By Peter McKay
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Are politicians becoming too thin-skinned? Labour's Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham threatens to sue for libel the Tory Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, over a tweet.
Extraordinarily, the threatened litigation is over Hunt suggesting Burnham sought to cover up NHS failings at Basildon and Thurrock hospitals in 2010. In other words, a political row.
Lawyer Gerald Shamash, who acts for Labour, writes to Hunt asking for evidence that Burnham was involved in a cover-up, or that he retracts the tweet and apologises. Otherwise, Burnham will 'consider his remedies'.
Labour's Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has threatened to sue Jeremy Hunt for libel, over a tweet
Politicians habitually accuse each other of lying, deceit, hypocrisy and covering up scandals. Usually they resort to legal action only when accused of these failings in their private lives.
Why might Burnham be an exception? He has been considered a Labour high-flier, a potential party leader. Recently, his star has been on the wane. Colleagues have told newspapers he might be dropped from the Shadow Cabinet in a re-shuffle.
So maybe there's an urgent need for Burnham, 43, to rebut a story which casts doubt on his previous performance in office.
But by legal action? Our courts won't be able to cope if politicians begin suing each other over alleged lies and cover-ups. I can't think of a case involving a secretary of state and his Opposition shadow doing so.
Hunt says he won't back down. The normal procedure would be for Burnham to deny what Hunt says, lay out his own account of the NHS failings involved, and say what he did in response.
Doing this would be good enough for voters who are not attracted to the Conservatives and their Health Secretary. Others are not going to believe Burnham even if he won a libel case against Hunt.
So why up the ante in this way? Burnham's career hopes might be an issue.
It's said he has been offered a job swap with Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, but is resisting the move. Switching him in the middle of a highly-publicised row with Jeremy Hunt - over the NHS, a sacred cow dear to Labour - might suggest he'd lost the argument.
Hunt says he won't back down. The normal procedure would be for Burnham to deny what Hunt says, lay out his own account of the NHS failings involved, and say what he did in response
How should politicians behave in the heat of rhetorical battle? When President Abraham Lincoln was accused, in a thundering public statement, of lacking direction and resolve in making war on slavery, by influential New York editor Horace Greeley, he began his reasoned reply:
'Dear Sir, I have just read yours of the 19th, addressed to me through the New York Tribune. If there be any statements, or assumptions of fact which I know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them.
'If there be any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.'
Complaints and too-strenuous denials can rebound. During the 1972 presidential election, Democratic candidate Edmund Muskie's wife Jane was accused by the Manchester Union-Leader newspaper, in New Hampshire, of drinking alcohol and using coarse language.
Muskie scheduled a speech outside the paper's offices in which he was reported to have wept while emotionally defending his wife - which ended his campaign for the presidential nomination.
Former Tory premier Harold Macmillan, discussing the affair with a colleague, said Muskie's response was wrong. The colleague asked what Macmillan would have done if his wife - duke's daughter Lady Dorothy Cavendish - had been so accused.
His reply is supposed to have been: 'I would have said, "You should have met her mother!"?'
Bard to the rescue for the Beeb
Jeremy Paxman says he 'seriously considered' giving up Newsnight during the Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine scandals, which cost the BBC more than 5?million to investigate. However, he told the BBC's Radio 5 Live: 'Loyalty commanded that I stayed.'
Walking out might have been a less attractive option financially for freelance Paxman, 63, than for BBC management types, some of whom were given huge payoffs prior to moving to new jobs.
Director-general Tony Hall will give a speech tomorrow about his plans for a new, cheaper management structure.
What about answering the Jimmy Savile who-knew-what–and-why-didn't-they-act-on-it questions?
They've been kicked into the long grass. Avoiding such squalid matters, Hall will announce that every surviving Shakespeare play and sonnet recorded by the BBC since its foundation, in 1922, will be released.
Funding for arts programmes will be increased by 20 per cent.
For all I know, Huw Edwards will henceforth read the ten o'clock news in a dinner jacket.
Sinead O'Connor had advised Miley Cyrus (pictured) that if she wasn't careful, music industry types would 'pimp' her sexuality and 'monetise' her consequent 'prostitution'
Aren't these exciting times for lawyers? Irish pop singer Sinead O'Connor, 46, is threatening to sue 20-year-old American artiste Miley Cyrus, whose 'twerking', bottom-rotating, sex-simulating dance moves on TV recently caused public disquiet.
Ms O'Connor, 'in the spirit of motherliness and with love', advised naughty Ms Cyrus that if she wasn't careful music industry types would 'pimp' her sexuality and 'monetise' her consequent 'prostitution'. Ungraciously Ms Cyrus, pictured, responded by tweeting an old snap of Sinead tearing up a photo of the Pope and likening the Irish warbler to actress Amanda Bynes, who has endured mental problems.
Sinead told Miley: 'If you cannot apologise I will have no choice but to bring legal proceedings against you since it is extremely hard to be given work when people think one is suffering from mental illness.'
I hope twerking Ms Cyrus finds it in herself to reply appropriately.
The death at 102 of North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, who defeated the armies of France and America, is marked by a generous, full-page obituary in the Guardian which says: 'A horrendous loss of life marked all Giap's victories, but he was coldly unapologetic, saying the number of dead was small compared with the number who died of natural causes.'
Leftists are always able to be 'coldly unapologetic' about the 50?million killed by Stalin in Russia and the 40?million murdered by Mao in China, saving their indignation for bloody conflicts which do not advance their cause.
The paradise on Earth we helped bring about by removing Gaddafi from Libya is now host to desperate Africans and Syrians who seek a new life in Europe in general, and the UK in particular.
After paying people-smugglers, they have a 1,000-mile journey through bandit-infested country to get to Libya's coast, after which many men are enslaved and women forced to become prostitutes.
But some 400 lucky souls were able to buy passages on a boat, and thought they'd reached the promised land last week. They sighted the I tal ian isle of ? Lampedusa and burned T-shirts in celebration. This started a fire which sank the vessel, taking more than 350 lives. Our benign nation will always attract poor, downtrodden people from Africa and Asia, as well as astute types from eastern Europe attracted by our relatively generous welfare system. What's needed, surely, is some new, progressive brand of colonialism in which we could be rewarded for helping clapped-out nations raise their game to the point that their poor didn't have to risk their lives finding somewhere new.
A sting in the tale
Forget global warming and concentrate on jellyfish. They're taking over our oceans, says marine scientist Lisa-ann Gershwin, who asks: 'If I offered evidence that jellyfish are displacing penguins in Antarctica — not someday, but now, today — what would you think?
'If I suggested jellyfish could crash the world's fisheries, outcompete the tuna and swordfish, and starve the whales to extinction, would you believe me?'
You will if you read any more from her book, On Jellyfish Blooms And The Future of the Ocean.
I dived into the sea in Corsica earlier this year to find myself swimming among what seemed to be millions of them. Luckily, I got out without being stung.
They were small, harmless-looking creatures but some can weigh almost half a ton. The box jellyfish has a head a foot across and 550ft of tentacles carrying poison which can — and has — killed humans in minutes.
What can we do? Stop eating anchovies for a start. They compete for food with jellyfish. Overfishing them led to our present plight.
Mia Farrow was asked 'point blank' by Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth if the father of her 25-year-old son, Ronan Farrow, was Frank Sinatra. 'Possibly,' she told Ms Orth, who doesn't elaborate.
How could it be? In 1966, Mia lost her virginity to Sinatra and married him. She was 21 and he 50. They divorced in 1968.
Ronan was born 21 years later when she was with Woody Allen. Mia explains that she and Sinatra 'never really split up'. She says that when she felt threatened by Allen — after accusing him of molesting her seven-year-old daughter, Dylan — certain friends of Ol' Blue Eyes in New York offered her protection.
The case against Allen was later dropped. He enraged Mia further in 1997 by marrying her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.
Ronan certainly bears a resemblance to Sinatra. But he's like his mother, too. He's friendly with members of Sinatra's surviving family. So a DNA test would be easy to arrange.
Mia is suspected by some of making up the story to spite Allen. We'll never know without a DNA test. Until then — and maybe for ever — Ronan Farrow will be known as Ronan Possibly Sinatra Farrow.
Sickoftwits, Canterbury, United Kingdom, 3 hours ago
Most people would probably agree with your comments about the people leaving Africa, via Libya, to settle in Europe including UK and about E. European migrants. It is the obvious solution and long term would be less expensive financially than supporting immigrants, plus in UK, avoiding more infrastructure pressure due to overcrowding these islands. The problem is almost all the countries the Africans are leaving are either run by corrupt regimes or fighting or starting civil wars. This means the funds that could help to create a lifestyle to enable people to enjoy living in their birthplace never get where they are needed. Until aid is strictly controlled by the donor country as a condition, this will never change and millions more will continue to head north.