How Much Longer For Heffer?

It seems that the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre still has sufficient confidence in the preposterously puffed-up Simon Heffer to entrust the e-dustbin of ranting and frothing that is RightMinds to him, but after the Hefferlump’s latest failure to do a few minutes’ research before pontificating, one has to wonder how much longer the Vagina Monologue will tolerate his presence.

Wake up Simon, you're being fired

Heffer has decided in his latest column to pontificate on the upcoming Presidential contest in the USA, where he has decided that his readers should back the Republican nominee, whoever that is. “The American press, which is almost uniformly Democrat, is muck-raking frantically about Republican Mitt Romney” whines the Hefferlump, who has not heard of the New York Post or WSJ.

Moreover, he hasn’t heard of the press Stateside being far better about separating news and comment, which his current berth, and former one at the Maily Telegraph, are increasingly unable to manage. He then continues: “their ‘muck’ consisting mainly of Mr Romney being rich, successful and understanding how business works”. Er, Simon, you haven’t been paying attention, have you?

Well, no he hasn’t, as he tells that the USA “is lucky to have Mr Romney in the wings. And I suspect that the American public has a rather different view of these matters than the American media”. Well, maybe not, in the light of recent revelations about Mitt, and had Heffer bothered to keep an eye on events Stateside before rushing to judgment, he might have avoided the subject altogether.

Mitt Romney had been CEO of an outfit called Bain Capital. Bain had gotten itself a less than good name after a number of its acquisitions were asset stripped and workers laid off, with some of them going bust. But Romney’s excuse was always that he left Bain in 1999 to head up the USA’s Winter Olympics operation, and so was not responsible for what happened after that.

However – and this is rather a big However – the Boston Globe has now found that Romney remained Bain’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” until at least 2002. And the Globe has told the Romney campaign that they won’t be getting a retraction, or even a correction. During those three years, Bain did an awful lot of asset stripping and sacking.

That’s on top of Bain’s expertise in outsourcing, otherwise known as exporting jobs abroad, a subject which is as sensitive in the USA as it is in the UK. Romney has gone on a charm offensive across the TV networks to try and salvage the situation, but the Republican Party must be wondering if they might have made the wrong choice. Lucky to have him in the wings? Maybe not.

And that story was there before Heffer filed his. Does he still enjoy Dacre’s support?