Wednesday 19 May 2010

Spelman must go

Ahhh ... sleaze. Truly a gift that keeps on giving.

iDave's fervent hope that he'd be able to draw a line under it after the election and yet here his Coalition of the Not-quite-winners and the Complete Fucking Losers is being tested within days. Caroline Spelman's reputation is being Stained.

It started off ominously enough:

For over ten years the new Secretary of State, along with her husband, lobbied the very department she now runs. Caroline resigned as a director less than a year ago and conveniently transferred her share of the company to her husband. The company address was also changed from her constituency home, for which Spelman claimed around £40,000 on expenses for cleaning and bills, to their million pound London flat. According to the company accounts last year, no rent was paid on this “office” subsidised by the taxpayers.


Mmm. Not rats to be smelled there, then! But of course, you just knew it wasn't going to end there:

“Mark Spelman is a managing director at Accenture, the firm that developed the online system that delivers subsidy payments to farmers. The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) awarded Accenture a £35m seven-year contract to develop new and more efficient systems in 2003. Accenture was appointed to develop and deliver the new system over two years and then provide ongoing support for the remaining five years.”

The disastrous Accenture deal that ended up costing £350 million is due to expire this year. Guess who is in charge of deciding if it is renewed?



Ahhh. Definitely no rats to be smelled there!

So, we've had a week before the Tories have revealed themselves to be exactly the same thieving, greedy, duplicitous cunts as Labour. Well ... we knew it from the expenses scandal, but iDave must be shitting himself at this little clusterfuck.

And if he'd just accepted the warning from the nannygate scandal and given Spelman the heave-ho at the time, none of this rumbling would be threatening his honeymoon with Nick. I can only assume she knows where the bodies are buried.

Still, you massively-foreheaded cunt, let that be a fucking lesson to you.

Not that you'll listen.

13 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Agreed. The Witch must die.

Further, iDave must have known about this for years, but he just ignored it.

Uncle Marvo said...

Definitely no rats.

You forgot to mention that the Accenture system didn't actually work, and I (me, personally) am still paying for it, through the nose.

It was a joint fuckup between Accenture, David Miliband (aka DEFRA), Goerdon Brown (aka Chancellor), and as far as I remember BT and another company that conveniently went bust in the middle of it.

Not also that Accenture, formerly Arthur Andersen consulting, are not whiter than white. Think Enron.

Now, who's this Caroline character? I feel an assassination coming on. A character one.

wv: milibust (really)

Kingbingo said...

You do realise clown that Accenture is a huge organisation doing an awful lot of different IT projects across the world.

You make it sound as if these two organisations are dependent on each other. That is no more true than you are dependant on Sony and them on you because you recently bought one of their TV’s.

Nevertheless, by hyping trivial stories like these, or crying wolf as it could also be known, will pretty much guarantee that when a genuine scandal comes along it will be ignored by bored public oblivious to cries of ‘wolf’!

Carpe Jugulum said...

I'm impressed........no really, it usually takes a few months for these greedy arse-bandits to get a snout in the trough here in Aust.

England i salute you, in race 1 of the greedy fucker darby you have kicked our Aussie arses over the fence for 6 & out.

woman on a raft said...

Spelman and the other Conservative Christian Fellowship supported iDave in the leadership challenge. He had at least two warnings that she was a liability, like Nadine, only flat-chested. He already rewarded her for her loyalty by keeping her in the party.

If the nanny business was not enough, Spelman embarrassed iDave by being associated with criticizing a sizable party donor, the Zabludowicz family.

The Observer told him about it on Sunday 2 March 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2008/mar/02/1

but he didn't listen.

The Conservative donor Poju Zabludowicz is married to art collector Anita Zabludowicz. She has some rum old tastes in modern art, as does Charles Saatchi, but it's their money. Anita bought a collection work by nutcase Terence Koh. He makes horrible nicknaks out of his own bodyily products. I'd shove the lot in the nearest clinical waste bin if it were me, but Anita lent hers to the Baltic Gallery in Newcastle for the benefit of the public.

In that collection is at least one defaced statue of Jesus doing something indelicate. The serious point which Koh is trying to make is about cabinets of souvenirs which encapsulate memory, but a symbol like that predictably annoys people.

It annoyed that bunch of laywers who have been trying to prove that Christians face discrimination in Britain. (They do, but the fools keep choosing the wrong cases to demonstrate it). They therefore put a dimbo clerk in Brentwood, several hundred miles south of Newcastle, up to complaining to the police. She had never been to the gallery, she had just read about it in the papers.

The Conservative Christian Fellowship - of whom Spelman is a trustee - rushed in with their opinion.

"A work like this needs to be treated with contempt. The artist was clearly just trying to shock and the people who should answer for it are the people who allowed it to happen. They should be treated with contempt."

Ooops. They might as well have accused Anita of being a fat tasteless cow.

The Christian lawyers brought a private criminal prosecution against the gallery, the CPS took it over, the case was thrown out and the gallery got over £8k costs. I've yet to establish who paid the £8k.

When I tried to point this out on Conservative Home, and early enough for iDave to do something such as dumping her, it was deleted. Shouldn't be surprised, given that Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home co-founded the Conservative Christian Fellowship in 1990.

The reason iDave does nothing is that he's up to his neck in hock now to various groups, only not the Eurosceptics.

Carpe Jugulum said...

Kingbingo - Please tell me you are shitting me.......or that you are blogging pissed...........or is it that you are oblivious to the obvious dishonesty of a newly elected official.

I shall take this opportunity to give you a quote from the great educator Dean Wormer.....

"Fat drunk & stupid is no way to go through life son"

Uncle Marvo said...

@Kingbingo:

Accenture is a huge organisation doing an awful lot of IT projects across the world, as are CAP, as are EDS and many others, and NONE of them have delivered anything like the customer wanted, and only governments or HUGE corporations can afford them. They are mainly made up of small people who got good degrees and can play rugger or hockey,and the size of these organisations does not make them better, they are as good as the wankers who work for them. Ditto PwC, ditto ditto ditto.

Therefore, they are cunts.

I rest my case (and that's from personal, alhough bitter, experience).

Accenture is a huge organisation doing a lot of awful IT projects across the world ...

If I say more I will have to name names and probably be sued.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

Sorry, Kingbingo, but you are completely wrong. If these guys were spending their own money, it would be none of my business. Unfortunately, however, they are spending my money and as such, I have every right to demand that they spend it in such a way as to leave me comfortable that it is being spent wisely.

Even if there is nothing shady going on, it's still my fucking money and I'm entitled to feel comfortable that it's not being pissed out on a crony deal.

Ironically, my own experience of Accenture has being uniformly positive, but this definitely has at the very least the opportunity for corruption.

Kingbingo said...

Obnoxio: Yes I don’t question for a moment that you’re entitled to cry wolf whenever you damn well please. But the point I’m making is that everyone will stop being able to distinguish between as you call it ‘the opportunity for corruption’ and actual corruption.

Just because her husband works for Accenture does not equal abuse. Indeed, you haven’t even been able to suggest that her husband is in the same department. As I’m sure your aware Accenture has lots and lots of MD’s, most of whom have never met each other.
If your blog had uncovered that her husband was the MD responsible for this contract negotiation and that he stands to make a substantial bonus if it is signed, and she then signed it, this would be actual corruption unless she declared the conflict and delegated the decision to a Minister of State.
But all you have is a couple each married to two very large employers HM Government and Accenture, and that on some level these organisations connect. So fucking what.
So by all means hate the concept of government so much you just disengage brain and throw as much shit as you can. But in my humble opinion I think you might want to target your undoubtable intellect on exposing the real issues.
I appreciate you hate all politicians that don’t live in libertarian Narnia. But at least let the new government warm their new seats to arse temperature before writing them all off as corrupt and useless.

Tim Almond said...

Obo,

I've personally found the likes of Accenture and IBM to be fine when doing things like managing infrastructure, but when it comes to software development, they're pretty bad.

It's not so much the programming staff on the projects as the analysts and management. They all seem to come from the sharp-but-useless school of management. Lots of nice Powerpoint, bugger all idea what the programmers are doing.

I've rarely seen farmed-out development work better than in-house. Run the project yourself, use your own staff (or contractors).

Obnoxio The Clown said...

"Indeed, you haven’t even been able to suggest that her husband is in the same department. As I’m sure your aware Accenture has lots and lots of MD’s, most of whom have never met each other.
If your blog had uncovered that her husband was the MD responsible for this contract negotiation and that he stands to make a substantial bonus if it is signed, and she then signed it, this would be actual corruption unless she declared the conflict and delegated the decision to a Minister of State."

If you honestly believe that there are MDs of Accenture who don't know each other at all, and that the MD who is responsible for the contract (if it isn't Spelman himself) would not avail himself of every possible "lobbying" opportunity, then there's not a lot I can say, really.

Likewise to the fact that he wouldn't get some kind of "bonus" for "assistance" with "closing the deal".

The fact of the matter is that (Mrs) Spelman has form when it comes to being economical with the actualité and the step from one kind of venal corruption to another is not huge.

Bang on about libertarian Narnia as much as you like, but before you do, please take off your Tory-blue-tinted specs. If this was a Labour MP, you'd be screaming blue murder.

Kingbingo said...

“If this was a Labour MP, you'd be screaming blue murder.”


You think. I spend the first two years of Labours government going round telling everybody that so far they were not as bad as I thought that they were being very sensible on spending while the Tories were being thoroughly opportunistic on certain areas. I could see Labour slight and subtle tax rises(pension raid excluded), but I wasn’t hugely concerned as we did have a deficit to pay off even back then. During these two years government declined from 37.5% of GDP to 35%.


Of course after the first two years they let rip on spending, and then I started screaming blue murder, for what they were actually doing. Now obviously I suspected they were going to do it, but at least I gave them the chance and judged them on what they actually delivered.


The Tories haven’t even had most of their new members sworn in yet, most ministers still haven’t figured out were all the loos in their new ministries are yet and you have already written them off. I mean for fuck sake your worse than Scott you miserable old git. I mean she hasn’t actually done anything wrong yet has she, you’re only concerned that she potentially could.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

So, Kingbingo, given your self-confessed ineptitude at reading politicians, why are you even trying to defend the new lot?