Robert Peston was hauled before the Treasury Select Committee today charged with the heinous crime of reporting the news. 

He stood accused, along with four illustrious accomplices from the world of financial journalism, of causing a run on banks like Northern Rock by merely pointing out that they were about to come crashing down.

 

 

 Perhaps next week MPs will be grilling Michael Fish and Sian Lloyd over their role in global warming. Peston, who never uses one word when a rambling, incoherent 15-minute monologue will suffice, took centre stage as the assembled hacks queued up to deny any wrongdoing.  Committee chairman John McFall set the tone, directing the first question at the BBC man with a wry smile: “I just picked you at random, Robert!”

 

 Make no mistake: this was the Robert Peston show. “At the risk of sounding pompous…” he began, to derisory sniggers from the MPs, before outlining, at length, the case for the defence. They could laugh all they liked but the committee members were lucky to have their star guest. Without this oratorical cluster bomb in their midst proceedings would have lasted about three minutes, amounting as they did to little more than: “Did you lot cause the credit crunch?” Answer: “No.”

 

 Northern Rock, said Peston, was a bust bank with a flawed business model, and today is “precisely where it would have been if we hadn’t published.”

 

 On this bombshell, it suddenly dawned on the politicians they needed another line of attack. Where head-on assault had failed, the committee opted for divide and rule.

 

 Perhaps Alex Brummer would drop Peston in it? The Daily Mail man had suggested, after all, that Peston’s “excitable reporting” fuelled the run on Northern Rock. Alas, it wasn’t to be. “I meant tone rather than content”, explained Brummer, remaining loyal to his BBC counterpart. Indeed the panel appeared to have nothing but praise for Peston’s journalism.

 

 At this point the honourable members got really desperate. Unable to nail Peston and co. for maliciously inducing public panic, they demanded to know why the media had not spotted the financial crisis earlier. Sky’s Jeff Randall wasn’t having any of it. “Without wishing to blow my own trumpet”, he began, before treating us to some virtuoso brass-playing, citing numerous articles he had written years earlier predicting Armageddon. Undeterred by the presence of this Nostradamus of the credit crunch, the rest of the panel weighed in with their own tales of how they regaled indifferent editors with their prophecies of doom.

 

 

 The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins mischievously suggested that the committee had managed to assemble the only five journalists in Britain who saw the crunch coming.

 

 

But the MPs had little time to guffaw before Jenkins turned his guns on them, suggesting not only journalists have a duty to spot crises in the making: “What have you been doing all the time?” he demanded. Several members shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Presumably they had started to wonder, like the rest of us, what they were doing there in the first place.

Five-year-old Oscar on the attack before Terry scored his own-goal

Grizzled veterans of the newsroom sometimes comment that reporters these days seem to be getting younger and younger. The Guardian, it appears, has taken this trend to its logical conclusion.

John Terry thinks Jose Mourinho is “the best” manager he has worked under at Chelsea, the paper reported today. The timing of his comment was a little unfortunate, coinciding with embattled manager Luis Felipe Scolari losing his rag with referees over their alleged bias against Chelsea. Big Phil can’t be pleased to hear his captain talking up the former boss.

So how did the Guardian’s cunning hacks manage to extract this juicy angle to their Sport section’s front-page story? Their secret weapon, it turns out, was five-year-old Oscar Witt, whose conversation with Terry was part of a series of celebrity interviews carried out by children for today’s Weekend magazine.

Oscar asked “Who do you like best, Jose, Avram or Big Phil Scolari”. Terry’s seemingly innocuous reply, that “because it’s too early to say on Scolari, I’m gonna say Mourinho is the best I’ve worked under”, leapt straight to the front page, giving young Oscar the first scoop of what looks set to be an illustrious media career.

Terry must have choked on his cornflakes – I’m sure he has the Guardian delivered every morning – when he realised that an apparently harmless PR exercise had resulted in uncomfortable headlines for his manager.

Bob Marshall-Andrews, Labour MP for Medway

Bob Marshall-Andrews was first elected to Parliament in 1997, but that’s about all he has in common with a large chunk of the loyal Blairite foot soldiers of the New Labour revolution. The MP for Medway in Kent has voted against the government on more than 200 occasions in a Commons career defined by rebellion.

Although a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, Marshall-Andrews is not a trade unionist in background like so many of his colleagues on the rebellious fringes of the party. Indeed, this wealthy barrister, owner of a £1m eco-friendly holiday home in West Wales known as the ‘Teletubby House’, is in many ways an odd fellow traveller for the old left. Nevertheless, he matches them stride for stride in his rarely concealed contempt for Blair and Brown and his unrelenting refusal to toe the New Labour line.

On election night in 2005, thinking he was going to lose his seat, Marshall-Andrews declared live on TV that ‘my defeat will be one of the few things that will cheer Tony Blair up.’ But Blair’s silver lining wasn’t to be as he scraped back into the Commons with a majority of just 213.

Besides legal matters, Marshall-Andrews’ roll-call of rebellion features many of the usual suspects: ID cards, the Iraq war and 42-day detention for terror suspects have all raised the hackles of the member for Medway.

The last of those issues led him to flirt with expulsion from the Labour Party this summer when he promised to campaign for David Davis in his by-election campaign protest over the Terror Bill. He lambasted the Labour leadership, saying: ‘They can’t muzzle the whole of the party, and it seems to me foolish in the extreme in the present climate to start describing civil liberties as a stunt.’

This wasn’t the first time he had been threatened with expulsion. In November 2005 Labour backbenchers urged then Chief Whip Hilary Armstrong to withdraw the whip from Marshall-Andrews to set an example to ’serial rebels’. These whisperers were reportedly upset not only with his rebellious record, but also his penchant for hobnobbing with Tory members in the lobby.

The 'Teletubby House' in Pembrokeshire

his habit resulted in a scuffle in 2005 when Labour loyalist Jim Dowd approached him to object, and thought he heard Marshall-Andrews call him a ‘faggot’. Marshall-Andrews’ deadpan explanation on Have I Got News For You – on which he has appeared twice – was that he had in fact used the word faccio, an Italian expression for lackey, and had not questioned Dowd’s ‘impeccable heterosexual credentials’.

According to Simon Hoggart of the Guardian: ‘Bob Marshall-Andrews is probably the best orator we have in the house’. But having announced in 2005 that he will retire at the next General Election, it looks like this silver-tongued Teletubby won’t be around to foment rebellion for much longer.

A practising QC, he has led many backbench revolts over legal matters, in particular the 2003 bill restricting jury trials and the reform of legal aid.

Taxpayers in four South London boroughs will have to stump up £4m to pay for the ongoing De Menezes Inquest at the Oval, according to the Ministry of Justice.

In the middle on an inquest into the killing of an innocent man, it seems a little crass to start bickering over who is going to pay for it. But now the De Menezes family campaign has added its voice to calls for the cost to be passed on to central government.

The Oval - the only South London venue large enough to house the media

Hiring the Oval cricket ground – apparently the only South London venue large enough- has made the inquest such a costly affair. Why was so much space needed? To accommodate the media, of course, and that means the national and international media, not just the South London Press.

This media interest is, of course, entirely legitimate. The inquest raises questions about policing and counter-terrorism of national and international significance. It therefore seems absurd that the residents of Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham and Greenwich have to pay for this very necessary media presence. Central government should acknowledge the exceptional circumstances and cough up.

Umunnamania: Coming soon to South London

In the post-US election scramble to identify ‘the British Obama’, one name has come up more than most. Chuka Umunna, the prospective Labour candidate for Streatham has been compared to the Senator for Illinois ever since he won the right to contest the safe Labour seat at the next election.

Martin Bright in his New Statesman blog named Umunna among Labour’s ‘leaders-in-waiting’ and intimated that he ‘will be fast-tracked into what is still likely to be the shadow cabinet’, if he wins the seat.

The man himself played down any similiarities today in his Guardian blog, but couldn’t resist pointing out that an ‘unusual name’ shouldn’t hinder him any more than it did Obama.

As a Streatham constituent, however, I can’t resist pointing out a remarkable number of similarities between the two men.

Let’s start with the obvious: He’s young, black, ‘telegenic’, an excellent public speaker and a lawyer. His work with youth charities in Lambeth mirrors Obama’s experience as a ‘community organiser’, which Sarah Palin treated with such disdain.

Like Obama, Umunna had to overcome the establishment within his own party before earning the right to face the electorate. Where Barack overcame Hilary, Chuka mounted a grassroots campaign to defeat early favourite and Lambeth Council leader Steve Reed.

Uncanny.

Ok, so Lambeth Council may be slightly less daunting than the Clinton machine which dominated the Democratic Party for 16 years, and Umunna is set to be MP for Streatham, not the leader of the free world, but you can’t blame me for trying.

It’s official: The politics of change have arrived. No longer are there red states and blue states, just United States. Barack Obama is here to help us rise above partisanship and petty party rivalries. Unfortunately, it seems the memo never reached Westminster.

Otherwise how do we explain the behaviour of our party leaders yesterday, as they bickered and scrapped in their attempts to paint Obama red, blue, or even yellow?

Gordon Brown was first, telling the House that he was sure “Obama will be a true friend of Britain”. Maybe misread his notes, because the comment was clearly intended to remind the Opposition that Obama would be a great friend to the other GB: Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister assured us that he and his presidential buddy shared “progressive values”.

Unperturbed, David Cameron stepped up to claim his share of the reflected glory. Speaking of Obama’s “stunning victory”, he said it was a reminder that “the US is a beacon of hope, opportunity and change”. With the mention of the word “change” the Tory leader dived headfirst onto the Obama bandwagon, to cheers from the opposition benches.

How does a rightwing British politician identify himself with what looks like one of the great progressive moments in US history? Simple, “change”. Who needs progressive politics when you’ve got an abstract noun? Labour under Brown, Cameron alleged, had “killed change when you bottled that election, and you buried change when you appointed Peter Mandelson”.

Twisting the knife, he brought up Brown’s party conference jibe at the Tory leader, wondering if the Prime Minister had warned Obama that “this is no time for a novice”. Evidently this was the most predictable line of the day, as Brown bounded to the despatch box before Cameron had even finished speaking, and delivered his precooked response with a knowing smirk: “What I said was that serious times needed serious people. Once again, the right honourable Gentleman has proved that he is not serious.”

While he seeks to unite red and blue states, Obama’s views on ‘yellow states’ haven’t been well-publicised, but that didn’t stop Nick Clegg staking his own claim to a special affinity with the President-Elect. Not to be outdone, he claimed that the new US administration and the Liberal Democrats form a kind of Transatlantic Robin Hood alliance. He demanded to know why the Prime Minister would not “cut taxes for people on low and middle incomes, paid for by the very wealthy” when that had been “the central policy” of the Obama campaign.

But didn’t Cameron say “change” was Obama’s central policy? Or won’t the “seriousness” he allegedly shares with Brown define his presidency? Or perhaps – as Messrs Brown, Cameron, and Clegg might be shocked to discover – Barack Obama is not a supporter of Labour, the Conservatives, or the Liberal Democrats. All three did their best to flirt with Obama, but in the end none got to take him home because, in time-honoured parliamentary style, they were too busy tearing strips off each other.