Stunning hypocrisy from William Hague ?

Craig Murray writes on his blog about attempts to smear the man behind Wikileaks, but finishes his article with a comment about how he himself has tried to clear his name of accusations and smears put across by the Foreign Office.

To quote Craig

Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated - but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these "serious allegations".

 Now today William Hague has released a statement making clear that false allegations made against him are untrue and have no basis in fact. This must be very upsetting for William Hague. So why won't William Hague or his department do the same for Craig Murray and clear his name ?

Isn't this a case of absolutely stunning hypocrisy ?

Judge a person by their actions, not words

When looking fairly randomly through some articles on wikipedia, I was struck by this sentence about William Hague in relation to the former Tory MP Shaun Woodward.

"he was a front-bench spokesman on London for the Conservative opposition under William Hague until 1999, when he was sacked for supporting the repeal of Section 28,[2] a regulation which prevented the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools."

It says all I need to know about William Hague's values.

Tories tell the BBC that they "will use Lib Dem stance on EU referendum to attack and win Lib Dem seats"

William Hague outlined today on the Andrew Marr show how the Tories will use the Lib Dems broken promise to have a referendum on the EU Constitution (renamed the EU Reform Treaty) to target and win Liberal Democrat seats in a future General Election .

He told Andrew Marr that Lib Dem MP's " in marginal seats will have to remember that their breach of that promise is something we will remind their constituents about in some detail at the next general election."

And to be honest, who could blame the Tories for doing this ? It is what we as a party do so well, We find issues that the public believe in, issues the public support, we find evidence that Tories/Labour (delete as applicable) have ignored the public on an issue and we stick it on a piece of paper and shove it through the electors letter boxes.

As it appears, and as the article on the BBC website explains, there is unique opportunity for the Lib Dems to defeat Gordon Brown on this issue. It is a golden opportunity for any new Lib Dem leader to make a mark, for the party to show that we really do trust the people, but in the same way as we saved John Major's neck back in 1993 when Lib Dem MP's marched in to the lobby's with the Tories to support the Maastricht Treaty, on an issue that John Major referred to openly as a "confidence vote", the party is in danger of showing itself to be government lackeys, toeing a line that the public neither support or the voters, in the short term, will forgive us for.

What a wasted opportunity.