Brian Haw at his anti-war ‘camp’ in Parliament Square

BRIAN Haw, whose loudspeaker protests in Parliament Square against the Iraq war, made the ex-Home Secretary David Blunkett apoplectic, may end up as a peer in the Lords.
Making constitutional history, Blunkett drew up a new law aimed singularly at silencing Brian Haw who struck camp in the Square more than three years ago.
MPs – including Hampstead and Highgate’s Glenda Jackson and Islington’s Jeremy Corbyn – rallied to his cause.
But, I can reveal, the BBC’s Today programme will receive Brian’s nomination from the left monthly Red Pepper to take ermine and be ennobled as a people’s peer.
“I am not a fan of a non-elected body but if anybody should be a member of it it should be Brian,” editor Hilary Wainwright told me yesterday (Wednesday).
“He’s the ideal candidate – someone who will not give up, always scrutinising MPs.
“The fact that people in the government find him an irritant and want to get rid of him is a good sign.”
The Today programme editors, apparently, are treating his nomination seriously.
This has been a good week for Brian. A charge that he assaulted a police officer in the Square when asked to leave his anti-war encampment was dismissed at Bow Street magistrates on Tuesday. MPs such as Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, CND leader Bruce Kent and Tony Benn lined up as character witnesses.
Brian was found guilty of breaching the new Terrorism Act in refusing to leave the Square during a bomb scare but, typically, he is appealing against the court’s sentence of a ‘conditional discharge’.
A West Hampstead reader, Raymond Morris, sent me a letter wondering how Brian lives. Does he get unemployment benefit or income support, he asks?
I can assure Mr Morris that Brian, to my knowledge, doesn’t draw a penny from the state but lives on donations and food brought in regularly by his supporters who are drawn from across the capital.

Professor Benny Mei

Benny mirrors the Chinese success story

IT all fitted together on Saturday as I sat in a conference hall in Regent’s Park.
I could see why China is rapidly becoming a world superpower. And I could understand how a Chinese company last week was able to swallow up the western icon computer firm, IBM.
If ever there was an example of the Chinese in action it was at a day- long medical seminar followed by a graduation ceremony, organised by the influential Acumedic, a Chinese medical centre based in Camden High Street.
In the late 1990s I attended a similar but smaller Acumedic ceremony at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.
But what a grand seminar at the Aldous Huxley conference centre in Regent’s Park on Saturday!
The hall, crowded with more than 200 people, including doctors, health practitioners and their families, buzzed with excitement. Doctors fidgeted nervously, like young students at a university graduation ceremony, waiting for their diplomas from the Tory MP David Treddinick, a parliamentary campaigner for alternative medicine.
The diplomas in Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture were awarded by Acumedic’s chief, Professor Benny Mei, who is also chairman of the Chinese Medical Institute.
David Treddinick, who himself has been successfully treated with acupuncture, said new laws would soon regulate alternative medicine and qualified practitioners need not be afraid.
A debate in the US as to whether cooked vegetables were better for you – as the Chinese say – or raw as American health experts maintain, was an important debate for today, he said.
Professor Mei emphasised that Chinese practitioners were not opponents of conventional medicine – both had a role. All that mattered was the patient should be cured.
Professor Mei’s journey to success parallels, in a small way, China’s phenomenal burst onto the world market.
In the 1970s he ran a bookshop-cum-health centre in Eversholt Street – essentially a one-man business.
Today, Acumedic is recognised as one of the top Chinese medicine centres in the UK but one with a difference – it is recognised by the prestigious Beijing University of Medicine.
It is this, as much as anything else, that gave Professor Mei’s diplomas an official seal of approval that doctors could boastfully display in their surgeries.
In the hall I met a young Chinese student from Beijing who read engineering at London University’s Queen Mary’s College and gained a first.
This has given him a run into a PhD with the aid of a grant from a British company desperate for engineering graduates. To supplement his grant, he works one day a week at Acumedic. He’s a typically serious Chinese student. Clubbing, binge-drinking, and a coffee bar life, would be anathema to him. Was it any wonder he pulled off a first in engineering?
It’s this sense of wanting to succeed, to achieve the impossible, that is driving the Chinese economy.

Kelly with patient Billie Josiah

Cancer kids were all Kelly’s heroes

YOU didn’t have to be much of a patriot – or an athletics fan – to blub when Kelly Holmes won double Olympic gold in Athens this year.
And only the churlish would begrudge her the BBC sports personality of the year award, which she scooped on Sunday.
The 1,500 and 800 metres athletics champion took along a BBC camera crew when she visited young cancer patients at The Middlesex Hospital in Goodge Street, on Thursday as part of the filming for Sports Personality of the Year programme.
But her easy touch with the children convinced me that her heart was in the right place.
She told 12-year-old Billie Josiah: “Keep smiling, you have a great one.”
And speaking to me later, she revealed hospital visits were now a high priority for her. She said: “If you can make somebody happy just for 10 minutes, that’s special.”
As if to prove it wasn’t about the cameras, she promised the kids she’d return with her medals, which she’d forgotten at home in all the excitement.

Gould’s big move on a knife edge?

LORD Gould – the pollster who has guided Tony Blair to successive election victories – was rather coy with me when I asked him where he planned to move to last month.
When I revealed that he and his wife, Gail Rebuck, the boss of publishing giant Random House, planned to sell their Rochester Terrace, Camden Town home for £1.4 million, he only said: “We’re staying in Camden.” So when I stumbled across Ms Rebuck’s name on a planning application lodged with the Town Hall, I thought I’d give him another call.
The application to make alterations to a home at plush Park Square East, Regent’s Park, suggested that his commitment to Camden hangs by a knife edge: the street lies on the westernmost boundary of the borough, just a few feet from Westminster.
Alas, Lord Gould (pictured) was less than forthcoming when we finally spoke last night.
He said: “I couldn’t possibly comment but I do admire your Daily Mail-style diligence.”
Whatever can he have meant?