Like father like son

Apparently The British Council "St Petersburg office director Stephen Kinnock was followed, stopped and released by authorities on Tuesday. Mr Kinnock - son of former Labour leader Neil - was held by the side of the road on Tuesday night and accused of going up a one-way street the wrong way and of smelling of alcohol. The British Consul in St Petersburg came to pick him up an hour later." That would be the same Neil Kinnock who was fond of a drink or several with his curry on the South Ealing Road all those years ago.


Incidentally, I wonder would Stephen Kinnock's position as St Petersburg office director of the British Council be in any way connected with a certain 'The Rt Hon Lord (Neil) Kinnock of Bedwellty' being the 'Chair of the British Council'? Is the entire Kinnock family on the "public service" gravy train? Neil was UK Commissioner of the European Commission from 1995 until 2004, and is now Chairman of the British Council. Glenys (his wife) is a MEP and is a Member of the European Parliament's Development and Co-operation Committee and a substitute member of the Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs. She is also co-president of the African, Caribbean and Pacific-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly and is Labour spokesperson on International Development in the European Parliament. She is President of Steel Action in the European Parliament. His son, Stephen, is as we have already established a director of the British Council and is married to Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is the leader of the Danish Social Democrats political party. Neil and Glenys's daughter, Rachel, works in the Political Office at No 10 under Gordon Brown.

I wonder how the interview and selection processes were carried out.

Neil Kinnock hasn't done badly for a man who once preposterously claimed to be the "first Kinnock in a thousand generations" to go to university. A thousand generations was it Neil?

Mind you this was also the man who railed for years against the House of Lords but somehow dropped his objections when Tony Blair created him Baron Kinnock, of Bedwellty. He was appointed to the House of Lords as part of Tony Blair's scheme to get a Labour majority in the unelected second chamber, a scheme that has worked not that you would know it from the way that Tony Blair portrayed it as a place still full of Tory toffs.




In researching this article, well looking for the name of the Indian restaurant where "the incident" took place, I came across this review of a book entitled "The Labour Party in Wales 1900-2000 edited by Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams and Deian Hopkin". I particularly enjoyed this part "They say that Kinnock was later "electorally destroyed by a hostile press in part because of his Welshness". Well, maybe. There is certainly no shortage of anti-Welsh prejudice in the London media. But Kinnock's real problem was not that he was a 'Welsh windbag', it was just that he was (and is) a windbag. Just remember the Sheffield rally. Or the tedious regularity that Kinnock has boasted of his handiness with his fists (the curry house incident, the Labour conference toilets etc).

Kinnock is one of these professional Welshmen, a caricature Welshman, a not very bright, loquacious chancer who talks a lot but says very little. This is a man who clearly yearns to be remembered as some sort of tragic Shakespearian character who selflessly gave his all for the good of the party and, when necessary, fell on his sword. He sees himself as a principled fighter who 'made the party electable' again, while sticking to his principles.

The reality is a little different. As a leader, Kinnock was possibly the biggest failure in Labour's history. He presided over disastrous defeats, despite ditching every last shred of principle that had accidentally become entangled to him in his rise up the greasy pole. And he hardly fell on his sword either - retiring to become a megabureaucrat in Brussels."

I like that description.


Was the restaurant called Sagar, or am I muddling up my Ealing curry houses?