Digging two graves

The Paul Richards column

There’s a line in For Your Eyes Only, when Bond tells the half-Greek Melina Havelock that if she wishes to avenge the death of her parents, she must first dig two graves. I don’t know whether the Athens-born Vicky Pryce (nee Courmouzis) is an aficionado of Moore-era Bond films, but she has taken the advice to heart. Her revenge on her cheating husband, served not cold, but magma-hot, looks likely to see them both in court. The Essex police are now interviewing those close to the mystery of the vanishing speeding points. This will include the secretary of state for energy and climate change Chris Huhne. He will be interviewed, unlike Blair who was interviewed as a witness, as someone against whom allegations of a serious crime have been made. The first question from Essex’s finest to Vicky Pryce might be: how did you manage to commit a speeding offence in Essex when you were at the London School of Economics at the same time?

If the police decide to proceed, Pryce may well end up incriminating herself as Huhne’s dupe, but the consequences could be much, much worse for Chris Huhne. Two graves, but one much deeper than the other. He is denying the allegations, with some very carefully calibrated phraseology. If it comes unraveled the words will come back to haunt him, just as Clinton’s bizarrely precise definition of ‘have sex’, and Jonathon Aitken’s ‘simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fairplay’ were hung round their necks.

Huhne should consider buying a box of Cohibas for his cabinet colleague Ken Clarke as a sign of his gratitude. Clarke – surely the model for the perpetually-bemused Peter Manion – gave a series of interviews yesterday which revealed a degree of ignorance and antediluvian attitudes towards rape normally displayed by High Court Judges. As Clarke dug an ever-deeper hole, Huhne was let off the hook, at least for a few hours. Clarke knows how to survive a media shit-storm. His first notable gaffe was to invite Oswald Mosley to the Cambridge Union – twice – which caused many Jewish members to resign (including Michael Howard). As health minister he called ambulance drivers ‘glorified taxi drivers’, and survived. He was a member of the government from 1979 to 1997. The Brixton riots, the Falklands, the miners’ strike, Westland, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the poll tax, the end of Thatcher, back to basics, the cones hot-line: Ken Clarke has survived them all. Then another 13 years in opposition, selling cigarettes to Vietnamese children and making some serious money. And here is is – back in the cabinet. Offending every woman in Britain is just another day at the office.

Although Clarke’s gaffe is more politically abhorrent, and erases years of detoxification, it is more survivable than Huhne’s alleged crime. Clarke has a huge constituency of support, and genuine popularity, if not on the right of his party, but in the country. He will probably be disarming and blustering on this evening’s Question Time, but he won’t be announcing his resignation. He’ll ride out the boos and catcalls, just as he has since the early-80s. He may even raise the odd laugh or applause.

Huhne, on the other hand, has few supporters, even amongst Liberal Democrats. Clegg’s people won’t mourn his passing, and nor will any of the other contenders for the leadership such as Cable or Tim Farron. Huhne’s political death may be a death by a thousand cuts, but it will come. His greatest regret will not be speeding on that night in 2004 (if that is what he did), but failing to resign on 5th May 2011, when it could have been a resignation of principle.

‘σας βλέπω στο δικαστήριο’ as they say in Greece.