Exercising his extraordinary powers of judgement and heading the queue to defend Peter Hain, blatantly caught with his pants down and money sticking out his hole, is none other than Wansdyke’s Labour MP Dan Norris,
Norris was parliamentary private secretary to the orange-faced foghorn during the period of his lavishly funded deputy leadership bid and he assures us that Hain, “has not done anything illegal and if it was a crime to report things late, beyond deadlines, then millions of taxpayers every year would probably be in trouble too.”
Thankfully it’s not up to dumpkopf Norris to decide, so it remains to be seen whether Hain has done anything illegal. Although receiving private donations from multi-millionaire South African diamond dealers through a “think tank” – The Progressive Policies Forum (PPF) – that employs no staff and has not published any work since its inception in December 2006 is to, say the least, an unusual approach to administrating party political donations that doesn’t seem, on the surface, to have any obvious parallel with putting your tax return in late.
This is an extremely casual thing for Dan Norris to say, especially since the amounts of money involved are very large. Not the sort of thing you could or should be forgetful about unless you and your supporting organisation are particularly incompetent. In any case the whole situation does absolutely nothing to build the already tattered ‘Labour’ reputation of Peter Hain!!