Patrick Rock, the deputy director of the Downing Street policy unit and one of David Cameron’s closest aides, has resigned after being arrested over child pornography allegations. Detectives searched No10 and and examined Rock’s office computer. Developing…
Read the Mail scoop in full here.
The hardest thing is getting them to admit the simplest things.
Margaret Hodge had the Treasury and the Department of Energy and Climate Change in to ask who is responsible for the great surge in energy prices and who is looking after consumers’ interests.
She didn’t question the departmental witnesses, but yelped at them in frustration, and then gazed with spaniel-eyed looks of reproach.
The water industry, she remembered, underspent one year by £1bn and with the regulator’s approval they gave the money out as a dividend, rather than put it into infrastructure. Why was that allowed to happen? Who allowed it? Why didn’t they do anything to stop it?
Guido would never usually push one of the endless stream of PR emails he gets each day, but this one did tickle him. At the launch of the Two Together rail card at Kings Cross this morning, a David Cameron look-a-like was hired. Now normally these people never look like the actual person they are meant to be, but you have to admit this one is a dead ringer though:
Too much hair though.
What a life it is, in politics. Having to satisfy the craving, constantly chasing a dragon.
So, Boris Johnson – the proconsular celebrity – appeared in front of the Communities and Local Government committee.
Had they asked him to declare his interests he might have confessed to the Aga Khan’s hospitality, a Hollywood superpass, oligarchical love interests.
But the committee were more interested in declaring their own interests. They said, a little competitively: I’m vice president of the local government association. I’ve got two members of staff of who are local councillors in Newcastle. My husband is leader of a district council.
Fair play to Boris for sticking it out. A man like him with all his assets and interests applying himself to local government fiscal devolution. Having to answer to these sober, worthy vegans, sitting it out for forty minutes discussing the suite of five metropolitan property taxes, council tax bands, a reset mechanism five years into the rationalization of the business rate structure – and all without recourse to alcohol.
The Conservative Friends of Russia re-branded into the Westminster Russian Forum in 2012 after allegations of homophobic smear campaigns, string pulling from the Russian embassy and Moscow gold. When exposed by the press, the Embassy accused the British press of playing ‘a critical part in engineering the unnecessary Crimean War’ in a long winded statement.
Fast forward 18 months and the new impartial forum for those interested in ‘Russian politics, business, history and culture’ were quick to tweet all about the Sochi Winter Olympics, and announce their new committee line up. Yet they’ve gone very quiet in the last week. And their website is down. How odd…
Rufus Hound, in 2012:
“A lot of people here seem to be making the case that tax avoidance’s morally wrong. In which case vote to change it! I do.”
