News is just emerging about a statement that Alistair Darling will be making to MPs this afternoon about an “operation problem” at HM Revenue and Customs. It is said that millions of records have been “lost”. On the “Next Chancellor” betting market Ed Balls is now priced at evens. Mike Smithson
Will playing the terror card deflect attention from PMQs? For the first time in three weeks there’ll be PMQs in the commons and after the recent batterings Brown is going to extraordinary length to dominate the news agenda today. According to the Mole column in the First Post the PM “has taken charge of a major announcement…on terrorism and border controls in order to steady the ship when everyone else is looking decidedly sea-sick.Lord West, the former First Sea Lord,…
Who is going to be the next one in the job? This is the Betfair market on the next home secretary which, given the current pressure on Jacqui Smith, might just be something that could take off fast. I find this a hard call but the chances of her hanging in there until a 2009 or 2010 general election must be pretty slim. So which of the current Labour ministers on the list would get the promotion. I quite fancy…
How the numbers show that he has a lot to smile about Judging by the latest round of press comment and the reaction to the polls you would have thought that Brown had brought his party to the point of electoral disaster with an inglorious election defeat being the only possible outcome. Yet are these perceptions correct? For the numbers suggest that under Gordon Labour’s polling position has been transformed with the number of people telling pollsters they would vote…
Has the Guardian columnist got the right approach for Labour? There’s an interesting critique of the government’s legislative programme in the Guardian this morning from the writer who used to be one of Brown’s greatest cheer-leaders – Polly Toynbee. Her argument is that Labour needs to develop a rhetoric that goes well beyond the term “aspire” that seems to have been the guiding force behind the Queen’s Speech. Polly suggests that insteads the notion on “fairness to all” could be…
Or could more flexible working just alienate the childless? Generally the most reliable guide to what the Brown political machine is up to is in The Mole column in the First Post online magazine. And yesterday while everybody was talking about how the leaders performed “The Mole” was reporting that the plans to extend flexible working for people with children was what would “grab the headlines in the morning.” Certainly the idea has caught the attention of the Times and…
Party funding proposals “put on hold? I don’t know whether anybody at Number 10 read yesterday’s thread on the Ashcroft money but one of the big surprises in the Queen’s Speech was the absence of a plan to bring in immediate legislation on party funding. This is contrary to all the reports over the weekend that suggested the Government would include legislative plans to deal with Ashcroft’s support for Tory marginals between elections. In fact all we got was a…
Should Labour go through all this grief for £72,970? Three developments in the past 24 hours have convinced me that Brown is taking a mega-risk by seeking to stop Michael Ashcroft money going to support pre-election campaigning in Tory marginals while doing nothing about the general issue of political funding. Firstly it opens up again the whole issue of “cash for honours” which was seized on by Lib Dem leadership hopeful, Chris Huhne, yesterday when he said that there was…