Siân Lloyd, TV weather presenter and former fiancé of the Lib Dems’ very own cheeky boy, Lembit Öpik, is re-engaged… to a millionaire motor-racing entrepreneur. Ms Lloyd confirmed the news yesterday to the Western Mail, saying she was “walking on air”. The paper adds:
Mr Opik, who has famously gone on to date Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia, yesterday congratulated the happy couple.
It looks like forthcoming report from the IPPR (a left-leaning think tank that is very well-connected in Labour circles) could be an interesting read:
The Government’s flagship Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos) are creating a culture that encourages children into crime, according to a think-tank.
The measures can become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of offending and should not be applied to under-12s, the Institute for Public Policy Reform (ippr) warned…
A report due to be published by the think-tank next month warns of a burgeoning “Asbo culture” and urges that they should only be handed to children under 12 if accompanied by family or parenting
…
Today’s Sunday Times carries a report based on a lengthy interview with Liberal Democrat London Mayor candidate Brian Paddick:
SIR IAN BLAIR, the embattled Metropolitan police commissioner, has been further undermined by claims that his force has become arrogant with power and that a group of senior officers see themselves as “untouchable”.
Brian Paddick, the former deputy assistant commissioner who is running for mayor of London, also claims that a senior civil servant, whose investigation of Met expenses has led to one high-profile resignation and two arrests, is regarded as a
…
The Sunday Times reports:
ONE of Labour’s biggest donors was able secretly to channel more than £300,000 into the party’s election funds through an Islamic lobby group that hid his identity.
Inquiries by The Sunday Times have established that Imran Khand, a 43-year-old computer entrepreneur, was behind three large donations to the party earlier this year.
But his name was never disclosed to the Electoral Commission, which regulates party funding, because the money was given in the name of Muslim Friends of Labour, a lobby group.
Separately, Harriet Harman’s deputy leadership campaign registered a £5,000 donation from Muslim Friends, when the cash was
…
The Councillors Commission, chaired by the former Labour leader of Camden Council (Jane Roberts), is due to report to the Government on Monday and leaks to the media suggest some highly controversial proposals will be included.
The media coverage has led on proposals to significantly increase the money paid to councillors.
But in the leaks are two other hot potatoes: the suggestion that council by-elections should be axed (and instead any vacancies filled from a list of names) and the suggestion that term-limits should be introduced for local government elections.
Welcome, one and all, to our second helping of weekend cheer free from any mention of you-know-what, as the race between you-know-who and you-know-who nears its end.
In this week’s bulging package: an impermissible donation for the Tories; some good news for Alistar Darling; why Mark Pack could be moving to Stockton; and more!
Quick alert for those wanting to see/hear Lib Dem MPs live on air in the next three days:
• Tonight (Fri), acting Lib Dem leader Vince Cable will be on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions at 8.00 pm (repeated Saturday, 1.10 pm);
• On Sunday morning, Vince (again) will be on BBC1’s Sunday AM (9.00 am), being interviewed by Andrew Marr;
• Also on Sunday, Lord Ashdown will be on Sky News’s The Adam Boulton Programme at (some point from) 10.00 am;
• And on Sunday night, both Lynne Featherstone and David Laws will be on BBC Radio …
‘Aggressive Huhne could run it close’ – at least, so says Guardian political commentator, Michael White:
Conventional wisdom continues to insist that Nick Clegg, frontrunner to succeed Ming Campbell since his hara-kiri in October, will win when the result is declared on December 18. It will be 55% to 45%, the sages predict. But straws in the wind, not all floated by the Huhne camp, suggest that their man’s aggressive headline grabbing, coupled with his strong showing in head-to-head hustings, may make for a closer result, even a shock win.
White also draws an interesting comparison between the current Clegg-Huhne …
In the last of the five video questions put to Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne, the candidates were asked what they would do as Party Leader to raise the profile of the Liberal Democrats.
The party’s extranet is a resource for party activists, elected representatives (including councillors) and staff and the home for artwork, campaign materials, policy briefings and also resources to accompany the party’s big national campaigns, such as the crime and health ones.
Access is open to all party councillors, staff, approved Parliamentary candidates, local party Chairs, EARS officers and Membership Secretaries, trainers and up to eight other nominated people per local party.
Full access details are on the site and if you’ve not yet registered, you can kick off the registration process online too.
And now, some variety. It’s a donation story and it doesn’t feature Labour.
Over to the East London Advertiser:
A NEW crisis has engulfed MP George Galloway‘s troubled Respect party after it emerged this week that the Electoral Commission has been called in over a suspected unlawful foreign donation.
The election watchdog is probing a $10,000 cheque from a Dubai construction company that ended up in the bank account of an organisation set up by Respect, the East London Advertiser can reveal.
Even more troubling for Left Wing Respect is the donor company is owned by one of Britain’s biggest private finance initiative
…
Crikey, this is bizarre, so let’s take things one by one.
1. Ken Follett (husband of Barbara Follett, Labour MP and Equality Minister) tells Andrew Marr’s Sunday AM program that, “She spends all of her allowances and all of her salary running her office and I actually subsidise it to the tune of at least a hundred thousand pounds a year.”
2. The Huntsman blog posts saying that (a) these subsidies need to be declared under the law, and (b) there’s no record of any such declarations.
3. Barbara Follett responds with a statement, exclusively published by Pink News, which …
Oh well, it’s a good thing I included the words “so far” when I wrote this morning that, “Today’s round-up of Labour donation news looks pretty simple so far. Just the one story.”
Because here’s the second of the day.
It’s about Barbara Follett, whose husband has talked about how he provides over £100,000 per year to help run her constituency office.
One slight problem. None of the money seems to have been declared, which is a bit problematic when you start looking at the rules.
The Huntsman (from where I’ve got this story) has got all the details and poses these …
Ah, Christmas time. The cheer. The mince pies. The gifts. The snow.
Not so happy a time for Labour: The scandals. The political turkeys. The dodgy donations. The rain.
Gordon Brown must be looking forward to having some time off, putting his feet up in front of the fire (let’s not wonder which documents he might like to use as tinder), and trying not to think about where it all went wrong. If he needs a reminder, though, we’re here to help.
What better way to keep track of Labour’s problems at this time of year than with an Advent Calendar? (Yes, we …
The penultimate question put to the leadership candidates as part of the party’s YouTube hustings was from Stuart Weir from the University of Essex. He asked about social justice and for the candidates’ views on economic, social, environmental and cultural rights.
Danny Alexander has got widespread coverage today for his shocking piece of research showing that pensioners are worse off than in 1950. As his news release says:
On the day that the Government has announced the level of benefits for next year, the Liberal Democrats have released figures showing that pensioners now receive less than in 1950.
The figures show that pensioners now receive only 15.9% of the average wage, compared to 18.4% in 1950.
Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Danny Alexander MP said:
“These figures are disgraceful. We have had a Labour government for ten years, and yet pensioners
…
Today’s round-up of Labour donation news looks pretty simple so far. Just the one story. It’s a bit of an explosive one mind:
Labour helped Abrahams set up secret cash transfers
Scheme designed by lawyers and party officials to conceal donor’s identityLabour officials helped lawyers acting for David Abrahams to draw up complex covenants that allowed the millionaire businessman to pay up to £650,000 indirectly to the party, the Guardian has learned.
Gulp.
The Guardian’s full story has more details.
Good news for Labour! Latest political financial scandal doesn’t involve David Abrahams.
Bad news for Labour! It still involves Labour, in this case London Mayor Ken Livingstone:
A senior adviser to London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, is under investigation after at least £2.5 million in public money was channelled to organisations controlled by himself, his friends and his business associates.
Lee Jasper, the Mayor’s director of equalities and policing, is at the centre of a network of companies which have received large sums of public money from Mr Livingstone while appearing to do little or no work in return.
An investigation by the Evening Standard
…
No quips today – acting Lib Dem leader Vince Cable returned to the scene of his triumph last week to quiz the Prime Minister on Northern Rock, demanding once again to know what guarantees Labour has received that the taxpayers’ loan to the troubled bank will be repaid – and why he still refuses to countenance temporary nationalisation to protect the interests of the British people.
(Rather bizarrely, Sky News’s Boulton & Co blog asserts that Vince “got lost with lacklustre questions” – which I think says more about their preference for Commons’ theatrics than it does about Vince’s pointed, and to-the-point questions.)
Anyway, here’s the exchange in full:
Despite supporting Everton I’m a bit of a football fan, so I was interested to read this thought-provoking article by Simon Kuper in today’s Financial Times. He rejects some of the recent isolationist talk that England’s national team suffers from the lack of English players in the Premiership: “ problem is not that too few Englishmen play in the Premier League, but that too many do.”
Kuper points out the obvious: that it is statistically probable England will fail to qualify for some big tournaments:
England’s historical average yields a probability of about 62 per cent of qualifying for a major
…
At the weekend, Nick Clegg’s campaign team released their canvassing figures of c.6,000 members showing Nick polling around 60% of the vote. The party estimates that about half the ballot papers issued have been returned; in 2006, c.70% of members voted. Taken at face value, this would suggest that Chris Huhne needs to persuade a large number of those who’ve sat on their hands til now to cast their vote for him.
Chris Huhne’s campaign team have just now issued details of polling figures “obtained by an independent third party organisation” (not named), showing undecided Lib Dem voters breaking …
In the light of the Labour Party’s trouble with candidates failing to report donations to the Electoral Commission, it is reassuring to see that the Electoral Commission has published the first list of donors to the Chris Huhne campaign (see here and select “Mr Chris Huhne MP” from the drop-down list) .
The Voice understands that the first tranche of Nick Clegg donations will also appear on their website in the next few days.
UPDATE (6 December): The first batch of Nick Clegg donations are indeed now up on the website.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse…
A man registered as a Labour donor in 2004 claims he never gave them a penny, and fears he is the victim of a Labour-supporting identity thief. If the Labour party *do* find the missing HMRC disc, could those on it be at even greater risk of identity theft?
So says The Guardian:
Gordon Brown and President George Bush are expected in the next week to bring some badly needed coordination to aid and military effort in Afghanistan by appointing Lord Ashdown as super-envoy to the country. Brown is set to make the announcement to MPs before the Commons rises for Christmas in what is seen as a statement of his foreign policy approach to the fight against terrorism. …
Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, is being asked to coordinate the roles of the UN and Nato for the first time, and is likely to pursue a political
…
The third of the five video questions put to Mr Clegg and Mr Huhne asked about how the candidates would improve the involvement of fathers in the lives of their children. Here are the question and their answers, which both touch on the candidates’ own experiences as fathers.
Rumours abound that Labour MSP Charlie Gordon may be about to quit over the Wendy Alexander Scottish Labour leadership campaign’s illegal donation.
As the Daily Record reports:
LEADING Labour MSP Charlie Gordon looks set to quit Holyrood after the devastating revelations about illegal donations in yesterday’s Daily Record.
He will make a statement about his “political future” this week.
That fuelled speculation he is poised to quit Holyrood.
As he arrived for a crunch meeting of Labour MSPs yesterday, all Gordon would say was: “I’ll make an announcement about my political future later this week.”
His comments came after the Record revealed Gordon secured illegal
…
Which Lib Dem MPs received the most media mentions between 1st September 2007 and 30th November, 2007? To find out I trawled Lexis-Nexis’s online database of all UK national newspapers (and a huge number of regional ones), feeding in the names of each of our MPs in turn, and seeing how many returns were generated.
To qualify, the MP must have been mentioned either as a Liberal Democrat or Lib Dem. This will disadvantage those MPs who are working their regional media hard, but whose names do not appear under the party’s banners. Sorry, but them’s the rules.
Anyway, here’s the list in descending order of media mentions (with their 2006-07 positions in brackets):
Here we go again.
A former chairman of the Humberside Police Authority has been arrested in Northern Ireland on suspicion of gross indecency and other offences.
Hull City Councillor Steven Bayes, 45, was detained in the centre of Belfast on Monday morning. He has since been released on bail.
Full story on the BBC website.
I think it’s safe to say it’s not a good day, week or month to be a member of the Labour Party.
Try to imagine a law that said “you can watch this film totally legally at your local multiplex, but it’s illegal to possess a still image from the film and you could be imprisoned if you do.” Sounds a little odd?
How about a law saying “you can engage in a wholly legal activity and take a legal photograph of that activity, but if you keep the photograph, you could be sent to prison.”
In fact, just such a law is currently passing through parliament and, worryingly, it isn’t clear that the Liberal Democrats will even oppose it.
The legislation in question is …
… but if the news keeps on spilling out, what can a blogger do?
Today’s news – the person (Paul Green) who gave an illegal donation to Wendy Alexander’s Scottish Labour Leadership campaign has said that:
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