They wear bobble hats and are known as the inflatable dolls.You are now in the shadow of the Brent Spar, which towers above looking rusty and forlorn and reeking of oil. A large hook is attached to the harness round your chest and you are winched nearly 100ft up to its decks.Her last crew, before Greenpeace, left all sorts of things on board – from bedding and baked beans to life jackets, survival suits and a huge, new electric motor still in its crate. Shell says all of this will be removed before the Spar is towed away and sunk in 6,000ft of water. For 15 years it acted as a gigantic petroleum station, filling tankers from the Brent Field.Now it is to become the first truly large North Sea oil structure to be disposed of by sinking – if Greenpeace can be evicted Captain Castle says dumping would be an environmental crime. “It’s a symbol for a wasteful, materialistic way of life,” he says.Shell argues that the environmental damage from the oily sludge, mildly radioactive salts and small quantities of toxic metals will be trivial and confined to a small area of the deep sea bed. To break up the Brent Spar on shore would cost pounds 34m extra.. BY JOHN RENTOUL
Political Correspondent
Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker of the House of Commons, may drop the threat of disciplinary action against Sir Jerry Wiggin, letting him off with making a full apology.Sir Jerry tabled an amendment on behalf of a commercial interest in the name of his colleague Sebastian Coe, without his permission.A senior Labour source said there would be “impatience verging on anger” with Ms Boothroyd if Sir Jerry avoided being referred to the Privileges Committee.Westminster sources were quoted as saying the Speaker was reluctant to refer Sir Jerry’s case to the committee both because its inquiry could take several months and because it was deeply split on party lines in a way that would “not help the reputation of Parliament”.Meanwhile, John Major and Tony Blair have both threatened to “go it alone” over the Nolan report on rules for MPs’ private interests if the two main parties cannot reach agreement.Mr Major defended his plan to set up a further committee to consider Lord Nolan’s recommendations, which include a ban on MPs taking paid lobbyist jobs.
“I hope the Opposition will co-operate with this committee on an all-party basis. If they do not, the Government will consult MPs themselves and frame their own proposals,” he said in a statement unusually issued through Conservative Central Office on Saturday.Mr Blair, in a letter to the Prime Minister, said the public would not understand why another committee needed to be set up. Labour leaders are threatening to boycott the committee unless the Government agrees to stick to the 12-month timetable for reform laid down in the Nolan report.But Jeff Rooker, Labour spokesman on Commons issues, said that if the Government had not acted by July, Labour MPs would begin to make full declaration of their interests, as required by the Nolan report. “It would be hypocrisy to do otherwise,” he said.Tony Newton, the Leader of House, is expected to set out details of the new committee today, and some Labour insiders say that they would consider using an opposition debate on Wednesday to force a vote on the issue if the proposals are considered inadequate.The strength of public opinion was made clear when more than 20,000 people telephoned BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend to vote on whether an outside arbiter was needed to regulate MPs’ behaviour. Only 2,650 callers (13 per cent) thought MPs could be trusted to regulate themselves.Mr Major’s statement put him at odds with most of his backbenchers.The Prime Minister’s statement said: “I do not just accept the broad thrust of Nolan, I agree with it.” But Conservative sources said that while he agreed with the broad thrust, much work was needed on the details to make the report workable.Sir Archie Hamilton, the Tory MP for Epsom and Ewell, criticised Mr Major’s statement: “I don’t agree with him that Nolan was merely calling for more openness, because he clearly demanded a ban on all paid advocacy. If we go down that road we would have to have a Commons where nobody is paid for any outside work and MPs would have to be given far higher salaries.”.
Jack Straw, the shadow Home Secretary, opened another front in the battle against trade union power in the Labour Party yesterday, writes John Rentoul. He called for a cut in union places on the party’s National Executive, as a survey found that half of Labour MPs want to end their union sponsorships.
In a move which will dismay union leaders and many in the party, including the deputy leader, John Prescott, Mr Straw said on BBC Television: “The time has come for the National Executive Committee to be reformed. At the moment it is composed only of people elected by the trade unions and the constituency parties and those of us who are described as constituency representatives are on the whole senior parliamentary politicians. There is a strong case in addition for true representatives of constituency parties and representatives of local government. I hope over the next two or three years we can agree changes without a row.”The momentum for change was strengthened by a survey of 120 Labour MPs in the Observer newspaper, which found that 57 of them thought that union sponsorship of MPs should be ended, while 55 wanted to keep the system..
The extent to which Baroness Thatcher feels betrayed by her successor’s reversal of her policies and loss of her government’s “sense of purpose” is revealed by the pre-serialisation trailer for her new book in yesterday’s Sunday Times. The second volume of Baroness Thatcher’s memoirs, The Path to Power, covers her life before she became Prime Minister but ends with a section called “Beginning Again” giving her present political views.
Central to the betrayal is John Major’s alleged selling out of the nation’s interests, expressed by his desire to be “at the heart of Europe”. She says she knew he would take a slightly more emollient line, “but I was not prepared for the speed with which the position I adopted would be reversed”.The new stance saw events move “swiftly, and as far as I was concerned, in the wrong direction”. Now Britain faces a serious threat to national sovereignty in next year’s Maastricht renegotiations: “The problem with John Major’s alternative approach was that, although it initially won plaudits, it left the fundamental problems unresolved.”To the charge that she allowed Mr Major, as Chancellor, to persuade her to go into the European exchange rate mechanism in 1990, she says she never intended that to be a prelude to joining a single European currency – “quite the contrary”.As soon as she left office, she appears to have changed her mind about Britain’s membership of the ERM. By mid-1991 she says she was “bending over backwards” to avoid publicly criticising Britain’s continued membership, which she thought was “unnecessarily worsening the recession by a monetary overkill resulting from an obsession with the exchange rate”.She says she gave Mr Major “the benefit of the doubt for as long as possible” before she allowed her frustrations to become known. Mr Major’s European policy, which has “not even” reunited the Conservative Party, which was one of the main reasons for replacing her.And she is scornful about Mr Major’s broader foreign policy.
