It was a busy news week, if you missed a few stories you can get our news round-up emailed on Saturday and read the blog in the Daily Star on Sunday. We’re a 7-days-a-week multi-platform news blogging operation. Subscribing to the Guidogram makes sure that you get emailed Guido’s weekly round up of the week. Thousands of Westminster insiders read it, Downing Street never misses it.
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With his wife and young family, Steve will be moving to California. He will join Stanford as a visiting scholar at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and will also be a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He will spend his year on campus teaching, researching and writing, and will focus on innovation in government, public services and communities around the world.
He will work with a wide range of centres and organisations across the university, including FSI’s Centre on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and The Europe Centre; the Graduate School of Business’ Centre for Social Innovation; the Centre on Philanthropy and Civil Society; and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
Guido’s favourite Young Conservative has defected to UKIP. Top Tory totty Alexandra Swann was the Deputy Chairman of Conservative Future and a Tory researcher, but will be taking to the stage tomorrow at their spring conference in the charming seaside resort of Skegness. This is the latest humiliation for the Heath-ite chairman of the Tory’s youth movement, Ben Howlett, who recently infuriated the party by siding with the Germans over Commonwealth countries at an international right wing conference.
That safe seat he boasts about in bars late at night is looking highly dubious…
Chris Huhne has hired John Kelsey Fry QC, the barrister who successfully defended Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp against accusations of tax evasion. In court today they were bailed over until May for an early October trial expected to last two weeks. So Huhne will cast a shadow over the LibDem party conference which precedes his trial.
Kelsey did manage to get Redknapp off his tax evasion charges by relying on a dog having a bank account. Can Huhne come up with a pet-related alibi, a shaggy dog-tale perhaps?
Not really sure what to make of the Guardian’s advert, the management seem very proud of it. Alan Rusbridger says it is about what they mean by “open news” as they move towards a mutual form of journalism. Meaning probably that they won’t pay for content, the HuffSlo Arianna model of slave-journalism is already mirrored over at Comment is Free (of charge). So many wannabees crave having Guardian bylines that they will write for free. Which is just as well, because that is probably the only way the Guardian is going to avoid bankruptcy.
In the newspaper’s reception they have put stuffed pigs staring at Guardian staff as they walk in:
Given the amount of hypocrisy at Kings Place in the building that is the HQ of left-of-centre hand-wringing; the hundreds of millions in offshore GMG corporate holdings in the Caymans tax haven, the half-a-million quid a year reward for failure paid to the editor of a loss-making paper that rails against high-pay, the columns from the multi-millionairess anti-poverty campaigner Polly Toynbee, the support for comprehensive schools from journalists who went to and send their children to private schools, it seems fair to quote Orwell to them:
“No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
After all, the Guardian’s pigs do walk on two legs…
Tom Harris bemoans the public’s attitude to politicians…
“Mr Oborne echoes the lazy, anti-politics whine we hear so often these days, all based on the absurd notion that politicians were once loved and only fell out of public favour during the expenses scandal. He should take a walk to the Strangers’ Bar. But not to sup with the patrons he seems to despise so much, dearie me, no; he should instead look at the paintings on the corridor outside the bar, which depict the devastating fire which consumed most of the Palace in 1834. And he should reflect on the fact that on that dramatic night, as the Commons went up in flames, a crowd gathered on the South Bank to clap and cheer.”
The thing that Dave needs to work out is which group is more likely to vote Conservative. Mad swivel-eyed loons or mad homosexuals wishing to get married.
It was a busy news week, if you missed a few stories you can get our news round-up emailed on Saturday and read the blog in the Daily Star on Sunday. We’re a 7-days-a-week multi-platform news blogging operation. Subscribing to the Guidogram makes sure that you get emailed Guido’s weekly round up of the week. Thousands of Westminster insiders read it, Downing Street never misses it.
