Legg rules that he doesn’t have to pay anything back? At the end of March several PBers, including me, risked their cash on the William Hill market that the former minister, Tony McNulty, would be forced to pay money back following reports that he’d claimed £60,000 of taxpayers’ money for the mortgage on a house he owns in his Harrow constituency where his parent live. As was reported this was close to his constituency office and just 11 miles from…
And is it made worse by the decision on Jacqui? Almost all the front pages this morning are devoted to the second eruption of the MPs expenses scandal and, in particular, the focus on Mr. Brown. We wait to see whether the further inquiries of Cameron will produce bad headlines for him but for the moment the fact that the PM is going to have to pay a slab of money back is not going to help his chances of…
CON 40 (-1) LAB 30 (+3) LD 18 (nc) What a difference from ICM This is quite a dramatic poll which is very unexpected simply because Populus operates in a very similar manner to ICM and indeed usually uses the firm for its field-work. So the variance from the ICM survey published only yesterday is quite remarkable, One thing I will be looking at when the data is published is the scale of the “spiral of silence adjustment” where Populus…
Fieldwork work starts later in the week I was asked on the previous thread about the time-table for PB’s exclusive new poll. Later this week fieldwork starts on the first of the monthly surveys that we’ll have here right upto the general election. There will be a formal announcement by the company involved, one of the biggest names in world polling, next Monday. The findings will then be published here on Tuesday or Wednesday. The detailed data will be made…
BBC
SkyNews Could this affair explode again? It’s been a bit of an up and downer for former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, this morning. With minutes of the report on last December’s arrest of Damien Green there’s news that no further action will be taken against her on her expenses. The investigation into the Green arrest has concluded that the documents that were being handed over to Green “did not contain information which threatened to undermine national security or Government effectiveness”…
Showing today on a TV screen near you So it’s the first day of the new term and every MP is due to receive a letter reviving the whole MPs expenses scandal. There’s been a build-up over the weekend and clearly some prominent names, including it seems Mr. G. Brown, are going to be told to hand money back. Now, as several papers are reporting, there are suggestions of a revolt with talk of Sir Thomas Legg’s report being rejected….
Bedfordshire on Sunday Are punters reading this one right? With the Tories keen to keep up the Manchester momentum David Cameron is heading back to Bedford tomorrow where what will almost certainly be the biggest electoral test anywhere before the general election takes place on Thursday. At the stake is a by-election for one of the “US-style” mayor posts. There’s an electorate of 117,000 and there’s been a whole stream of leading politicians heading there in the past week. The…