Post links to sleaze stories in the comments and Guido will summarise them.   It is a dirty job, but someone has to do it…

Frank Cook claimed  back a £5 donation made at a church service to commemorate the sacrifice of RAF pilots.  The left wing MP for Stockton North signed the claim thus: “Battle of Britain church service, Sunday 17.09.06. £5 contribution to offertory on behalf of Frank Cook MP.”  Where do you start?

Multi-millionaire Labour backbencher Mohammed Sarwar claimed £100,000 to cover mortgage interest that he paid from an account with a Swiss bank. Tax needn’t be taxing…

Lord Clarke of Hampstead, former chairman of the Labour Party, admits he fiddled expenses, but he is remorseful. “It looks like I’ve made a terrible error…. I’m responsible for my own actions . . . If I have to go to the wall and my life is finished in terms of political or public life . . . then so be it . . . I regret what I’ve done and shall be seeking to make amends by speaking to the accountants.” Wonder if that “remorseful” line will work for pickpockets?

The Sunday Times has a claim that Gordon is going to attempt a last reshuffle immediately the day after the Thursday election.  He wants to put Ed Balls in number 11.  Hell why not, the insane Caligula tried make his horse a consul.  The Prime Mentalist making his most loathed acolyte the second most important person in government should be worth another 5% off Labour’s polling.  Go ahead Gordon, make Guido’s day…

Who could the “high-level” source of the story be?  Mandelson blocking Balls by front-running Ed’s ambitions to provoke a backlash?  One bit of the story made Guido laugh -

Balls, who is widely respected in the City, could appear a younger, fresher face than Alistair Darling to take on George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, in the run-up to the elections.

Widely respected by who?  He is despised in the City by everyone who has had dealings with him.  Is Balls pushing this story himself?  If so he must be as mad as his fuhrer.  Is everyone in the bunker bonkers?

Nokias will be bouncing off the walls…

It is election time and leafleting canvassers can be annoying pests knocking at your door.  Print out this poster and attach it to the nearest street lamp post outside your house, remembering of course to fill in the name of your expense troughing local MP in the space provided. Piano wire can be useful to secure the poster to the lamp post. You may want to keep some spare…

According to a Populus poll for The Times,  the Tories are on 30%, UKIP have surged to 19%, Labour fell to 16%, the Liberal Democrats are on 12%.  The Greens are on 10% and the BNP trail with 5%.  The BNP will be lucky to get a seat…

He will not resign immediately, he still wants to keep claiming his salary and expenses. Claims it was all a mistake and there was no question of deliberate intent.  Well that will clearly be his defence.  Whether it will wash with a jury remains to be seen.

Danny Finkelstein seems set on winding Guido up (again). Having fought a long media campaign against the Tories making the case for lower taxes in The Times, on Newsnight and via text messages to George Osborne,  he is now arguing for higher pay for MPs to make up for their reduced future opportunities to fiddle their expenses.

MPs’ expenses alone almost match average mean earnings, in fact after tax is deducted, MPs’ tax-free perks alone exceed average (net) mean earnings.  Their salaries are triple what the average voter / taxpayer earns, add in their perks and it is quadruple what the average voter / taxpayer earns.  The chart above (source) shows income distribution in Britain.  See how MPs are way over-paid already.

The “mob” referred to last night in his set-to* with Kelvin MacKenzie on Newsnight might not be part of the metropolitan media class struggling to get by on six figures, but they know self-serving bullshit when they see it.  MPs don’t deserve the salaries they are actually on, there can be no question of them deserving a pay rise.  Unemployment is above two million, there are plenty of better qualified people available who would do a better job than the parasitic, all-party, interchangeable professional political class currently in control of Westminster.  Not a single penny more for the pigs.

*Worth watching from 10 minutes in: Kelvin telling it like it is about Alastair Darling’s “quasi-criminality”…

There have been a few newspaper stories about the BNP’s popularity online suggesting it is surging in ‘popularity’.  It is even claimed that it is the most popular political site online.  The BNP boast that this is the case based on Amazon’s Alexa rankings.  The problem with Alexa is that it is easily gamed, download the free toolbar or extension and you boost your own ranking when you visit your own site.  If BNP activists are encouraged to download the toolbar, they will make it appear that they are more popular.  Of necessity given the BNP are not given mainstream space they are (disproportionately to their size) very active online with a well developed web presence.  It appears to be true that they have the highest  traffic of any official website of any UK political party.  They are not however quite as popular as they claim.

The online advertising industry demands independent, verifiable metrics.  Three firms dominate the online metrics business, ABCe, Comscore and Hitwise.  They all use different methodologies and none are perfect.  ABCe is more precise but is paid for by the publisher and uses verified data from the publishers own servers.  Comscore and Hitwise are by nature inexact but have the advantage of sampling on sound methodologies and are very good at measuring relative market share, even of competitors.  If you know your own traffic you can therefore derive the approximate traffic of your rivals relative to your own.  Below is the Hitwise ranking data for April 2009 for blogs and political sites viewed in the UK:

click graphic to enlarge

So given that last month Guido knows he had circa 3 million page views, the BNP (with half the relative market share) probably had circa 1.5 million page views.  You might note that the Guardian’s Comment is Free, with all the cross marketing, budget and staff only manages to have 31% more readers than Guido.  It must drive them crazy at Guardian HQ that a part-time, rarely sober, lone blogger with a lap-top and a site that costs a couple of hundred quid a month to maintain, runs them so close.  No wonder they lose so much money…