claimed to know nothing at all about £650,000 worth of donations from David Abrahams. You are beginning to wonder at this point why the man is treasurer, and if in fact he is in any way qualifie
d for the job...well, apart from the obvious, that his wife is the deputy leader of the Labour party. Harpy Hardman was actually caught up in that scandal too, as she her staff had solicited and accepted donations from Abrahams of £5,000, according to Wikipedia.Jack has had parliamentary ambitions for some time. On his first attempt in 1997 he didn’t even make the cut, and so on his second his union Unite, offered a donation of a £1m based on assumption of the safe seat of Wolverhampton NE. That failed too. In 2009 it was decided to parachute him into Leyton, another safe seat, but this proved too unpopular with the local party especially given that it ran contrary to his wife’s all-women shortlists policy.
When, in February Siôn Simon announced that we would stand down at the election, the NEC swiftly announced that Birmingham Erdington would be an open short-list. To hell with women, our Jack needs a job. Our Jack was confirmed to have made that short-list. The same month he was selected as the Labour Party candidate and he was duly elected on May 6. As they say in Punch and Judy “That’s the way to do it”.
My advice to whoever is leading the Labour party after the next Queen’s speech is: don’t let him anywhere near the Treasury brief. He wouldn’t know £3.5m if it was sitting there in front of him in the form of br... no sorry, loans from aspiring noblemen.
Oh, and don’t let him anywhere near Paxman. He would have been Toast, with a VERY big T, if Jeremy hadn’t been up all night and in need of a good laugh! Pathetic just isn’t half strong enough!
Video is not of the Paxman interview, but the story of Dromey's attempts to get himself a cushy billet.
