How fitting that while Ricky Gervais and Phil Jupitus share a birthday with Michel Tremblay, a Canadian writer I studied as part of my degree, the US should be celebrating National Catfish Day.
Two big stories
Another climbdown for Brown as the Government backs off plans to bolster MPs’ pensions. Just hours after Clegg took Brown to task at PMQs for being wrong about Gurkhas, wrong about expenses and the Iraq enquiry. Now he’s admitted to being wrong about MPs’ pensions too. A planned increase had been accepted by all parties in March but the government now says it will accept a Lib Dem plan to freeze the amount from public funds. The proposal would have seen MPs’ own contributions rise by £60 a month, but the Lib Dems said taxpayers would have paid £750,000 more than last year.
And a curious story from the Guardian: Tory plans for emergency cuts cabinet – one of those headlines you have to look at backwards for a few minutes to work out the sense. Is it a Tory, planning for an emergency, deciding to cut cabinet? Ah, no, as we read the story, it is about an emergency cuts cabinet the Tories are planning. Scant seconds after wresting the reins of power from the disgraced Labour party, it seems the Tories would be careering the sleigh into the Forest of Slash and Burn, at least as far as the Guardian is concerned. So is this a real story? the scant attribution makes one wonder, but it is too detailed to be more Labour spin, so presumably Tories must have been briefing journalists at some point. And there’s the small matter of Dave winning an election first before George ever gets any opportunity to haul cabinet ministers over the coals for their spending plans.
2 must read blog posts
Stop the world, Andrew Reeves wants to get off. Or at least stop the madness that is 4 year olds having their own mobile phone. Fair enough, say I.
And the newly co-opted Cllr Lady Mark is getting to grips with his new representative role by looking into the vexed question of bus stops in Creeting St Peter. For the uninitiated, Lady Mark’s title is a protest at inequity: he’s married to Baroness Ros Scott, the fair president of this good party. Whilst female spouses of male peers get the courtesy title “lady”, male spouses of female peers and civil partners of peers do not have the courtesy extended to them.
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2 Comments
re: cuts cabinet. Tory Shadow Chief Sect. to Treasury was on newsnight last night, and he was hilarious. Paxo started by asking him about whether they would have such an emergency cabinet and his initial response was “the Guardian is just speculating.” Paxo (as only he can do) asked again and again, eventually said Tory crumbled and said (I paraphrase) “yes we would drastically cut spending, yes we would meet soon after taking power to discuss how to do this, yes this would be a full cabinet meeting, yes the Guardian is therefore spot on.”
I only made the very last bit up…
If Mark and Ros were the opposite gender, he would be Lady Scott; Lady Mark Scott is the title of the daughter of an Earl, Marquis or Duke. I think that adopting the title of the son of a peer, as the Hon. Mark Scott would be hugely sensible.