Corrupt or incompetent?

Tessa Jowell used to be our MP, when we lived in Peckham. Now we have Kate Hoey who fights for the right to take booze into the cricket (it's the most I have ever been tempted to vote Labour), who's much better.

Jowell was - and presumably still is - a shambolic incompetent who should never be allowed near policy and certainly not any financial decision. Today, her ex-husband, now officially a crook, was sentenced to four and half years in prison. Good.

Jowell's defense was always that she didn't really know about any of this income and how it worked. Given that the sums in question were $600,000 you would expect her to have paid some attention, not just sign whatever was put in front of her. Of couse, terrifyingly, it is entirely possible that she didn't know or, more likely, understand: no mystery why the Olympics budget has overrun. She did write to us once to argue that Labour had slashed inflation, when anyone who was alive knows this was a Major, Clarke and Eddie George success. And George got into serious trouble for it. She is clearly a financial illiterate (Note a more literate Gordon supporting Eddie George's position).

As a defence, the 'I am useless' justification is a poor one in politics, though they doesn't appear to have stopped Gordon (best parodied here) trying the same trick when he claimed that he had known there was a looming debt bubble so, er, ran up loads of debt and didn't change regulation. With Gordon, you know it was incomeptence. With Jowell, it could be either, but I'm betting on incompetence again. It's never a bad bet with this lot.