He is not, in other words, a good “minister for the Today programme”.On the other hand, he has a lifetime’s experience of the Labour Party and the union movement. Tony Blair had to call off last week’s planned cabinet reshuffle after furious objections from his deputy, John Prescott, to a proposal to sack the Labour Party chairman, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. The case is one of at least 13 alleged incidents of misconduct now close to going to trial.This week the most controversial of these cases – the alleged murder of the hotel receptionist Baha Mousa by members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment last September – will come before a British court for the first time.Mr Mousa’s death, first revealed by the IoS in January, will be at the centre of allegations in the High Court that the MoD has broken the Human Rights Act by failing to prevent the deaths and abuse of 29 Iraqi civilians by British troops, and failed to carry out independent investigations into these cases.. Ministers were forced to ask the Crown Prosecution Service and Metropolitan Police to take over the investigation. The change has already been made in Iraq, where responsibility for ordering a criminal inquiry was secretly passed in February to the Army’s most senior officers.The move follows the refusal of a commanding officer to let Army prosecutors charge a soldier for the alleged killing of an Iraqi called Hassan Abbad Said. An MoD document seen by the IoS reveals that ministers have ordered a major review of the way unlawful killings and alleged abuses by British troops are investigated, as part of a wider review of armed forces procedures.It could see a complete ban on the right of regimental commanders to stop the military police and Army Prosecuting Authority from charging soldiers.

Ministers have stripped Army commanders in Iraq of their power to veto criminal investigation of their troops after a string of cases alleging mistreatment of Iraqis.
The Independent on Sunday has also learnt that the Ministry of Defence is overhauling the controversial system of paying compensation to aggrieved Iraqis for alleged ill-treatment, deaths and damage to property. The intelligence and security services are making an “unacceptably high” number of mistakes bugging the wrong people, an official report has found. One intends to read “The Dog that Barked in the Night” (that’ll be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, if you haven’t found it yet).But one sounds like a normal person: “As many thrillers and novels as I can get my hands on as an antidote to the rest of my life.”* Communicate Research surveyed 58 Labour, 29 Conservative and 14 other MPs between 7 and 21 July.. Another responded grandly: “I intend to write a book in August.”Similar jolly souls heading for busmen’s holidays include a Welsh nationalist who is going to read “winning poetry and prose from the National Eisteddfod” and a Scottish nationalist packing Edward Cowan’s history of the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, For Freedom Alone: Scotland’s Declaration of Independence.When MPs try to sound in touch with literary fashion, they usually fail.

One poor sap has still not got round to The Long Road to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, having no doubt taken it on holiday for each of the past eight summers One will read “back copies of The Economist”. One hopes to tackle Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; another is taking Augustus: Godfather of Europe, by Richard Holland; and another wants to read Rubicon: Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland – although one plans to read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (“with or without my seven-year-old”) and another Tory names Rod Liddle’s bacchanalian novel, Too Beautiful for You.Labour MPs tend to be full of good intentions and attempts to impress. The only other book selected by more than one MP is Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything.For the rest, the MPs’ choices are idiosyncratic, but some patterns emerge Tory MPs seem fascinated by the Roman Empire. The next most popular with three mentions apiece, all by Labour MPs, are Churchill by Roy Jenkins, and Brick Lane by Monica Ali.Tories prefer The Great Deception, the anti-EU polemic by Christopher Booker and Richard North, while there is a cross-party consensus on Lynne Truss’s bestseller, the punctuation primer Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and on David Starkey’s Six Wives of Henry VIII. Still, 35 per cent of our sample do not expect to find time to read their books anyway.In a survey of 101 MPs by Communicate Research, nine mention the former US president’s memoir – six Labour, one Conservative and two others.