Summary
IF THE Home Secretary, David Blunkett, hoped that he would put to rest, at least temporarily, the row over the favours he is alleged to have done his former mistress, Kimberly Quinn, by announcing an independent review into the matter, he can think again. The investigation is likely to be conducted by a retired senior civil servant but it ought to be, as the Tories demand, in the hands of a judge. Moreover, the investigation will address only the most substantive allegation against Mr Blunkett: that he fast-tracked the visa application of his mistress' Filipina nanny. It will not deal with several minor charges: that he sent a policeman to guard her house during the MayDay protests, enabled her to be driven to Derbyshire in the car carrying his ministerial documents and allowed her to use rail passes intended for ministerial spouses. These are trivial offences compared with the central allegation: that Mr Blunkett intervened to help Mrs Quinn's nanny to get a permanent visa when she was some months short of the period that would qualify her to remain here. And here Mr Blunkett really does have serious questions to answer. Did he really ask a senior civil servant to "look over" the application? Did he indeed "check over" it himself ? Mr Blunkett is blind - who read the form to him?
What was it doing on his desk - and was Mrs Quinn right to say that he sent his official driver to collect the papers? Mr Blunkett is a seasoned politician and he knows full well the difficulties in which Peter Mandelson, his former Cabinet colleague, was embroiled in another visa scandal. Visas are a sensitive matter and if Mr Blunkett did intervene here, it puts his normally reliable judgment in doubt. The Home Secretary is an able and astute minister, who has accomplished a great deal in tackling law and order issues that really matter to the lives of ordinary people. This scandal is both vexatious in distracting attention from the Government's legislative programme and humiliating in that it focuses lively interest instead on the extraordinarily complicated home life of himself and Mrs Quinn and the fraught question of the paternity of her two children. These are areas in which Mr Blunkett has not emerged with much credit, but these are not matters for the inquiry. That will deal with a potential abuse of office and it must not be a whitewash. To ensure it is not seen as such, it should be conducted by a judge and take into consideration all the relevant allegations in this unedifying affair.See the full content of this document
Extract
The Questions for Mr Blunkett
A failure of duty
PUBLIC CONCERN over the suspicious deaths of four young recruits at the Deepcut Army training c...See the full content of this document
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