Pandora reports: The last thing Tony Blair needs right now is for another loyal minister's head to appear on the chopping block. If he thought Tessa Jowell was out of the woods, he'd better think again, though. The Culture Secretary, only recently recovered from the David Mills affair, is about to be thrown back into the firing line. Last week, Pandora raised an eyebrow at Jowell's comments in Parliament about a (highly criticised) decision to award a £30,000 lottery grant to Manchester United. It was, she said, nothing to do with her. "This decision was taken by the regional sports board of Sports England. This was not a decision ministers were party to." As I pointed out, these comments directly contradict those of the Sports Minister, Richard Caborn, who had days earlier told The Sunday Telegraph that he was "directly involved" in that very decision. They can't have both been telling the truth. And tomorrow, the Conservative MP Nigel Evans will table two Parliamentary Questions to find out what's been going on. The questions, drafts of which have been seen by this column, will require Jowell to confirm that the comments she made to Parliament were accurate. Presuming that she replies in the affirmative, MPs can draw two explanations. Either Caborn lied to The Sunday Telegraph; or he told truth, but Jowell was ignorant of what he was up to. Either way, it won't look good.

Here's the relevant exchange in the Commons.
Here's the Telegraph article.
Here's a report from the BBC.

There's a lot of dirt to be dug up here... Labour's behaviour over lottery funds has raised many questions in the past, with the direction of funds somehow straying to pet/high-profile projects and/or programmes that should be covered by mainstream taxation. There's also the matter of the illusion of charity... in 2003, Camelot ran a series of ads that focused on the recipients of grants, implying - as Private Eye put it - that purchasing a lottery ticket was "an act of charity rather than a business transaction (looking) very much like a breach of both Camelot’s own code of practice and the ITC rules for television advertising."

There's also all those questions about other cash that may or may not have passed through Jowell's hands and/or field of vision (leading to this gloriously spirited defence) that will be raised all over again as a result of this story.