Enver Hodge - "The Truth will set you Free" - A Damascene revelation

Eric Gorden, genial, bearded and bespectacled , 40 years a hack and now Editor of the Islington Tribune was present with his shorthand notebook and pencil at a meeting last Friday at the London Resource Centre in Holloway Road. He was the invited guest of his friend Labour Party member Chris Roche who introduced him to many of those present .



Ex near neighbour and (and probably ex )friend of the Blairs, Margaret "Enver" Hodge, now a Minister at the Department of Trade & Industry (her 4th Ministerial post) , in a Q & A session after a prepared speech , and a generous spread of nut cutlets and organic yoghurt, told the assembled Fabianistas that the Iraq war had been the Prime Minister's "big mistake in foreign affairs".

She accepted the Prime Minister's arguments about the dangers posed by Iraq in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion because she said in answer to a question - "he was our leader and I trusted him".

Shed of the scales that occluded her vision she singled out Mr Blair's "moral imperialism" - importing British attitudes and ideas to other countries - for particular criticism.

In another fit of truthfulness the Member for one step beyond Dagenham - Barking , whom fans of the blonde bimbo will remember her recruiting cry for the BNP in April before the Local Elections this year.

The Torygraph were deliriously happy to report her claim on April 11th (curiously the 21st Anniversary of the death of her eponymous hero Enver Hoxha) hero that eight out of 10 white people in her east London constituency of Barking were threatening to vote for the far-Right BNP in the local elections.

"They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry,"

Said Mrs Hodge, (then) the employment minister.

"When I knock on doors I say to people, 'are you tempted to vote BNP?' and many, many, many - eight out of 10 of the white families - say 'yes'. That's something we have never seen before, in all my years. Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not."

Mrs Hodge said the pace of ethnic change in her area had frightened people.

"What has happened in Barking and Dagenham is the most rapid transformation of a community we have ever witnessed."

Should the Prime Minister haul her over the coals for her irreverence she might well recall what her guiding light Enver Hoxha told Stalin on his first meeting with Stalin in July 1947 (the year of her birth incidentally) in explaining his problems with internal dissent ..

" .... we still cannot say that internal reaction is no longer active. It is not capable of organizing any really dangerous attack upon us, but still it is making propaganda and mischief against us"

He was also keen to explain to Stalin how British perfidy was even then causing international strife ...

"The Corfu Channel incident," I told Comrade Stalin, "is a concoction of the British from start to finish in order to provoke our country and to find a pretext for military intervention"

Plus ca change ....