back to article Blunkett gets another job

David Blunkett, the ex-Home Secretary, is to front a TV show called Banged Up With Blunkett. Sadly it seems the title is slightly misleading - Blunkett will not be sent to prison but will oversee a Big Brother type show where off-the-rails teenagers are scared back onto the straight and narrow by Blunkett and some ex-cons. …

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  1. bobbles31
    Coat

    You know I suspected this all along

    "He works for Entrust, which may bid for the national ID card project so long championed by Blunkett."

    Every decision he made as Home Secretary should be reconsidered with this in mind and where necessary turned over.

    Way to go Blunkett, its nice to know that you sold 60 million up shit creek so that you could get a nice job.

    Mines the one with "Bitter and twisted" written on the back.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    'with' or 'by'?

    'Banged up with Blunkett' - a series in which liberals are incarcerated with New Labour's own mad, bad and dangerous to know bearded demagogue would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment in any book. Grown men have been known to beg to go to Guantanamo Bay rather than share the Today programme with our big-budget Mullah Omar.

    Meanwhile, that positively engorged bonkbuster 'Banged up by Blunkett' a the racy story of American millionairesses, their third world nannies, our deliciously stern ex-Home Secretary and a dog - must be deemed too disturbing for sensitive viewers.

  3. Kevin Swinton
    Coat

    I'll...

    believe it when I see it.

    (ok, i'm going)

  4. dervheid
    Joke

    Blind Faith!

    Yes. I KNOW it's a sick joke.

    Just as long as it's not public money that's funding this hogwash, good luck to him! Can't see "errant teenagers" being scared by DB & HD, or a load of ex-cons.

    Maybe for his next outing on TV he could try 'One Man and his Dog' herding a flock of said "errant teenagers" back onto the 'straight and narrow'.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Title chosen with care

    Presumably "Banged up by Blunkett" was not top of the list.

    Or perhaps its just a Spectator sport.

  6. Aram
    Paris Hilton

    Who the f*** do these people think they are?

    I completely concur with bobbles31. Blunkett is displaying all of the despicable characteristics previously ascribed to the sleazy Tories with multiple directorships (my, my, isn't Blair doing well?).

    He's yet another example of the kind of Westminster attitude that leaves so much of the electorate cold and seems to push the remaining, passionate minority to the extremes in order to get something done.

    I choose Paris, 'coz I'd happily support her "visa application", f'narr, etc.

  7. Richard
    Coat

    In the full BIg Brother's Little Brother tradition

    Presumably there'll be a "behind the scenes" companion show presented by Kimberly Quinn called Banged by Blunkett...

    Mine's the one with "If you can read this you're too close" embroidered in Braille on the back.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Let's not forget

    "...He works for Entrust, which may bid for the national ID card project so long championed by Blunkett. He also has a column in The Sun alongside his guide dog. His fee from the paper was recently reduced from £150,000 to just over £100,000..."

    AND he continually bangs on in the Scum about how we need ID cards and that biometrics are the way forward. Conflict of interest, you say?

  9. g e

    So how's he gonna do that then?

    I mean overSEE the shebang.. maybe he'll just 'over' it instead...

  10. Ferry Boat

    @Fraser

    His Sun column must be one of the reasons Entrust employ him. He bangs the drum for ID cards, they get the contract, wads of cash all round. I don't think it's a conflict of interest as he does not have a say in who gets the contract. He will, of course, vote for ID cards if there is a vote. He's still an MP but his position with Entrust is disclosed. It's all above board but it still stinks to high heaven.

    He's a classic example of principled politician gone bad through exposure to power and money. Labour seem to have quite a few of those.

  11. Steve

    This could work

    Once the little terrors see the kind of cash you can steal from public funds sorry, justly earn after a transparent and legitimate tender process, why would they bother TWOCing cars.

  12. Hans

    Nice doggie!

    My Gran (awww bless!) always taught me that if you can't find anything nice to say about someone, say nothing at all. So here goes:

    I think his dog looks quite nice.

    OK Gran?

  13. Spleen
    Paris Hilton

    I'm confused

    I thought Blunkett eliminated yoof crime with the ASBO. Who are they going to get onto this programme?

  14. adnim

    mmm

    The self serving trying to correct the behaviour of the incorrigible. Two wrongs make a right?

    He is not the only self serving politician to accept a post from a company which has benefited from government policy. Seems to me the majority of them do. Stinks of corruption and bribery.

    It is possible that young offenders may listen an ex-con, but to listen to a hypocrite of questionable morality, would you? Come to think of it, if a career in crime and getting away with it is what one really wants to pursue, perhaps he is the right guy for the job.

  15. Arnold Layne
    Flame

    Honest Dave

    "His fee from the paper was recently reduced from £150,000 to just over £100,000"

    Given MP's track records of honesty it probably wasn't reduced at all. When he's found out it will be put down to an error by a minion.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    "Blunkett and some ex-cons."

    shouldn't that read "Blunkett and some other ex-cons."

    here's hoping....

  17. Chris Collins

    Dog column?

    "He also has a column in The Sun alongside his guide dog."

    What does his guide dog write about?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You couldn't make it up...

    I can't believe I almost feel pity for these kids. Even 10 months locked up in a borstal has got to be preferable to being forced to endure "Banger" Blunkett's prescence for even a few short minutes.

    And these miscreants... they'd better not be girls! It's well documented that Blunkett considers himself a big hit with the lay-deees, so if you're a girl and get into trouble, you may get "Banged up with Blunkett" and really be in some "in trouble" hahaha.

    On a serious note, whilst our ex-Home Secretary moonlights from his day job filling his pockets with C5's money whilst portraying himself as a modern Magistrate version of Judge John Deeds, who is going to be representing Sheffield Brightside as it's MP?

  19. Steven Pepperell
    Stop

    @Dog column?

    "He also has a column in The Sun alongside his guide dog."

    "What does his guide dog write about?"

    Life with Blunkett I would imagine, the sites that dog must of seen, I dont envy it.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Oh Boy

    I don't understand the reasons behind this at all. What are channel 5 up to here? Are they deliberately trying to nuke their ability to remain (or even become) a serious TV channel? If so then what's the rationale? To close down channel 5?

    Is anyone intelligent in charge of channel 5 these days? Natasha Kaplinski gets bunged £1M to get her off the Breakfast sofa to front a news show that I certainly have no intention of watching. Now presumably she will be coupled with Blunkett on the channel 5 sofa to form a new dynamic duo.

    What with El Reg promoting Paris Hilton so much in the recent past I feel there is a very strong whiff of TIT about the way this is going.

  21. Luther Blissett

    Tragic indictment of education

    The educational system is supposed to nurture talents and abilities that will make a contribution to the sum total of happiness. Clearly the man missed his true vocation and ended up in the wrong job. Unfortunately that job was politics. He only wanted to be loved, but his heart was and is not fit to receive the respect of the British people as a whole. He now has an opportunity more appropriate to his talents and abilities, and good luck to him.

    An education system whose aim is the welfare of a small and unrepresentative segment of society clearly needs to be changed. Only then is it fit for purpose - education, education, and more education.

  22. This_One

    Pure Evil

    The man is BAD !

    Because he's blind he was able to get away with more than most politicians. bad bad bad bad..................................

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Are all MP's on the fiddle?

    Here we go again, when water was privatised we saw all MP's who championed it getting non exec director jobs years later.

    Here we see it with Blunkett.

    I have long questioned the crazy spending on the NPFIT ( later renamed connecting for health) which sought to replace every single piece of clinical software in the NHS with newly written software by huge consortia . The cost of the programme was initially just under £6 billion. The initial promise was that every clinician would have access to the complete medical record which sounded good at the time although many questioned the need to replace software and baulked at the price.

    The contracts were awarded to Consortia and they had subcontractors who would write the software, I remember some of these had special brochures printed without screenshots and neglected to tell health bosses that the software did not run under windows at the front end and was in the middle of being converted to an SQL platform at the back end. Was this what we were paying billions for?

    Then the programme started failing to provide basic functionality of the software it was supposed to replace (some hospital Trusts said that they lost 75% of functionality and were told they would have to wait 6 years for the software to catch up).

    Later the costs of the programme spiralled to a point where it was suggested it would cost between £25 billion to £32 billion and take 20 years to implement. Along the way we were told that it would not in fact deliver the information to every clinician and would become a regional system.

    Staff in the NHS resisted this programme, Hospital Trusts implemented procedures to prevent all the proposed benefits of components like “Choose and Book” from working. So yes if you had a 12 week queue for treatment you could “Choose and Book” a hospital with a lower waiting time, but the Trust took all such non local referrals to special committees who looked at the time the patient would have waited in their own Trust and gave the patient the same lead time for treatment.

    This is what happens when politicians try to force things through that are inoperable by hospital trusts who have a thousand other directives as well as budgets to comply with. Yet it was forced through at the highest level, i.e. MP's, one wonders why? I remember Tony Blair being asked questions about it in the House of Commons and coming out with one of his classic "what we have to understand is..." blairshit answers.

    One wonders who was on the take on this programme, why else would some thing that had failed to deliver and had projected costs of a third of the total annual NHS budget was still being pushed through. There were many opportunities to bail out, the consortia had failed to meet contractual deadlines and some themselves abandoned the programme. The Commons' Public Accounts Committee published a damning report saying it was not delivering value.

    There were all kinds of financial problems with consortia subcontractor Isoft which was finally sold off to Australian firm IBA Health, later Isoft was being investigated by the serious fraud office.

    Ironically in Wales they had their own NPFIT but instead of replacing every piece of software they just proposed replacing those that could not export data. Needless to say the costs of the Wales programme are nominal and much easier to implement.

    NPFIT has to be the biggest computer project cock ups of all time, yet MP's kept forcing it through despite all the signs and warnings. One wonders why? One wonders how many will appear as consultants or non exec directors to CSC, Accenture, Isoft, Fujitsu, BT in later years?

    Surely we need some anti trust leglisation to deal with this sort of thing.

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