Last week Guido revealed how Unison rep and former nurse Jane Pilgrim was depriving the public of a nurse in a frontline role at St. George’s Hospital in Tooting. Yesterday the Mail on Sunday exposed how she is also depriving families in need of housing through the commune of which she is the head. The Crescent Road Community consist of three dilapidated houses in Kingston upon Thames, where thirty “peace and love” activists live. They have ignored attempts to have them evicted and and are living there illegally.
Nurse Pilgrim is now subject to a double investigation at St Georges, including one into why she was using the image of one of the hospital’s directors to promote her private consultancy without his knowledge or permission. Guido hears that she is in rather a lot of trouble…
The TaxPayers’ Alliance have found 2,493 Pilgrims across the public sector, union officials, paid not to provide the service they represent, but instead do political activities that should be funded by the unions. Without having to pay their staff, the unions can spend the money raised through their subs on other things, like keeping the Labour Party solvent. They’re costing us millions and, as last week’s investigation showed, they’re completely unaccountable. Do you know a Nurse Pilgrim in your hospital or school? Tell Guido…
The Style section isn’t normally the first bit of the Sunday Times that Guido reaches for, but thankfully this one didn’t go unspotted. Agent Provocateur’s new lingerie range has been apparently been styled on Maggie:
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The designer said her delicate bow and a “little bit of pleated shawl that goes around your bottom” was “quite racy, but I like to think she might have worn that underneath her suits.” So does Guido…
Alan Johnson is alive. In his first trip back into the political limelight since his “problems”, he joined the Yes campaign rally with Miliband and Cable, but no Nick. Somewhere in a cupboard in Cowley Street, the Deputy Prime Minister is desperately trying to break out and campaign for his beloved voting reform. It’s quite hard to spin that this isn’t referendum on Clegg when you ban him from the stage.
The Yes campaign’s tactics have come under attack even from their own side today. Total Politics carries a raging piece from industry experts who accuse Yes of re-running the failed Euro campaign of the nineties:
“‘Yes’ has run a classic establishment campaign. Lots of prominent places for Westminster insiders; a nice smattering of the usual (boring) B-grade celebs who bang on about politics between filming reality shows, and ads in comfortable shades of pastels that look like every second Department of Health campaign or those posters the council puts on bus shelters up to tell you which day to put out your recycling.”
Meanwhile twenty minutes later Cameron popped up with Lord Reid. The former Labour Home Secretary accused the “moaners and losers” in the LibDems of wanting AV purely for political reasons. Well someone had to say it…
Elsewhere No2AV head Matthew Elliot put the boot into Clegg this morning:
“he claimed that we are having this referendum “because of the expenses crisis”. Given Nick’s role in the coalition negotiations, this is a frankly bizarre lie. We are having this referendum for the one and only reason that the Lib Dems demanded it.”
Guido has already commented on the IPPR push poll and their squiffy results. Yesterday’s balanced and professional ComRes poll said that only 37 per cent of people backed AV. With 43 per cent against. 17 days to go…
UPDATE: Nick Robinson is wondering where Nick is too.
Silvio Berlusconi admits…
“All of us have a homosexual part of 25%, which I also have. The only thing is that I, after a profound examination, have realised that my homosexual part is lesbian.”
Want access to the Deputy Prime Minister? Well if you have a spare £25,000 lying around, the LibDems are offering you “unrivalled networking opportunities” at the “Leaders Forum” dining club. PR Week report that the cash-strapped LibDems could make over a million in the sort of fundraising drive the Tories and Labour have been doing for years. Given that you pay your money into an RBS account and then you get to meet Clegg, it seems a little absurd that they are denying that this is anything other than cash for access.
Though with Clegg’s track record, Guido would get those winks and nudges in writing…
In 2010 the left-wing think-tank IPPR was vociferously arguing against the Alternative Vote system, putting out pamphlet after pamphlet decrying AV. IPPR boast that it prides itself on “rigorous and innovative research… based on sound evidence”.
Their research conclusions were blunt: “IPPR does not believe AV is the right option for the UK.” AV they concluded was “significantly flawed” and would not “deliver results which are sufficiently proportional”.
“Simply put, AV would not remove the bias of the current system towards the largest party or parties and in some instances it would further reinforce the status quo”.
IPPR made a clear evidence based case against AV.
In 2011 the Yes campaign funders, the Joseph Rowntree group of organisations dominated by LibDems to such an extent that they bunged over £2 million pounds to the party before the last election, gave the cash-strapped IPPR £70,000.
Now, by coincidence, IPPR argues in an astonishing about turn that “AV will make elections more competitive.” “AV goes with the grain of contemporary British politics.” They have even spent money on push-polling and, unusually for a supposedly apolitical charitable think-tank, they have thrown themselves fully behind the Yes campaign politically. Odd when only last year they claimed: “Changing to a system which could deliver even more distorted results than FPTP is surely not the answer for those looking for genuine reform.” Guido wonders what made them change their mind?
