I FEEL the excitement of the chase as this column closes in on cabinet minister Hilary Benn aided and abetted by two readers who are also dogging his steps.
Mr Benn (pictured) is accused of neglecting – to the point of indifference – the scores, if not hundreds, of children who have lost arms and legs in bombing raids in the early days of the Iraq war.
Their plight was highlighted by a former New Journal reporter, Lee Gordon, who brought a little girl, Zeynab, over from Iraq to get her fitted with an artificial leg.
In a recent visit to the British zone in and near Basra he saw children in villages who had lost their legs, still hobbling painfully on crutches. Nothing much had changed since he saw them a year ago.
Two weeks ago Hampstead MP Glenda Jackson tabled a question in the Commons asking Mr Benn what his department for international development was doing to provide medical assistance for these tragic children.
A reader, Nicholas Woods of South Hill Park Gardens, Hampstead – following our story about these children in this column – had asked the MP to question Mr Benn about them.
But in his written reply (see page 6) it seems everything possible is being done for them.
But is it? Mr Woods saw one gaping omission in Mr Benn’s reply – it didn’t contain one single figure about amputees. After reading it we still don’t know how many children were maimed in bombing raids. Nor how many children have been fitted with prosthetic limbs.
There are figures galore about how much money is being spent on medical assistance through the International Committee of the Red Cross and Unicef – but Mr Benn, I ask, why cannot you give us just a few hard facts.
Mr Woods seemed to share my amazement at Mr Benn’s dodgy reply. After a forensic dissection of his one page response, Mr Woods drew up two pages of questions for Ms Jackson to put to Anne Clwyd, the government’s Humanitarian Envoy in Iraq to “match Mr Benn’s answer”.
He has also involved ex-cabinet minister Clare Short by sending her copy of his letter.
Meanwhile, another reader Clem Alford of Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury, has also fired off letters about our campaign to Mr Benn, Anne Clwyd and Tony Blair.
A reply from Aemer Lodhi, who works in Blair’s ‘Direct Communication Unit’, pointed out that the PM hoped Mr Alford understood this was a matter for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – and so his letter had been forwarded on.
Mr Alford describes this as “passing the buck”. That couldn’t have been better put.

PRAISE was heaped on Tim Coates, former managing editor of Waterstones, by the Parliamentary select committee on Britain’s libraries.
The august body came to the same conclusion as Mr Coates in his report for the charity Libri that libraries were amply funded but managers were failing to buy enough books.
Mr Coates, who lives in Fortune Green, has been arguing along these lines for sometime.
It turns out that of £1 billion spent on libraries only eight per cent is used to fill the shelves. And who are the worst boroughs in Britain? Camden and Islington. They spend only 4 per cent of their budget on books.

Rock crawls back to Camden in beery style

MUSIC is the food of love, they say, but the Camden Crawl on Thursday night proved beyond doubt that beer is the drink of music.
More than 4,200 music fans crammed into Camden Town’s world famous live music venues for the tenth anniversary of the boozy festival.
The Crawl gave early exposure to world famous acts including Moby and Beth Orton when it began in 1995, but was absent for seven years before its welcome return this year.
For £15 fans could buy a wristband that allowed them access to ten venues from Barfly in Chalk Farm down to Club Koko in Mornington Crescent, with 40 bands playing from 6pm until the early hours of Friday.
Local boy Graham Coxon and punk legends The Buzzcocks shared the bill with lesser known bands.
I don’t know whether it was all the beer or the informal come-and-go-as-you-please set up, but there was a real sense of bonhomie among the revellers – something all too often lacking from today’s music scene.
Police, who, fearing trouble, had banned late licences for many of the venues, said they had no problems all night.

Fight the good fight

From left: Sarah Walker, Jenny Hautman, Selma James, Sue Webster (front centre) Christel Amissm Michael Kalmanovitz and Phoebe Jones

THE wife of a US soldier who refuses to fight in Iraq, Sue Webster, called for the release of her husband Abdullah in Camden on Saturday.
Mrs Webster, a secondary-school teacher from Birmingham, has been campaigning for her husband’s release since he was jailed for 14 months last year for refusing to fight in Iraq.
Speaking on a platform organised by campaign groups Payday and Global Women’s Strike at the Trinity United Reform Church in Buck Street, Camden Town, she said: “The court martial said he had refused to kill other Muslims but that is not true – he refused to fight because the war was illegal.” She added there had been tacit sympathy for her husband’s stance amongst his fellow soldiers in the Engineers Battalion, but that they were too frightened to speak out.
Abdullah had served for 20 years, including stints in Kosovo and Iraq in the first Gulf War, but has been stripped of his pension and is currently in a military jail in the US.

Pure poetry from Sir Bob

IN his usual intellectual style, Bob Geldof (pictured) displayed his love of Keats and Shelley at the British Library on Monday by likening them to rock stars.
After a reading of the poets he told me: “They were rock stars. They all died young, they were all about politics, passion and girls. They were trying to get laid, not having much luck.”
Talking of rock stars, actor Tom Hollander brought to my attention a classical precursor to what has always seemed to me the most awkward rhyme in pop. I think it was Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols who once screamed: “I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist.”
Yet Shelley was happy to use a similar rhyme in his masterpiece The Mask of Anarchy, a stanza from which runs:
And each dweller,
panic-stricken,
Felt his heart
with terror sicken
Hearing the
tempestuous cry
Of the triumph
of Anarchy.

That’s rich!

SCHOOLBOY Marley Morris caught a slight whiff of republicanism when he asked the Commonwealth Secretary General Don McKinnon on Monday a question about the Queen.
Marley, aged 15, a pupil at Haverstock School, wanted to know whether it was hypocritical that the Commonwealth working to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor is headed by the Queen.
“Why? Because she’s the richest woman in the world?” replied Mr McKinnon who was visiting the school on Commonwealth Day. He added: “Her role is really as a figurehead – it’s symbolic. It is an anachronism, but on the other hand it’s not giving us any problems.”