Norman Lamont, Edith Piaf, Hazel Blears: which is the odd one out?
Ms Blears, it turns out; for while the former Chancellor and the Little Sparrow were happy to proclaim “je ne regrette rien”, the recently departed Communities Secretary is full of regrets.
In no particular order, she says she regrets:
*Her YouTube joke against Gordon Brown.
*The timing of her resignation.
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*Wearing that “Rocking the Boat” brooch the day after she resigned from the Cabinet.
Ms Blears also regrets that there are not more women “at every level” in politics as well as just the Cabinet, but as that is not her fault it probably does not count.
In an interview with the Manchester Evening News, the Salford MP was at times close to tears as she said: “I’ve thought long and hard and I have a number of regrets.”
She described her decision to write in a newspaper column “YouTube if you want to” — seen as a criticism of the Prime Minister — as “thoughtless and quite cruel”. Mr Brown, she said, had immediately accepted her apology.
“I thought it was clever — it was too clever by half. It was flippant and I only realised later how hurtful it was.”
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Ms Blears, who resigned when it looked apparent that she was likely to be sacked in the Cabinet reshuffle for her part in the MPs’ expenses scandal, denied being part of a plot to bring down Mr Brown. “I genuinely thought I could go without it sparking off this huge firestorm. In hindsight that judgment was wrong. I should have waited until after the election. The effect on the party is something I will live with forever.”
Ms Blears has handed over a cheque for more than £13,000 to cover the Capital Gains Tax she avoided on the sale of her London flat by registering it as her primary residence when it was also registered as her second home for parliamentary purposes. She admitted, however, that she was shocked when Mr Brown publicly described her actions as unacceptable.
“At that moment everything became much more difficult,” she added. “I had come to the view it was not tenable to remain and that I should go back to bread-and-butter basics in Salford. I only talked about it with colleagues who are friends and not with other Cabinet ministers,” she said.
Ms Blears was later pictured arriving in Manchester with that brooch — seen as a message to Mr Brown. But the MP insisted: “It was a brooch my husband had given me. I’d had four weeks of intense media pressure, the like of which I have never known, not just on me but on my husband, my dad, my family.
“At that point I’d had enough. It was a stupid thing to do but I think it was just trying to put a brave face on — not going out cowed on the basis of expenses claims that genuinely are not true.”