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David Laws was targeted by ‘disgruntled LibDem leakers’ a senior House of Commons source alleged last night. Further research carried out by The Slog this morning supports the allegation’s veracity. It also suggests that James Lundie was as much a target as David Laws – and the motivation of one of the story’s authors – the Telegraph’s Robert Winnett – was equally political….despite him holding entirely different views to his source.
Our informant – who is close to these events – asserted that there was “a sort of disconnected rainbow of Coalition enemies” working overtime to destabilise the new Government. This is hardly news (Alastair Campbell does little else at the moment) but what is beginning to emerge is that for some diehards, the Laws/Lundie story has been something of a billiards cannon.
The key thing to establish would be not just who might benefit from a Laws absence in Government – that’s a long list – but more, who would know that Laws and Lundie were an item….or indeed that David Laws was gay – a secret he kept tight from all but an inner circle for many years.
James Lundie is not just a PR man – he works for lobbyists Edelman UK. And he isn’t just any old lobbyist, he is a highly active pro-Coalition LibDem…..from long before Laws’ appointment to the Treasury. He is seen by some on the LibDem left as being too much in favour of ‘new’ political alignments. Last week he penned this blog extract on the Edelman site (my italics):
“The Liberal Democrats genuinely want this coalition to work, both because it allows them to introduce policies in which they believe but also because it shows the British people that co-operative politics can not only be made to work, but actually to flourish….’
Two weeks ago, Kennedy wrote in The Observer:
‘I feel it is worth recalling that great statesman who split the political family and ended up as a Liberal Unionist. Several decades later and a similar trick was to lead to the emergence of the National Liberals and their subsequent assimilation within the Conservative fold…’
Another is Paddy Ashdown, whose comment on events (caught on the hop for once) after the LabLib talks broke down and the ToryDem talks steamed ahead was that this was “a rather unexpected moment”.
As The Slog revealed at the time, many senior LibDems had mentally ‘scripted’ a post-Election hung result. They saw the ‘principled Tories-first’ speech by Nick Clegg as a feint: the act of going through the motions prior to an inevitable breakdown in the talks. But they hugely underestimated the personable negotiation skills of William Hague and Oliver Letwin. Now they find themselves isolated because of a plan that went badly wrong.
The clue as to who would have been in the best position to know about Laws’ sexuality, however, comes via the Lundie connection. For as a professional and LibDem activist, he had two direct clents as a press sceretary between 2006 and 2009: Charles Kennedy and Paddy Ashdown. In two such close working relationships, it is near inconceivable that Lundie’s sexuality and/or partnership with David Laws would not have been known.
A last word from The Slog’s mole:
“You’re very warm. Of course, they wouldn’t pull the trigger. But they must’ve sanctioned it”.
The Slog 