Jacqui Smith: umm, what can you say…
Written by Mark Pack on 20th January 2008 – 11:14 pm… when she comes out with this:
You don’t walk in areas you don’t know in any circumstances and I never have in my life.
Presumably she only walks around places that she has driven through or done a low-level flight over first to get to know them? Hmm … her deciding that I’m not a real person seems quite tame by comparison.
P.S. Jolly nice of the Daily Telegraph to manage to squeeze in quotes from three different Liberal Democrat MPs into their one piece here.
Posted in Opposition watch
20th January 2008 at 11:35 pm
The sad thing is, this appears to have created a circle jerk of politicians all denouncing Labour for the high crime in London, instead of pointing out that it isn’t actually that dangerous to walk the streets at night.
20th January 2008 at 11:36 pm
Maybe she’s missing an “unaccompanied” there, but even so…
Perhaps she needs some Granny Weatherwax Training (who knows that there are scary things in the woods after dark, and also knows, with smug satisfaction, that she’s the scariest of them)
20th January 2008 at 11:37 pm
Clearly she needs a hat.
20th January 2008 at 11:37 pm
God she must live a terribly dull life. Imagine walking the same few streets your entire life. Never branching out. Well it explains a few things about her, I guess.
20th January 2008 at 11:38 pm
Whut? I presume she’s never ever been on holiday or taken a city break?
I walked pretty much the whole of Berlin Mitte, central San Francisco and some very dodgy areas of PAris, as well as a lot of London, at night, without feeling threatened or overly worried. Cautious, naturally, but still.
How can you get to know a city properly, or indeed any area, without walking around it? Ye gods, another batshit Labour Home Sec. They do know how to pick ‘em.
20th January 2008 at 11:41 pm
James, yes, a pointy one.
* volunteers to be the Ogg substitute, and wear red boots, get drunk, and sing rude songs about Hedgehogs at her *
20th January 2008 at 11:41 pm
1 - absolutely James. Clive Stafford Smith said how he couldn’t believe the Tories were claiming that the UK was top of the premier league of crime in the 2005 election - pointing out that he’d never been held up at gunpoint in the UK whereas that had happened to him four times in the US.
20th January 2008 at 11:55 pm
She should try Beachy Head. The edge is very, very crumbly, and there is no fence to hold idiots back.
Seriously, the lack of any real talent on the Labour front bench is astounding.
Brown has looked haggard and burned out since his mauling by Cameron last October. I cannot see him lasting the year. Who will replace him? Harriet Harman? Hazel Blears? Steve Pound, perhaps? Or the boy, Milliband?
The proliferation of colourless mediocrity at the top of the Labour Party is going to prove a very serious challenge to the comrades (gulp, colleagues) by the end of the year.
21st January 2008 at 12:01 am
They’re now spinning like crazy and making her look even more pathetic. http://christianmay.blogspot.com/2008/01/jacqui-smith-street-crime-and-kebabs.html
21st January 2008 at 12:04 am
7 - Hywel, precisely. We have to make sure that they don’t sour the discourse so much that people freak out and reach for authoritarian, reactionary, and mindless policies. On crime, liberals must be at the forefront of the debate and not leave it to David Davis scaremongering. This is Huhne’s opportunity. Use those sharp elbows, Chris.
21st January 2008 at 12:47 am
“I am much less likely to be a victim of crime than 10 years ago.”
To be fair, that’s probably true. I don’t think a Home Secretary has been beaten up since 1972, and that was on the floor of the House of Commons …
Chris Phillips
21st January 2008 at 8:30 am
As a matter of fact I generally go out in the evening when it is dark. I feel more safe. Might be because of my dark complextion I become invisible in the night and feel safer.
21st January 2008 at 10:07 am
I’m always out late at night… It’s quite hard to mug people in daylight.
21st January 2008 at 10:25 am
Can someone help me understand the LibDems position on the EU treaty vote? As a pro-European party I can´t see the integrity in threatening to abstain…