The life and times of Michael Cocks #4

Former Bristol South MP Michael Cocks, even in the twilight of his long parliamentary career, still manages a small walk-on part in high Tory journalist Peter Oborne’s surprisingly impressive attack on contemporary parliamentary politics, The Triumph of the Political Class.

The – now – enobled ‘old Labour’ Lord Cocks of Hartcliffe makes his brief – and entirely characteristic appearance – in 2000 when New Labour were going all out to nobble the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Elizabeth Filkin, who was just a little too keen on doing her job properly.

Having already conducted thorough and effective investigations on our behalf in to Keith Vaz and his financial relations with the notorious Hinduja brothers; in to Gordon Brown’s wealthy benefactor, the Paymaster General Geoffery Robinson and in to John Reid‘s unusual employment practices with regards to his son, Filkin’s looming investigation in to Tony Blair’s New Labour pin-up boy, Peter Mandelson and his bizarre home loan arrangements was considered a step too far for the government.

Initially – we’re told by Oborne – Mandelson himself attempted to prevent Filkin’s investigation by using his “charm”. When this inevitably failed, we then learn that Mandelson tried bullying tactics and dark threats to Filkin regarding his friends in the press. This in itself tells you an awful lot about the endemic private schoolboy culture of New Labour. Can you imagine a soppy little prick like Peter Mandelson bullying anyone in a genuine party of the working classes? He’d wouldn’t last five minutes before he was taken outside and given a well-deserved kicking.

However, whatever his tactics, Mandelson dismally failed to stop Filkin in her tracks as he had planned. So a number of particularly loyal and ambitious backbench Labour MPs were tasked with dealing with Filkin by briefing some of the more soft-headed and impressionable members of the parliamentary press lobby that Filkin was ‘a mad alcoholic’ among other things. Still Filkin bravely refused to budge.

What was to be done? It was time for New Labour – in a last desperate roll of the dice – to wheel out their parliamentary big guns. A call went up to the Lords for old school Labour Party enforcer Michael Cocks – described, not entirely inaccurately, by Oborne as “a Labour fixer who had been a notoriously thuggish chief whip in the dying days of the Jim Callaghan government” – to have a word with Filkin.

Alas. It’s not clear whether Cocks’ persuasive skills were on the wane or whether Filkin was exceptionally brave and focussed on her public service remit, but remarkably Filkin still refused to back down and her Mandelson investigation went ahead.

Filkin even managed to hang on to her post for a further two years – in the face of an extremely personal and brutal mauling in the press inspired by government sources – before eventually being forced out when her contract was not renewed in 2002.

While this will not probably go down as Cocks’s finest moment, at least he had what it takes to make it into a book about contemporary power politics. Unlike the current Bristol South MP, Dawn Primarolo. Despite being constantly touted as a member of Gordon Brown’s ‘inner circle’ and allegedly a leading New Labour light, Oborne makes no mention of Dawn at all. But then why would he bother with someone who’s little more than a glorified admin assistant for Gordon and his charmed circle of elite Oxbridge boys?

COMING SOON: Is Oborne a class struggle anarchist in disguise?