The Prime Minister We Never Had?

Former Home, and Education Secretary, Charles Clarke MP has claimed the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair wanted to position him to become a leadership rival to Gordon Brown. Astonishingly the MP for Norwich South, in an interview with the New Statesman, says that Blair wanted to offer him the post of Foreign Secretary to make him a more rounded candidate. According to Clarke, the then Prime Minister made this revelation the day after sacking him from the Home Office in 2006 when it emerged that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners had been released without being considered for deportation. Blair, it is claimed, then invited Clarke and his wife to a private dinner at Chequers.

"He had a great plan, apparently, that he wanted me to be foreign secretary because he thought that if I had been foreign secretary and home secretary I would be a credible opponent to Gordon, as the leader of the party. And this had been his long-standing strategy, and that was what he had been intending to do, and that's what he hoped to do. Which ran against, of course, what I had said to him about feeling I needed to do home secretary for three or four years. I knew nothing about this until after the event, and I said to him if he was nice enough to think I ought to be leader of the party, then he might as well have been courteous enough to tell me this was his plan" said the former Home Secretary.

Following his dismissal from Government, Clarke has be a constant thorn in the side of Gordon Brown, criticising his appointment as Prime Minister; setting up a website with Alan Milburn to put out their vision for the Labour Party, and questioning his mental state, claiming he has phycological issues and is a control freak.

Clarke is currently seen as attempting to eye up the position of Transport Secretary but concedes that he'll never run for leader.

Read the New Statesman interview here.
Licence Charles Clarke photographs here.

The Tin Tabernacle

The tiny corrugated iron chapel began life as a £350 flat-pack in kit form, taking only weeks to build as a temporary place of worship for the swelling population of a Victorian village.
More than 120 years later as other, more sturdy, churches have long since closed their doors, the “tin tabernacle” at Saxlingham Nethergate, Norfolk, is bursting at the seams… and has just appointed its first pastor.
Former policeman Ian Masson believes his congregation at the Evangelical Chapel has been boosted by the credit crunch.
‘With the fall in house prices and the recession, a lot of people have become disillusioned with material gain and they are increasingly turning back to the church and God,’ said the 53-year-old known as “Pastor Ian” to his flock.
Until fairly recently the timber-framed, metal-clad chapel was on the verge of being demolished, after 120 years of East Coast winds had taken their toll. But as the worshippers flocked back, so did the money for refurbishment, and a £90,000 makeover left the building with an extension to house an inside lavatory, kitchen and meeting room.
Air-conditioning, however was not on the list. ‘It’s like an ice box in winter until the heating fires up, and like sitting in a Hovis tin in the Summer,’ said Mr Masson, with the deafening noise of rain thundering in the background on the roof.
At one time, there were thousands of the corrugated iron churches around Britain, with manufacturers sending them out in kit form to the provinces and colonies alike.

Licence Tin Tabernacle photographs here.

Cold Blooded Evil

The murders of six women in Ipswich in 2006 and subsequent 2008 trial of Steve Wright resulted in an enormous amount of media attention on the Suffolk town. Alongside the reporters, photographers and tv crews were a few that didn't quite fit in. They were the crime writers and even a playwright.

The first of these, Cold Blooded Evil, has appeared and uses a number of my images from both the investigation and Crown Court trial.

Buy Cold Blooded Evil here.
Licence Ipswich Prostitute Murders photographs here.

New Website...

My main site is having a rebuild. It will now function both as a window on my work, and an archive and image delivery system. It also allows for automatic on-line licensing of images. Currently their is an automatic redirect page, which will disappear when I sort out the CName. Comments about usability and any problems encountered with different systems and browsers are most welcome.

To go to site, click here.
The old site is here.

The Loss of a Friend...

A little while ago I photographed author, Stephen Foster, with his dogs for a Daily Mail feature on his life with these faithful companions. The session was a little hurried due to Ollie (on the right in the above photograph) having just returned from the vets and obviously being in need of rest.

A few days after the article ran Stephen called me to ask for some prints of Ollie as sadly he had been diagnosed with cancer and only had a few days left.

I dropped some prints at Stephen's and came across the melancholy sight of Ollie seemingly awaiting his fate, looking at me in the way that dogs always manage to when something is out of the ordinary.

There is something about the passing of a dog that affects people in a profound way. Cat owners don't seem to suffer the same fate. Maybe it's a cat's independence as opposed to a dog being totally dependent on it's owner. As a boy I too, like Stephen held my dog as the vet performed the final act to end it's suffering and it is something you never forget.

Stephen has since written a piece for the Times about the passing of Ollie. He writes that everybody has a story about the passing of a pet dog. It's true; they do.


Daily Mail article here.
Times article here.
Licence Stephen Foster photographs here.
Buy Walking Ollie here.
Buy Along Came Dylan here.

Holding Back the Years....

Sarah Burge, the self-styled Human Barbie has spent over £1/2millon on cosmetic treatments and surgery according to the Daily Express. The mother of three has racked up over 100 treatments in an effort to halt the aging process and now has the rather dubious honour of being a world record holder for cosmetic surgery.

She has admitted that she find going under the knife addictive and claims that she is not unhappy with her looks.

Over the years I have photographed a number of women who have had cosmetic surgery, and have to say that I find the whole thing very odd. Quite why anybody does it is beyond me. I've never seen anybody that looks natural or is entirely happy with the end result. (Stylists that I work with will agree; they have to hide the scars.) Usually there is an underlying unhappiness that they are trying to compensate for with the aid of surgery.

My advice..... don't do it.

Daily Mail article here.
Previous Daily Mail article here.
Licence Sarah Burge photographs here.

Last of the Family Silver...

Today, it has been announced that French state owned power company, EDF has bought British Energy PLC. EDF are planning to build another four power stations over the next decade. Not many years ago the selling off of Britain's nuclear industry to a foreign power would have been unthinkable, but considering every other utility and national industry has some element of foreign ownership, we should perhaps not be surprised.

One thing you can be sure of is that energy prices will not fall; currently EDF's UK customers pay £100 per year more for their energy than the French.

You may think it is odd that neither of the main political parties have raised questions over the bid. Perhaps this is due to EDF and related nuclear lobbying firms making donations to both Labour and the Conservative parties.

Interestingly it has also been noted that Andrew Brown, younger broth of Prime Minister, Gordon Brown is Director of Communications for EDF in the UK. One of Brown's key advisors is Ed Balls, whose father in law Tony Cooper, is a long standing nuclear lobbyist.

License British Energy photographs here