More Lib Dem panto-sanctimony exposed

John McTernan is in fine furious form, roused by Nick Clegg’s “smug, self-satisfied, self-justificatory, deluded” speech to a not-quite-full conference hall.

Best of all was – at last – that he vigorously rebutted the panto-sanctimony of the Liberal Democrats on “child detention”, by rewriting a paragraph of Clegg’s speech thus:

After the May elections, Alex Cole-Hamilton, one of our defeated candidates in Edinburgh said that ‘if losing was part payment for claiming to end child detention and then privately realising that no immigration system can work if there isn’t an effective returns policy, which in the end means deporting families and if they don’t actually want to go, as so many have shown, then in the end we will have to put then in a secure place until they can go on a plane, but at least we won’t call it detention’. Well, as he said: ‘I accept it, with all my heart.’

That really should be the end of that sob story.

Photograph: Reuters

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• http://twitter.com/raymondonia ray turner

  You cant fool all of the people all of the time

• TarquinBroxted

  Aw hell John, let’s not mention ZaNuLabour and internment without trial, putting 2 million innocent suckers, oops, citizens on a database judged illegal under ECHR laws and the extrajudicial murder of de Menezes.

• Guest

  Unlike John Rentoul, John McTernan has never deigned to respond to a comment on his Telegraph blog. But whatever one thinks of him, he certainly cannot be accused of writing from other than first-hand experience of the smug, self-justificatory and deluded.

  Mr McTernan was political adviser to Tony Blair, the straight kinda guy who embarked on the course of events that would lead to the unnecessary deaths of over one hundred thousand Iraqi citizens, at a conservative estimate, and still thinks he did the right thing. The straight kinda guy who tickled the tummy of the Mad Dog of Tripoli whose regime was responsible for the death of Yvonne Fletcher, supplied Semtex to terrorists on both sides of the Ulster divide, possibly used in over 150 bombings of British citizens, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. The straight kinda guy whose government may have thrown the Mad Dog juicy Libyan dissidents to play with, but if so it is news to him.

  No, fair do’s, Mr McTernan writes with authority on the vain, self-satisfied and downright dishonest.

• TarquinBroxted

  Ray, Rentoul only replies to his coterie, “Blairsupporter”, John Justice (an Indy staffer sent in as 7th Cavalry) and plod. 

• http://twitter.com/LeClosdesGuyons Le Clos des Guyons

  A somewhat biased viewpoint I would suggest!!!

  Littered with assumptions and blind acceptance of disputed figures and the viewpoints of blinkered anti-Blairites.  And may I also remind you that it was not just Blair who tried to get Gaddafi onside and to persuade him to give up terrorist support and weapons programs.  Amonst other things there were also invitations from the UN and the friendship of our only living saint, Nelson Madela. In Mandela’s own words Ghaddafi was, “The brother Leader”, whom he invited on an official tour of South Africa.  Let’s see you attack him in the same appalling manner. John Rentaul’s blog was absolutely nothing to do with Tony Blair anyway. – Totally obsessive!!

• Guest

  It is the end of the Peerage party.

• Guest

  RentHole says it all!

• gls123

  You can’t spell sanctimony!

• ZacMurdoch

  Clegg is certainly a master of sanctimony, hypocrisy and demotic ‘down with the kids’ trashing of everything Labour.  Fortunately, no one out here in the real world takes him seriously.

• http://twitter.com/JohnRentoul John Rentoul

  True. Thanks.