Diary

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/08/hugh-muir-diary-aidan-burley

Version 0 of 1.

• So there goes Nadine Dorries, pictured sunning herself in Australia ahead of Sunday's debut on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. And simultaneously confounding the smart money that her colleague Aidan Burley would be the first self-harming Tory MP to self-destruct. He seemed to have it in the bag: attending Nazi-themed stag parties and calling the Olympic opening "leftie multicultural crap" on Twitter. Nobody wanted to admit to being poor Aidan's pal – Big Dave called him "idiotic". But his seat is vulnerable and the Tories look certain to lose Corby, so Aidan's getting a bit of help. He recently recorded a £10k donation to his constituency party from JCB, the digger firm run by Tory donor Sir Anthony Bamford. Burley may be an idiot but he's useful.

• "How's that hopey, changey thing workin' out for ya," Sarah Palin once asked of Barack Obama. He gave the answer this week. She's down, Romney is disconsolate. As for Melanie Phillips, she's plain vanilla furious. "Four years ago, America put into the White House a sulky narcissist with an unbroken history of involvement in thuggish, corrupt, far-left, black power, Jew-bashing, west-hating politics," blogs Mel. And now they have gone and done it again. "The Islamic enemies of civilisation stand poised … with the re-election of Obama, America now threatens to lead the west into a terrifying darkness". And the horses and cows, they're shacking up, taking over. Mayday, mayday. Nurse! Nurse!

• A measure of head-scratching in Whitehall over the changing of the guard at the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Three lauded, long-serving commissioners sacked by an automated headhunters email. How could that happen, goes the cry. Well, one must look away from the commission itself, for the decisions are being made at a higher level. Look instead to the Government Equalities Office and the director general there, Jonathan Rees. He and the new chair, Baroness O'Neill, are among a small group pulling the strings. Rees is himself heading out of the Equalities Office door, and the department is itself being painfully scaled down by cost-cutting ministers, so there will be precious little sympathy for the commission staff who will lose their jobs or the humiliated commissioners fired by email. Sad to see it happening, but the abused so often go on to abuse.

• What will the future be like at the EHRC? We know that O'Neill's body will be smaller. It seeks leaders with different skills – experience of business and audit. And in keeping with the government's view that the human rights fuss should be kept to a minimum, one suspects there will be less troublesome intervention on behalf of victims of discrimination. O'Neill doesn't seem one for making a fuss about these things. Blaming is, she said in a 2005 lecture, The Dark Side of Human Rights, "a readily available and cheap pleasure – even for complainants whose case is not upheld. Those who cast blame can appropriate, enjoy and prolong their role and status as victims, can enjoy indignation and a feeling of superiority, even if they cannot quite identify or demonstrate the failings of others. If it proves impossible to identify a blameworthy culprit, they can at least blame the system." One feels she'll have no truck with that sort of thing.

• We catch up with James Athill, the Tory candidate for police commissioner in Norfolk, and talk to the former military man and defence attache about his other life – undeclared on campaign literature – as UK point man for a CSOK, a Czech chamber of commerce. Questions have been raised. Are you working for the Czechs, he was asked on BBC Radio Norfolk yesterday. Yes and no, he tells us. It's a straightforward commercial opportunity. Nothing to interest John le Carré. And anyway, 10 months in, it hasn't made him a shilling. That commissioner job must look better by the day.

• Finally, to Amazon, where there are still Denis MacShane mugs on sale. Just £8.99, but there'll be a rush, for obvious reasons. And Christmas is coming. Hurry, hurry.

<em>Twitter: </em><em>@hugh_muir</em>