One of Britain’s top government ministers, under fire over allegations he fast-tracked a visa for his former lover’s nanny, may have made a fatal mistake — breaking into song.
Home Secretary David Blunkett resigned Wednesday, but he still faces an inquiry into whether he helped to obtain a UK residence visa for the nanny of his ex-lover Kimberly Quinn.
Blunkett, who reached the top of the political tree despite his blindness, may have dropped a clanger by serenading a pre-Christmas party this week.
Onlookers were stunned as Blunkett burst into a rendition of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ “Pick Yourself Up.”
The Mirror newspaper said Blunkett chirped, in a voice described as more Louis Armstrong than an angel, “I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again.”
Members of his party, already nervous at the stream of negative headlines Blunkett has garnered, were aghast.
“There is obviously general concern. I don’t want to comment specifically on this song,” Bob Marshall-Andrews, a senior figure in Blair’s Labour party, said before Blunkett resigned. “But ultimately, if he is not up to his job then he has to go.”
A peculiarly British curse
Abroad, the curse does not hold so firm.
Billionaire Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was once a cruise-ship singer, Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi crooned an Elvis hit with actor Tom Cruise and Bill Clinton made a media virtue of his elementary skills on the saxophone.
But in Britain, a song can be the last straw, maybe because reticent English are embarrassed to see their elected representatives in such unfamiliar territory.
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont famously admitted to singing in the bath after the British currency bombed out of Europe’s exchange rate mechanism on his watch and declared “Je Ne Regrette Rien.” He was sacked a while later.
Peter Brooke did not last long as Northern Ireland Secretary after singing “My Darling Clementine” on a television chat show shortly after an IRA bomb killed seven workers in 1992.
Conservative John Redwood will forever be haunted by footage of him nervously mouthing words to a Welsh anthem, which he clearly did not know, while in charge of the principality.
That was his last job in government.
And British political pundits will never forget Peter Lilley who, as deputy leader of the Conservatives, refashioned “Land of Hope and Glory” at the party’s 1998 conference in an attempt to lampoon Blair’s claims to trendiness.
To the horror of watching advisers, he sang in a thin voice:
“Land of chattering classes,
“No more pageantry,
“Darlings, raise your glasses,
“To brave modernity.”
Readers can be spared the rest.
Lilley has since been tangled up in the political undergrowth.
A pithy phrase is better
Far better, when in trouble, to reach for a pithy phrase.
Margaret Thatcher stiffened followers’ resolve by declaring: “The lady’s not for turning,” and led on for many more years.
Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson pulled off a similar trick to defuse talk he may be toppled by plotters. “I know what’s going on. I’m going on,” he told his party conference.