Asahi.com Hatoyama will be next PM, DPJ has majority on its own The results from Japan’s general election are not quite complete, but what is clear is that the voters have delivered an earthquake to the ruling LDP, which has governed the country for almost all of the last 50 years. The DPJ has confirmed that it will lead a coalition including the Social Democrats and the People’s New Party, despite the fact that it will have about 70 more…
Aren’t dirty deals sometimes necessary? The Tories, quite rightly in political terms, are trying to squeeze as much as possible from the latest revelations suggesting that the Lockerbie bomber’s release was one of the prices that the Labour government seems to have been prepared to pay as part of an oil deal with the Libyans. But what would a Cameron government have done in such a situation? Would it, in the interests of ensuring energy supplies, have followed exactly the…
Mail But will he lose the post-visit PR war? There’s an interesting angle on Brown’s surprise trip to Afghanistan in the Mail on Sunday this morning which has all the potential to blow up into a big incident. According to the paper the Tory leader was forced to call off a trip to the country after discovering that the PM had beaten him to it. The report goes on: “The Tory leader scrapped his own visit – which has been…
Sunday Times Was it a “murky” deal for oil after all? The main lead in the Sunday Times tomorrow looks set to take the Megrahi release debate into new territory for the paper says it has leaked ministerial letters suggesting this was all about an oil deal with Libya. This is how the story starts: “The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom†to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for…
BBC online Won’t his trip just highlight the problems? The big political story this afternoon is the surprise trip by Gordon Brown to Afghanistan and the suggestions that the scale of the British deployment might have to be increased. Fine – but what’s the political point at a time when the opinion polls have shown increasing scepticism amongst voters to the whole undertaking? Such a visit over such a distance is a massive undertaking and there really has to be…
Could his intervention thwart the Tories? Probably the biggest election, certainly in terms of the number of voters involved, in the UK before the general election takes place in Bedford in October when there’s a by-election for the post of elected mayor. This follows the death a fortnight ago of the union activist turned multi-millionaire media entrepreneur, Frank Branston, who had held the position since it was created six years ago. What’s interesting is that he was an independent who…
Reuters MORI has Scots more evenly split Just trying to keep up with the Scottish polls on Megrahi is getting to be quite difficult and there has been another one overnight – by MORI for the Reuters news agency. This found that 40% of Scots were in favour of the decision with 47% opposed – so numbers that are more sympathetic to the SNP position than the ICM poll reported earlier. It’s hard to compare one poll with another because…
BBC News Scotland ICM suggests both have been damaged Only a few days ago I was bemoaning the fact that there did not seem to be any polls of Scottish opinion on the release of Megrahi – the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and murder of 270 people. Well this evening we have a second with strong suggestions that there might be another one this weekend. The survey is by ICM for the BBC and is of 1,005 people…