I know very little about British politics, but I spent a lot of time watching the committee hearings yesterday and question time today. As a fairly naive spectator, I thought that David Cameron did a decent job overall. By “decent job”, I mean he outperformed the facts of the case by having a plausible answer for each point raised over the last few days, and he danced around the tricky spots pretty artfully. Labour leader Ed Milliband, in contrast, did an awful job. He tried to make a few key points but couldn’t make them crisply, and he generally had nothing like the presence and confidence that Cameron showed. Again, I’m ignorant, but I don’t see how Labour can make any kind of a recovery with that guy running the show.
Even though Cameron did pretty well, there were two topics Cameron ducked consistently: the vetting of Andy Coulson and his personal role in discussions about the BSkyB acquisition. On Coulson, he maintained that the Tories vetted Coulson thoroughly before hiring him, but he refused to name the firm that did it. He also claimed that Coulson received a standard vetting upon being hired at #10. The Guardian reports that both of these claims were pretty transparently false. Coulson got a less thorough vetting than his predecessors in the Brown and Blair cabinets, and the Tory vetting was laughable:
Coulson was also screened by a private company when he started working for the Conservatives in 2007. Asked in the Commons, Cameron refused to name the firm involved.
Electoral Commission returns show that the party last year used Control Risks Screening to vet several staff at a cost of £145.70 per check. If this is the level of vetting undergone by Coulson it is likely to have involved only the most cursory checks of online records.
It sounds like the Tory vetting was the British equivalent of pulling a credit report, which is probably why Cameron didn’t want to go down that road. And the vetting when Coulson was hired at #10 smells like Cameron and his staff didn’t want to know what Coulson had been up to.
More importantly, if Cameron dissembled to hide Coulson’s low-quality vetting, then he must also be hiding something about BSkyB, because that’s the other thing he was slippery and slimy about today.
Also, too: can someone explain why the Liberal Democrats aren’t taking this opportunity to ditch Cameron and flip to Labour, getting more concessions as they go?