editorial comment schadenfraude yet again.....maybe he should receive an ABSO too....

No one could say David Blunkett has ever been shy of publicity - neither this week, nor at any time since he was a student with his mind on a career in politics.

Last week's Queen's Speech was in a large measure David Blunkett's speech, with the British Home Secretary's proposals for combating drug abuse, alcoholism, terrorism, organised crime and other forms of criminal or antisocial behaviour making up its central theme.

No fewer than 10 bills unveiled in the speech - nearly one-third of the total - were Blunkett's babies, and he was everywhere, vigorously taking on paternal responsibility for them.

Yet all week there has been a curious disjuncture between the things David Blunkett has been discussing in public and what members of the public are talking about among themselves.

His now-ended relationship with Kimberly Quinn, a married woman better known as Kimberly Fortier, publisher of the Spectator magazine, and the dispute about who fathered her two children is, in the popular view, another tale of a politician who tells people how they should behave while misbehaving himself.

This is, after all, the man who is cracking down on all manner of undesirable behaviour, from serious crime to petty nuisance. He is preparing legislation to stop the young from taking drugs, to crack down on people who make a nuisance of themselves when they are drunk, and to curb the excesses of animal rights activists. He is the only Cabinet minister who, in the past, opposed lowering the age of consent for gay sex.

His long-standing reputation for conservatism - almost prudishness - in views on sex goes back to his first television appearance, during the "Swinging Sixties", when the BBC received an irate letter from a 20-year-old Sheffield student about naked bodies shown on prime-time television. It was only after they had invited him down to London to take part in a televised debate with Mary Whitehouse and David Dimbleby that they discovered he was blind. He had been watching television with his mother.

More recently he argued that "Governments cannot and should not be held directly responsible for personal and family relationships ... Too many people feel that it is always the responsibility of the state to pick up the pieces when things go wrong".

The same conservatism was visible even in the 1980s, when in other respects he was identified with the radical left of the Labour Party. But then he had a vastly different background from the middle-class ex-students who dominated the left.

As well as being born blind, he was brought up as the only child of elderly parents, and went through a period of extreme financial hardship when he was 12 years old, and his father, Arthur Blunkett, was killed in a horrible industrial accident, attributable to the carelessness of a fellow employee at the East Midlands Gas Board. The gas board refused to compensate the family on the grounds the dead man was past retirement age, meaning that his widow had no claim for lost earnings.

One of the Home Office Bills unveiled in last week's speech, which Blunkett has defended against opposition from other Cabinet ministers, would create a new offence of corporate manslaughter.

He has insisted that it should apply to public bodies, as well as private companies, a view not popular with parts of the civil service.

The poverty that he and his mother endured, when they were still grieving, is a source of Blunkett's social conservatism. His view is that spoilt middle-class radicals are guilty of "sentimentalising" poverty.

David Blunkett was married in 1970, the same year as his political career began, but the marriage was heading for the rocks by the mid-1980s, and ended in formal separation when he became an MP, in 1987, and divorce three years later. He tried, nonetheless, to continue to be a father to three boys.

The view that Blunkett is a hypocrite and marriage breaker who deserves exposure is not shared by his peer group in Westminster. Perhaps the loudest silence has been from the Conservative front bench, from which Boris Johnson was abruptly sacked only a fortnight ago, after revelations about his private life. Even so, Blunkett must know that the affair puts a cap on his political ambitions. Three years ago, there was serious talk of him as a potential prime minister.

Now, as a political realist, he must know the public would not accept a prime minister whose personal life is as unsettled as his appears to be.


- INDEPENDENT

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