No laughing matter
Could somebody, anybody, supply the prime minister with a few new gags? This afternoon, in a Q&A session at the
My Two Cents...on the general election campaign
The polls continue to suggest a general election is imminent and that the Tories will be trounced. I don't want to say "I told you so" to the Cameroons who underestimated Gordon Brown prior to his accession to the Prime Ministership so instead here are my suggestions as to how the Tories might at least be able to stave off Armageddon should an election be called in the next few weeks.
Active preparation?
The BBC has learnt that over the past 24 hours the Labour Party has begun recruiting key staff to work on an election campaign. The BBC has spoken to a number of individuals who have been asked if they can begin work on Monday. The people approached are currently self-employed or work for lobbyists, organisations sympathetic to Labour or in other political posts from which they can be released immediately.
Boris wins 79% in mayoral vote
Boris Johnson: 15,661 (79.0%) Victoria Borwick: 1,869 (9.4%) Andrew Boff: 1,674 (8.4%)
Boris, Ken, Gordon And Celebrity Politics
No surprise at all that Boris Johnson has won the primary to be Conservative Candidate in next years London Mayor election. The Mayor posts introduced by the Blair Government are a unique innovation - an individual directly elected to the top job - and all the evidence is that having a big media footprint helps.
Boris the Buffoon - an insult to London
So Boris the Buffoon Johnson is the Tory candidate for Mayor of London. Heaven help us if his very personal brand of tomfoolery actually makes it into City Hall. A Conservative Party spokesman said the contest had "captured the interest of the public and helped challenge voter apathy". That's a joke. Boris won 75% of the votes cast in the open Tory primary, but only 20,000 people bothered to take part.
Boris Johnson - Conservative candidate for Mayor of
Boris Johnson (hero of the people and all round bon oeuf) was confirmed this morning as the official conservative candidate for Mayor of London.
Red Mist
Does everyone have their own vision of Utopia? Or is it just the optimists? I think our political system encourages pessimists and encourages voters to be pessimistic. We always end up with the least-worst rather than the best-possible. It's a shame, because I think we should have a more forward-looking environment instead of the side-swiping gimmickry we suffer from now. I have to resist watching the news or political programmes because I quickly descend into a red mist. I get angry, but I suspect that many just switch over. This is the kind of stuff which puts people off:
How little they understand
One of the great pre-requisites for being in favour of the European Union, it seems, is knowing little or nothing about how it works.
EU Referendum
The past is another country
Labour 07: For the first time in years, the conference is free of Blair-Brown rivalry. But has the energy disappeared too?
Sleep walking into a one party state
Thoughts on the date of the election and the day on which Comrade Chairman Brown will call it vary from one person to another. I wrote the other day that I think he will call it this Monday for 25th Oct. Since then the share value of an announcement tomorrow, Friday, has risen, as has the prospect of the election being on 1st Nov.
The election: what Gordon should do.
I don't know whether Gordon Brown is going to call an autumn general election, and if the amount of bet-hedging and fence-sitting going on in
Why is the Times leading on the plagiarism suggestions?
Reproduced here is the front page of this morning’s Times showing the lead story which won’t please Number 10. For Labour’s new leader is accused of “rehashing old phrases from Bill Clinton and Al Gore without attribution in his first speech to a Labour conference as Prime Minister”.
My rule of thumb for assessing the polls
With so many polls showing such different pictures I’ve now adopted my own “rule of thumb” for working out what the big picture is. Basically I take the latest surveys from YouGov, Mori, ComRes, ICM and Populus and take the second lowest share for Labour and the second highest shares for the Tories and Lib Dems.
Are the kids all right?
The battle for Gordon's ear is fast becoming a battle of the generations. It is the kids of the Cabinet who are arguing most vociferously for him to go the polls. It is the Cabinet's grey hairs who are worrying about how it might go horribly wrong.
Sketch: Brown Q&A
Before Gordon Brown took to the conference stage for the second time in three days the Human League's pop classic "I just can't get enough" blared over the PA. By the end of the question-and-answer session the journalists, if not the delegates, certainly had.
The right way to harmonise taxes, if you must do it
With the news earlier this week of business support for a common corporate tax base in the EU, it seems little will stop
EXCLUSIVE: Bercow's
John Bercow, the Tory MP widely tipped to be the next prominent Conservative to defect to Labour, has told Sky News he will not be attending his party's conference in Blackpool next week.
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