Daily Mail What will Esther and Chilcott do to Luton South An interesting little side story of the coming general election is what happens in Luton South – one of the seats listed here earlier in the week as being high on the target list for the Tories and one they really need to take in order to get a majority. Looking at the 2005 notionals LAB 42.8: CON 28.1: LD 22.5 this should fall easily to the Cameron juggernaut…
Could the Mirror’s splash damage the Tories? Thanks to one or two contributors on the overnight thread for picking up this – the main story in the Mirror . For after a day which saw Gordon Brown at his most confident for months the paper’s exclusive, presumably from publicly available material, is that amongst the receipts in Cameron’s claims were those for four or five chocolate bars. These were under Cameron’s claims for his administrative and office allowance As the…
Telegraph How’s it going to affect the party political battle? My first reaction when I saw the front page of this morning’s Telegraph was, I guess, hardly unique – what was the political affiliation of the six who appear to form the next stage of the ongoing expenses saga? For until the election is over and the votes are counted we are going to be in a high-octane political atmosphere as the Tories sense victory and Labour tries to hold…
BBC news What a terrible day for UKIP for this to come out? On the day after the Tory change of heart on the Lisbon referendum the anti-EU party that did so well last June, UKIP, must have been hoping for better headlines than this. This was the opportunity, surely, for them to be presenting themselves as an alternative to Cameron’s Tories. And what happens? We get the news from Southwark Crown court and UKIP has to deal with terrible…
BBC News Making money on McNulty’s money-making It’s been an up and down eight months for the McNulty troughing backers – those of us who piled into the William Hill market at the end of March taking as much as we could of the 5/1 bet that the former minister would have to pay back some of his housing claims for the mortgage on a house he owns in his Harrow constituency where his parent live. At the end of…
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…
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….
Telegraph Have the Telegraph editors lost their sense of proportion? If you had been following the PB thread last night and had monitored other political blogs then you’d have thought that the political world as we know it was about to come to an end. I was being texted and called with the news that something “very big was going to break”. The story came out at 10pm and looking at how the paper has treated it you would have…