Barbara castle, Tony Benn … Bernard Ingham wasn't press officer only for Margaret Thatcher
• With fashionable counterfactual scenarios posing the question of whether Britain could have stayed afloat without the premiership of You-Know-Who, one variation is whether Barbara Castle, Labour's most charismatic woman cabinet minister, could have become Britain's first prime minister if her luck had held. Who better to ask than ex-Guardian reporter Sir Bernard Ingham, who left Fleet Street for Whitehall and became, in quick succession, a trusted civil service press officer (never spin doctor) to Castle, Tony Benn and You-Know-Who. The cuddly curmudgeon tells the Diary that he admired Castle for her Thatcher-esque courage in trying to reform the deeply misogynistic unions in 1969, for her sheer hard work ("twice as hard as the men") and for her cleverness. Like Thatcher she talked too much, sometimes too stridently, without Thatcher's advantage of being the boss. In the end You-Know-Who was the better politician with the more tungsten-tempered will and a better head for detail, says Sir B. She could also get changed for a smart event in five minutes – "whereas it took Barbara half a day".
• When Barack Obama addressed a party fundraiser in California he called Kamala Harris, the state's top legal official, brilliant, dedicated and tough. In a rare lapse, the president playfully added: "She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country." Whoops! A Thatcher or Castle would have been delighted. But an anti-sexism furore forced right-on Obama to ring Harris and apologise for the "distraction". His Russian oppo is less constrained. When bare-breasted feminists denounced "fascist" Vladimir Putin during his visit to Hanover this week, the ex-KGB pen-pusher beamed. "I think he was really offended to hear it from a naked woman," explains one protester. The old lecher insists: "I liked it."
• With impeccable logic gambler George Soros, who thrives by betting against idiot markets, is telling the Germans to underwrite eurozone debts or recreate their own Deutschmark and suffer. Fat chance that her voters will easily let Angela Merkel abandon Berlin's current Wonga policy: extravagant payday loans to let Greeks buy BMWs, followed by a bailiff's visit when they can't pay up. Soros is also trying to persuade the European court of human rights to overturn an insider dealing conviction in France from the 1980s. It doesn't take much notice either.
• Similar theological disputes over monetary sovereignty prompted a House of Lords report (largely ignored in England) this week claiming that it would be "entirely fanciful" for an independent Scotland to keep the pound and regard the Bank of England as its lender of last resort. Asked whether such dilemmas will one day help break up the union, Edinburgh historian and sage Professor Tom Devine came up with a memorable get-out: "The future is not my period."
• Julian Assange no longer commands a media scrum. Barely a dozen reporters, two of them from RT (the Kremlin TV sock puppet that ran Assange's interview series last year), turned up for the video-linked press conference from his eyrie in Ecuador's London embassy to Washington's self-important National Press Club building. The event was the launch of the WikiLeaks Kissinger Files, US diplomatic cables (1973-76) already declassified. Lots of empty chairs and embarrassingly few questions. As Assange spoke his elusive target, Henry Kissinger (90 next month and thriving), was already busy eulogising Margaret Thatcher.
• Her pal, Ronald Reagan, had Washington's downtown airport and much else renamed after him, and Pretoria must be all but certain to become Mandela one day (just like Washington, really). So why shouldn't You-Know-Who have the capital of the Falklands renamed Port Margaret now that the Victorian three-times leader, Lord Stanley, has been dead for so long? Despite the "hate-filled rants" (copyright Daily Mail) of teenage Thatcher-haters, some Tories want her to get a column in Trafalgar Square next to Nelson's. Watch out, Waterloo station!
Twitter: @MichaelWhite
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