ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Time to take a look through the Sunday papers now and I’m joined by the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Lord Blair, the MP for Falkirk Eric Joyce and by the editor of the weekend Financial Times, Caroline Daniel, good morning to you all. Now the story that happened too late, Lord Blair, for the papers was the formal deportation of Abu Qatada but they got wind of it some of them, didn’t they?

LORD BLAIR: Well it is quite interesting, here’s a piece in the Sunday People, oddly by the political editor, which indicates it has been planted in advance, as it were, of what was going to happen and it is quite striking that in the leader of the People, that it praises Mrs May and it says it is an unusual thing for the Sunday People to praise any Home Secretary, let alone a Conservative one, and it then goes on to say it won’t do her any harm in her own political ambitions. But the important part about this is he spent far too long in this country, it has been incredibly difficult to remove him and I don’t think it’s going to get any easier in the future because even if you passed a new British Bill of Rights, you are still not going to be able to deport people to places where they are tortured or are going to have evidence given against them obtained by torture.

DM: Well at the moment there is the European Convention on Human Rights and so to leave that or do something about it would be very difficult wouldn’t it?

ERIC JOYCE: It would be very difficult. I think there is some credit due here to the Jordanians themselves who I think have made an effort over the last year or so to try to take British concerns into account without being seen to be toeing the line too much to a foreign government so I would give the Jordanians some credit.

DM: Nevertheless, Caroline, the thought does occur that now the Jordanians have got him and apparently they have whisked him straight into court, in all honesty we are not going to have complete oversight are we of how he is being treated? We’re not going to go, hold on a minute, we don’t really like this witness or that witness any more?

CAROLINE DANIEL: Also the level of interest in this story from the British media is going to decline quite considerably I suspect and I think the next move will be how do you get rid of the other people in the Ecuadorian embassy, Julian Assange, who has also been costing 3.3 million to the British taxpayer, so maybe this will be a new route to get Julian Assange …

LORD BLAIR: He can always be joined by that nice Mr Snowden!

DM: Somebody has said that. Well I’ll tell you a story we’re all talking about and we’re glad to have the man here who knows a lot about it, knows a lot about the constituency anyway, Eric Joyce. You picked in the Mirror what’s going on, the implications, the ramifications of Falkirk, you’re tearing Labour apart at the top and Len McClusky himself, the boss of Unite, writing below that.

ERIC JOYCE: I think what Len McClusky has done here is create an entirely bogus argument based upon social class and essentially what he starts out by doing here is saying if you want your son or daughter to be an MP then forget it because they are more likely to be a cleaner. Well of course I was just talking to John Reid earlier and there are all sorts of Labour MPs, including myself, who are entirely working class in terms of our origin.

DM: But you are a dying breed, isn’t that the point he’s making? They are parachuted in by the Labour leadership and a lot of them do nothing more than be advisors to MPs before they become MPs.

ERIC JOYCE: There are two things you have to look at. The reason why there is a figure of 25 working class MPs in parliament which is a figure based on the social census which is quite an old fashioned idea and it’s from an academic book written in 2010 but that’s manual workers, people from social employment CTD and E. The people that Unite want to put into those seats are of course, guess what? Parliamentary researchers, middle class union officials and exactly the same type. The reality is this is an ideological fight. It’s not between the trade unions and Ed Miliband, it’s between Len McClusky and a few of his anarcho-syndicalist advisors and the Labour party and it is them self-aggrandizing I think in trying to win an ideological battle which I think they will lose.

DM: But the problem is, of course, Labour needs Unite’s money. If you really fall out with Len McClusky it could be a real problem for Labour funding.

ERIC JOYCE: I think Len McClusky and his advisors may have pushed things a little bit too far trying to be the champions of the entire Labour movement, I think they’ve pushed things too far and have probably damaged their own case but it may be that the Labour party can find a different way of keeping a strong relationship with the trade unions but still getting the financial support.

DM: What do you think Lord Blair, is it an opportunity for Ed Miliband to crack the whip and show he’s the boss and get a bit of political kudos out of it?

LORD BLAIR: Yes, I think it probably is but on the other hand he’s in a position where David Cameron is using this as a serious weapon against him and that makes it much more difficult. I mean there is a level of hypocrisy on both sides about funding isn’t there? There are certain very large party donors advising David Cameron, there is mounds of money coming from banks and other things going to the Conservative party, both sides have this weakness.

DM: As you say, it’s manna from heaven. Not so very long ago we were discussing the 80s after the death of Baroness Thatcher and all the problems with the unions then and this is a chance for the Conservatives to raise the spectre, another bogeyman.

CAROLINE DANIEL: Well I used to work for Gordon Brown during the glory days of the Clause Four debate when Tony Blair sought to define himself against the unions and the relationship with unions and actually this is a rather odd moment for Ed Miliband to have his own Clause Four moment forced upon him but actually he is being backed by the unions in a much stronger way than Tony Blair was so it is a rather peculiar battle for him to be having. Obviously the Tories would love to have him be in a big fight with the unions right now.

DM: Clause One is it, I think he’s dealing with here.

ERIC JOYCE: I don't think it’s a battle in the same way that Clause Four was, I think this is dealing with a small number of people at the top of a very powerful, very important trade union who have lost their way and are self-aggrandizing themselves, pushing an ideological battle which frankly the overwhelming majority of their own members don’t support. You know there’s that thing where sometimes the leader of an organisation, particularly an elected one, can do when they just stretch out the link with their membership so far that you just snap it, you take it beyond its elasticity and I think that’s essentially where it’s going.

DM: What are you going to do when the campaign is fought in your constituency? Are you out of it altogether or are you going to campaign for whoever the candidate is?

ERIC JOYCE: I am not a Labour party member at the moment, maybe I will be by the time the general election comes along. I’d certainly campaign for whoever wins this election proper.

DM: More stories and Caroline, Egypt. What a situation there, mortal peril or has the army averted chaos? It is difficult isn’t it for people who support democracy? Is it democratic for the army to move in here?

CAROLINE DANIEL: Yes, it’s a rather strange moment to have the army backing democracy activists on the street but I think it is really the army exploiting democracy activists on the street. But the most interesting intervention today in the papers is Tony Blair in the Observer and he is very much obviously a strong democracy advocate passing his definition of democracy which is now democratic government doesn’t on its own mean effective government and he goes on to say that 17 million people on the streets are not the same as an election but it an awesome manifestation of power. So we are really having a rather complicated redefinition of is this a democratic moment, is it shoring up democracy, is democracy no longer about the ballot box but moving beyond it?

DM: But then of course he has got his moment hasn’t he, when he was Prime Minister he had a million plus people on the streets opposing military intervention in Iraq and he didn’t really listen to that did he?

ERIC JOYCE: They had a parliamentary vote and I voted for the action and that’s kind of history now I suppose but in this particular situation I suppose I slightly disagree with Caroline, if I understand Caroline right and Camilla Cavendish did this well in a piece in the Sunday Times actually, that when someone gets elected in that context they have to take a whole load of things into account and having a strong constitution that has ethnic minority rights and minority grouping rights and so forth, is a really important thing and he seems to have ignored the context and pressed ahead with a strong Sharia imperative and as she says, you can’t eat Sharia and that’s the way the people saw it.

DM: What do you think is going to happen? It is finely poised, obviously the army has the military muscle but there is a lot of big stuff happening.

LORD BLAIR: According to the Observer, they polarise two outcomes. Algeria in 1992 when exactly the same thing happened and then nine months later civil war happened, 250,000 dead and Egypt of course is three times the size of Algeria and they then point to Turkey in 1997 where exactly the same thing happened but the military put a democratic government back into power. Which way it goes is really on the balance. I thought Tony Blair’s comment that democracy only works where religion has a voice but not a veto is a very good comment.

CAROLINE DANIEL: James Carville and ‘It’s the economy stupid’, actually really what’s behind a lot of this is that the Egyptian economy has been a disaster over the last year and they are running out of foreign reserves at the moment so they are getting to a real crisis point, they can’t pay some of the imports of gas, you have had petrol strikes and rows developing so on the ground ahead of this there was a lot of tension rising, particularly about unemployment so I think behind the scenes, whatever they can do on the economy to stabilise that is going to be more important than some of the debates about who’s in power, who is the interim, is it El Baradai or not, that will matter actually less than the economy.

DM: And then they need that aid all the more particularly from the United States. To move to another story, Lord Blair, Lord Prescott has really thrown his toys out of the pram hasn’t he, leaving the Privy Council, he will no longer be the Right Honourable.

LORD BLAIR: He is writing in the Sunday Mirror, actually I’d never noticed his strapline before, it’s John Prescott – He Still Packs a Punch! He’s resigning from the Privy Council, people do resign from the Privy Council but normally when they are in a position of disgrace so Chris Huhne going to prison, he resigned from the Privy Council but he is apparently the first person to resign on a matter of principle and it is back to Leveson. I was in the Lords, Leveson was discussed again in the Lords this week and there was actually laughter in the Lords about the complicated explanation being given by a Minister with a very difficult brief as to why there were now two Royal Charters going to the Privy Council and the wonderful point that the press one had got there first so it had to be considered first because the Privy Council couldn’t consider two Royal Charters at one time.

DM: I think they might manage that!

LORD BLAIR: So the idea is the one that the government allegedly doesn’t want is going out for consultation and the one the government does want will sit in the wings until the consultation on the one it doesn’t want … are you still following that?

DM: I think we’re with you, I’m taking some complicated notes, I’m on the third page here but yes, well listen we’ll see if he still packs a punch when he comes on this programme in about forty minutes times. Another story that everyone has been talking about for weeks I suppose, Eric you have a front page exclusive for the Mail on Sunday and Charles Saatchi using that to say he is asking Nigella Lawson for a divorce.

ERIC JOYCE: There’s no competition for the most unpopular man in the UK but Charles Saatchi is making a bit for that by putting a statement out through the Mail on Sunday, a perfectly good newspaper …

DM: You think he’s ahead of Len McClusky?

ERIC JOYCE: I think he’s ahead of Len McClusky, it’s remarkable yet true. There are all sorts of angles here, you can take this … I suppose as a man saying this it is probably less powerful than a woman saying it but men who have been, he has accepted a caution for a relatively junior offence from a police officer’s point of view but an important offence from most people’s point of view and he needs to accept that he’s done that and it will show that he understands what that means. Instead he seems to be taking it not that seriously, taking it like a game. He is a super-rich guy who has communicated incredibly well, that’s what he’s built his career on but instead he seems to be treating this like a game instead of the tragedy that it is for Nigella.

DM: It’s interesting isn’t it, that article raises an awful lot of questions because of course we only hear from the Saatchi side of it, Nigella Lawson has been remarkable silent and why not, it is her private life but it seems that it comes down to Charles Saatchi’s interpretation is it’s all to do with her PR guy making her not back him up.

ERIC JOYCE: But that’s what happens when women get abused, they are not going to be out there on the airwaves putting things in the media and so forth, they are going to be quiet. She is the victim in all of this and Charles Saatchi has chosen for some reason to compound his original office and issue this remarkable statement through the Mail on Sunday.

DM: It takes some reading. He is still saying that obviously what happened, happened because you can see it in the pictures but there was no pressure, we often do that.

ERIC JOYCE: He actually says she has done the same sort of thing to him and by way of a punish back by her sort of thing which seems an astonishing thing for a communications professional to do.

LORD BLAIR: No lawyer is going to allow his client to receive a caution from the police unless the client is saying I did it. He is just trying to find another interpretation on what we’ve seen in those pictures and the more he says, what is it, the lady says too much or whatever it is. He’s saying too much.

CAROLINE DANIEL: And Private Eye had a bit of a go at him when he was saying it was just a playful tiff with a cover saying ‘I was only choking’ as their headline. There has been a series of leaks ahead of this actually saying the row was over some of Nigella’s aides spending vast amounts of money and flying to New York so this was actually a number of leaks that we’ve had and I think it’s going to get worse and not better for Nigella and Charles Saatchi.

DM: Watch this space or these spaces. Thank you all very much indeed for taking us through some of the main stories in the Sunday papers today.