Red rag

The Telegraph reports that Gordon Brown was disappointed when Katherine Jenkins refused an invitation to sing The Red Flag at the close of the Labour party conference last Thursday. 

“Senior party figures” pleaded with Miss Jenkins to add a deperately-needed touch of pizzazz to the gloomy Brighton gathering but were told that she was unavailable:

“She keeps her politics to herself, and prefers to keep it to the voting booth,” says a spokesman for the Neath-born mezzo-soprano. “Katherine was already doing a whole day of programmes for Welsh radio stations that day.”

I do hope, for his own and his party’s sake, that Neath MP Peter Hain was not one of the “senior figures” deputed to do the pleading; he already has an unfortunate record of displeasing Miss Jenkins. 

Prior to the 2005 general election, Hain was obliged to issue an apology to a “furious” Katherine after using her photograph on his campaign literature.

Miss Jenkins’s manager commented at the time:

“Katherine has no political leanings whatsoever. People have been coming up to [her mother] Susan in the street and saying, ‘We didn’t know your Katherine was a Labour supporter.’

“I have spoken to Peter Hain’s agent who says he is anxious to get hold of Katherine to explain but she is not interested in an explanation. What she wants is an apology.

“This has really upset Katherine’s mam, who is anything but a Labour supporter. It has horrified her.”

In the circumstances, any approach by Hain to the diva would have been rather like waving a red flag at a bull.