Diary

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/06/hugh-muir-diary-equalities-commission

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We are counting them out and counting them in, as the BBC man Brian Hanrahan said during the Falklands conflict. We are doing much the same as senior officials move the chairs around at the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. A very strange process it is too. There are interviews this week, but already we know that two commissioners, • Simon Woolley and Lady Meral Hussein-Ece, have been judged surplus to future requirements by the new commission chair, Lady O'Neill. Woolley is, at present, the only black commissioner; Hussein-Ece the only Muslim. Both were only recently told how highly regarded they were. Both were encouraged by the government to reapply. But if they are puzzled, they are not alone. For we learn of a third commissioner who won't return. Mike Smith chaired the commission's statutory disability committee, played a key role on the regulatory committee and led the highly acclaimed formal inquiry into disability-related harassment. Like Woolley and Hussein-Ece, he was the recipient of a glowing assessment and was invited to reapply. Like them, he wasn't accorded the benefit of an interview. Like them he learned his fate from a head hunter's automated email. "I naturally am disappointed at not being reappointed for a further term," he said. The way this is being handled must disappoint everybody. Straight out of the human resources handbook, 1986.

• Big love in south London meanwhile between George Galloway and Lee Jasper, the controversial former race and policing adviser to Ken Livingstone. Jasper is running in the Croydon byelection under Galloway's Respect banner. And it just shows how time can heal. Or how agendas can coincide. For back in 2004, they were hardly comrades. Jasper ran Livingstone's anti-racism festival, called Respect. Galloway pitched up with his new party, decided the name Respect was rather nifty and ran off with it. Your thing is a "mere pop concert", he told an aggrieved Livingstone. There were threats of legal action, but nothing came of it. Galloway registered his party and Jasper's Respect festival was renamed Rise. Galloway was triumphant. "We get to play Aretha Franklin all day long," he said.

• Since the fall of Gaddafi, Britain has tried to assist Libya's return to democratic government. Thus relations between its nascent political class and our own are cordial. But for how long? For the government of Libya has a relatively new recruit, Sami al-Saadi. He's the minister for martyrs, responsible for the welfare of dependents of people who died during the revolution. And when he's not busy being minister for martyrs, al-Saadi has more personal things to do. As one of the Libyan dissidents rendered to Tripoli by MI6 and Gaddafi's henchmen, he's suing the former home secretary Jack Straw, as well as MI6 and the foreign office. Advice to Straw and Q and any of the other shadowy types that may be in his sights: steer clear of Libyan airspace.

• Though investigations and departures go on at News International, just occasionally someone achieves the distinction of departing unaccompanied by police or lawyers, untroubled by suspicion or rancour. This week hacks in the north gathered to applaud reporter Alastair Taylor. Taylor clocked up 33 years, covering the biggest stories, but for all his experience he still fell into the trap of seeking to assess his success via Google. "I looked to see what stories I did over the decades which had got the most hits," he said. "Was it the Ripper, the Shannon Matthews case or another high-profile crime story? No, it was about a Hull man having sex with a goat as passing train passengers looked on horrified." The sublime, the ridiculous. All in a day's work.

• Finally, many a reader gets in touch to ask: is it true, as you asserted yesterday, that Denis MacShane was sacked from the BBC in the 70s for calling Reginald Maudling a cook? The answer is no. The now disgraced MP lost his job after implying that the former Tory chancellor was a crook. There is a difference. It isn't yet defamatory to compare an honourable member with the likes of Gordon Ramsay. But case law is developing all the time.