I’M not a clairvoyant but I think I know what’s going through the mind of international development minister Hilary Benn about this newspaper’s campaign to provide proper medical aid for the scores of children maimed by Allied bombs in Iraq.
Hampstead MP Glenda Jackson put down a question in Parliament this week – following our campaign – asking Mr Benn what help is being given to the Iraq government to provide prosthetic limbs for these children?
At the moment, they can be seen hobbling about on home-made crutches in Basra and the surrounding villages.
How will Mr Benn respond to Ms Jackson’s question? I can tell her in advance – though I hope I am wrong – that he is likely to pass the buck to the new Iraqi government.
He gave a good hint of this at a public meeting in East Ham on Monday when ex New Journal reporter Lee Gordon – who has reported the war in Iraq and its aftermath – volleyed two questions at him: Didn’t he think Britain had a “moral obligation” to help these children in the British zone in Iraq? And shouldn’t we be providing them, at least, with prosthetic arms and legs?
Mr Benn, had just finished a speech about how much more aid Britain was giving the Third World in contrast to the smaller sums spent by the Tories in the 1980s and 1990s – and all because of Labour’s greater “political will”.
He revealed to the audience of more than 100 – most of them Asians, Africans and West Indians – a little bit of his inner-self when he asked: “Aren’t we our brother’s or sister’s keeper?”
But his solicitude seemed to end there. He ducked the issue of moral responsibility in his response to Lee Gordon’s question. He simply laid responsibility on the Iraq government.
But that didn’t explain why Britain had done so little to help these maimed children from the end of the war to the present day – two years in all. Plenty of time to find out how many children are maimed and then allocate money and medical aid for them – plenty of time to make life a bit more bearable with artificial arms and legs.
Mr Benn didn’t strike me as politician bent on a career come what may – an unthinking politician with no sense of morality.
He admitted he knew of the plight of little Zeynab, an 11-year-old Iraqi girl brought to London last summer by Lee Gordon who arranged – with the help of Paul McCartney’s wife, Heather Mills – to fit her with a prosthetic leg.
So why did he give such a facile answer to Lee Gordon’s main question about the miserable life of all those maimed children in our zone?
It’s partly, I suspect, because he didn’t want to be drawn into the immorality of the war – and Britain’s obligation, as an occupying power under the Geneva Convention, to provide medical assistance to the Iraqi people.
To that extent, he was playing politics – and to that extent he typifies so much of what is wrong with New Labour.

EVEN in these enlightened days it is not the subject you want to talk or joke about but laughter rang out at the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden on Tuesday – and it was all over the launch of a book on cancer.
But this wasn’t a phoney, PR event. How could it be, when it involved the Redgraves. They are the least pretentious actors I know.
Only Corin couldn’t make it – presumably because he was holding the stage at the Arts Theatre with his one-man Kenneth Tynan show.
Lynn Redgrave had decided to combine a party for her 60th birthday with the launch of her book, a kind of diary on her journey through the travails of breast cancer photographed by her daughter Annabelle.
Theatre director Thelma Holt said – almost with an embarrassed smile – that it engrossed her so much it became “bedtime reading.”
Difficult to imagine, but the audience knew what she meant. As for Lynn she spoke at ease about how she had lost a breast under the surgeon’s knife.
Vanessa got so emotional however that she suddenly lost her train of thoughts and appealed to her sister Lynn for help. “Lynn, I’ve lost my wits – help me,” she said.
Thelma Holt had to leave early to keep an eye on her latest West End production, Man and Boy starring David Suchet.
She told me she alternates – one night she sees the first act, making sure everything is all right, the next she checks up on the second act. Vanessa had just come from a rehearsal for Tony Harrison’s new play Hecuba which opens in the West End at the end of this month.

Gillian’s in the partying mood

I SPENT a happy couple of hours stocking up my library with purchases from the stalls at the Jewish Book Week in Bloomsbury – and was fortunate enough to wander in to a discussion hosted by the Independent’s literary editor Boyd Tomkin featuring novelist Gillian Slovo (pictured right).
Slovo, who lives in West Hampstead, was talking about her life and times – her recent book the Ice Road was short listed for the Orange Prize.
But the audience were just as interested in her parents, the South African anti-apartheid campaigners Joe Slovo and Ruth Furst – and Gillian did not disappoint. She explained how the two communist campaigners had a decadent love of partying.
She said: “In my childhood in South Africa my parents’ parties were multi-racial and therefore illegal. I thought it was just usual for every one to suddenly throw their alcohol in to the many vases my mum had around the house when ever they were raided by the police. ”
She also revealed what happened at Christmas at the Slovo’s.
She said: “It was the one day a year my parents would have a really good argument about the attributes of Chinese and Russian communism. My mother supported China and my father Russia.”
But I don’t imagine it ruined the festivities – being secular Jews, they weren’t celebrating that particular religious festival anyway.

An unholy alliance?

DON’T think Holborn MP Frank Dobson (pictured) is one of those new, trendy republicans.
In fact, he gives the Royal family a lot of thought.
So much so, that he jumped at the chance to support a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament on Tuesday to abolish a 300-year-old law banning members of the Royal Family from marrying Catholics.
He was so keen to attach his name to the Bill that he didn’t mind it was drawn up by Tory MP Edward Leigh or that his allies were the Tory party’s previous leaders – William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith.