Just as Charles Kennedy had started to rebuild his political career, apparently his erstwhile friends (“senior party insiders”) have briefed Greg Hurst a reporter from The Times, who has written a book about him.  Not only does the book helpfully flesh out those damaging rumours that leaked and led to Mr Kennedy’s resignation, young Turks such as Heather Teather[1], Edward Davey[2] and Norman Lamb[3] who had been tipped as future leaders and high flyers of the Party, are stitched up to look like Brutus and the Gang.  Implausibly, Sir Menzies Campbell is cleared of any complicity in Charles Kennedy's political assassination.

The Sunday Times reports today that,

“A string of senior Liberal Democrats have provided material for the book, which is expected to reveal embarrassing details of Kennedy’s long battle with alcoholism...”

Well, I suppose that whilst you are ensuring that Charlie Boy’s comeback stalls, you might as well stymie some of your future leadership-challenge opponents as well. This is not going to be taken well by those who are “done down”.  In a parliamentary party as small as that of the Liberal Democrats, by a process of elimination it will not be difficult to deduce the members of the cabal who have been plotting since before the fall of Charles Kennedy. When Sir Menzies is unceremoniously ditched as party leader in a year or two’s time, the next Liberal Democrat leadership contest is not going to be a teddy bears’ picnic.

Twenty years ago, Mr Ray Honeyford now 72, played the part of the little boy who pointed out that the Emperor was not wearing any clothes.  For his trouble, he was "retired" from his position as the headmaster of Drummond Middle School in Bradford. He was vilified by politically correct "race experts", sent death threats, and condemned as a racist. He was never allowed to teach again.  Mr Honeyford's crime was that he suggested that children of immigrants should be integrated into British Society.  He had challenged the accepted orthodoxy of the Left and had to punished, severely.

Times change, of course. Now the chickens have come home to roost and multiculturism has been exposed as being the dangerous, socially divisive mumbo-jumbo that many of us suspected but were too timid to say publicly.   Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary has now publicly questioned the multiculturalist orthodoxies. Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, had already challenged whether the nostrums of multiculturalism had done more harm than good.  Just as there was not a single Nazi to be found  in Germany after 9th May 1945, soon no one will admit to ever having been a multiculturalist.
 
Mr Honeyford is not triumphant however. Asked whether he was impressed by Miss Kelly's recent speech, he said that,

"[Ruth Kelly] was only a politician, a bird of passage, minister of education one day and minister of communities the next, and like all politicians liable to say whatever was fashionable or useful to her career at the moment. "

Ouch! That was on par with Sir Robin Day's "mere, transient politician" jibe  addressed to (then just plain) John Nott, the UK Secretary of State for Defence during the Falklands War in 1982.

Rod Liddle delivers his denunciation of the multiculturalists with all the delicacy of a punch in the teeth, but given the manner in which the multiculturalists conducted their campaign against perceived opponents during the course of the past thirty years, this is nothing less than they deserve.

See the detailed article of Karyn Miller, Melissa Kite, James Orr, Nina Goswami and Roya Nikkhah in the The Sunday Telegraph.