The Electoral Commission have found some irregulatrities between what Chris Huhne declared in his election expenses as “national spending” and what the national Liberal Democrats actually declared. The bad news is for Cowley Street as there is clearly some serious concern over at the Electoral Commission that this practice goes beyond Huhne’s tight marginal constituency:

“The Commission have written to the Liberal Democrat national party asking them to review their procedures and report back to the Commission measures they will implement to avoid a repeat of this in future.”

Which begs the question, how many more LibDem associations do the Electoral Commission suspect are up to these tricks?

UPDATE:

http://twitter.com/#!/MichaelLCrick/status/96185758318215168

Discuss.

Piers Morgan discusses the downfall of Coulson and Clive Goodman in 2007:

“As for Clive Goodman, I feel a lot of sympathy for a man who has been the convenient fall guy for an investigative practice that everyone knows was going on at almost every paper in Fleet Street for years,” 

Well it looks like CNN’s Piers Morgan is rather rattled this morning. Instead of addressing his vocal and written confessions that he published hacked stories, Morgan went for the man rather than the ball.

Guido didn’t expect anything less…

One thing that did tickle though, was how quickly Morgan was to use the magazine Private Eye to try to head off some of the shit-storm that he is currently at the centre of. Lets see what he said the them in his now infamous Desert Island Discs appearance:

“Private Eye is one of the most intrusive and inaccurate newspapers in the country…”

Guido is still waiting for an answer to why Morgan wrote in the Mail that he published a story that was hacked, yet told CNN he had never done so. Maybe it’s time to take to the airwaves again Piers…

Ken Livingstone’s former aide Lee Jasper left his post after emails linked him to the dodgy use of City Hall funds. Anyone that dared question him about this was slammed as for being racist. He is the eternal victim, but seems to be in the midst of a full on breakdown on Twitter. Ken has already run a mile.

It started on Monday with a sick joke about Boris and the Norwegian murders, but it seems our old friend has been on a downward spiral of decline ever since. Remember that he is an equalities activist and “Chair of London Race & Criminal Justice Consortium” when you take a look at a selection of his tweets from the last twenty-four hours:

• “White men are obsessed with black mens ****s.”
• “Disabled or black we are all the undeserving poor as the ideological attack on the poor is prosecuted with zeal . Disablism and racism.”
• “White boy hysteria once again reveals its penchant for the overly dramatic when it comes to black men
• “I know you white boys have a thing about black men’s tackle”
• “Anyway racist pedophiles, NI acolytes , assorted miscreants of the wretched right wing I must go and ferment racial harmony among the masses”
• ” Well you would having pedophile tendencies an all…”
• “Good sit back whilst I give you a very unhappy ending”

Our esteemed friend went on to tweet that he wants “equality and harmony”. When Red Ken abandons you, you know you’ve crossed a line…

Last night Piers Morgan claimed that his 2009 interview with Kirsty Young where he talked about phone-hacking was about generalities, not anything he himself had done. He repeated his bare-faced lie that he had never published anything knowingly based on “hacking”, which in this context is illegally listening in to mobile phone voicemails. So he denies what he said was what he said, relying on a slight ambiguity in Kirsty’s “money quote” question.

It has become, according to some US commentators, a question of Guido’s credibility versus Morgan’s credibility. That isn’t a contest Guido is ever going to lose. Guido has staked his reputation on his story that the Ulrika/Sven affair story that won Scoop of the Year in 2002 for his Daily Mirror paper was based on illegal voicemail interception. Guido has written testimony from a witness that Piers can’t dispute in any way. Himself.*
Piers is as he himself admits, cocky, that cocky quip is the nail in his coffin on hacking. His admission that

“it was the Daily Mirror, under my editorship, which exposed Sven’s fling with Ulrika Jonsson after learning of a similar message left by the then England manager on her phone”

leaves him no wriggle room. He admits publishing a prize winning story derived from a hacked voicemail intercept. Which is what Guido first claimed and Piers has lied about for weeks. He also aggressively called Louise Mensch MP a liar live on CNN, he owes her a massive apology or risks a defamation suit from her. It is over Piers, ‘fess up son. It is time for that live on CNN mea culpa…

*Source: Serialisation, by the Daily Mail, of God Bless America: Misadventures of a Big Mouth Brit: Diaries of an Englishman in the Land of the Free, bylined by Piers Morgan.

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Piers Morgan ‘Desert Island Discs’ interview with Kirsty Young

First broadcast: BBC Radio 4, Sun, 7 Jun 2009

KY: And what about this nice middle class boy who would have to be dealing with I mean essentially people who rake through people’s bins for a living…

PM: Well I…

KY: People who tap peoples phones , people who take secret photographs…

PM: I know but…

KY: …who do all that very nasty down in the gutter stuff, how did you feel about that?

PM: Well to be honest lets put that in to perspective as well, not a lot of that went on. A lot of it was done…

KY: Really?

PM: A lot of it was done by third parties, rather than the staff themselves, that’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work. I’m quite happy to be parked in the corner of tabloid beast and to have to sit here and defend all the things I used to get up to and I make no pretence about the stuff we used to do. I simply say the net of people doing it was very wide and a certainly encompassed the high and the low end of the supposed newspaper market.

Morgan of course is claiming this morning that he was speaking in generalities, clearly he wasn’t, he was talking about the things which in his words “I used to get up to”. In a very changed climate post the revelations of the Milly Dowler hacking, with criminal investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, he is now pretending otherwise…

More over at The Daily Beast.