UPDATE:

While Guido was over at PoliticsHome, laughing at that development, he noticed that the latest chapter in the Aidan Burley Nazi-gate story didn’t take very long to fall apart. Burley was accused by a teenager on Twitter of sleeping during a Holocaust lecture. It turns out that the teacher who organised the trip, on which said teenager conveniently managed to recognise Burley, is a Labour councillor:

“After the lecture, Ms Reeves confronted Dr Smith and Burley and (wrongly) assumed the doctor was a Tory aide. Ms Reeves is then alleged to have told Smith and Burley that she knew Ed Miliband…”

Playing politics on a trip to Auschwitz. Stay classy.

No cut in the advertising budget then…

Via LewisCPS

Reeves worked for HBOS from 2006 to 2009. If she’s going to continue proposing historical punishments for failure, should she not declare any bonus payments she received in that time and whether she waived them? How much was her bonus?

Did she even deserve one for “exceptional work”? After all HBOS ended up partially state-owned when Lloyds Banking Group was bailed out…

After the furore over “Top Totty” resulting in it being banned as a guest ale in the Strangers Bar, a brewery have sent over “Kangaroo Court” as a replacement.

Here endeth the beer story. 

Given that the only result on GoogleMaps for “Brewers Green”, where the Labour NEC say the new offices are, is even further from Parliament, Guido is going to believe his Labour drinking companion the other night who claimed the only reason for the move was because the party could not afford the rent in their current location.

What’s that line about organisation and breweries? 

The smart money is on Cameron not reshuffling until after the Olympics and opting for a quick yellow for yellow swap if Huhne is forced out, but that hasn’t stopped some intriguing ideas being floated around Tory circles. Firstly there was the hilarious “bigging up” of Sarah Teather, whose civil servants give a very different picture from the one painted in Black Dog:

“Small but perfectly formed Lib Dem Schools Minister Sarah Teather is being tipped by friends of Michael Gove to succeed Chris Huhne as Energy Secretary if he is forced to quit over his speeding offence wrangle. ‘Like most of us, Michael didn’t rate Sarah but he has changed his view after seeing how she sends mandarins twice her size packing,’ said a friend of Gove.”

Whoever Gove’s friend is, he’s a master of reverse psychology. Guido is sure that many tears will be shed if Sarah does move on from Education.

Today’s pipe dream is shifting Vince Cable from BIS over to DECC. There was vicious briefing against the Sage of Twickenham in the Sun today, with unknown Tory Ministers accusing him of stunting growth:

“Cable is obsessed with punishing the bankers — and little else.He has failed to deliver any meaningful strategy to help struggling British companies. Time is running out for us to get this right. We’re doing not nearly enough — and we won’t until Vince gets out of the way.”

Do they really want to put him in charge of growth-choking green-taxes?

With the announcement coming in the morning, in all likelihood it will be Ed Davey or Jeremy Browne laying awake in wonder tonight. There is talk of Norman Lamb and Jo Swinson moving up a rung as a result. Guido doubts we will see the return of David  Laws to the Cabinet, but he could well take the vacant Junior Minister slot. 

As the PM sat down after a tough outing in the Commons, the news breaks that Fred Goodwin was told at 3pm that he had been stripped of his knighthood “by the Queen”. Intriguing timing.

Knighted by Gordon for banking and stripped by Dave for, er, banking.

Another day, another mob win.

There wasn’t much of his famed “grit and steel” on display from Ed Miliband this morning. He repeated his Davos trick of trying to look hard by just wearing a suit on Sky earlier, but with frozen breath, and even funnier than usual facial contortions, he looked absolutely freezing. Guido isn’t sure what the logic is here. Someone buy the lad a coat…

After Guido pointed out the inappropriate smearing of Gove and his links to a Jewish antisemitism Charity, carefully timed for Holocaust Memorial Day, the paper has backtracked and apologised. Not with due prominence in their paper, but in a quote to the Jerusalem Post instead:

“The story does not in any way suggest that the funding ofsecurity guards for Jewish schools was inappropriate, only that Mr. Gove should have stood aside from the grant giving process given his relationship with CST. It was scheduled for publication on Thursday but pushed back because of the volume of news that day. We should have spotted the unfortunate timing and regret any offense caused.”

A textbook non-apology, but interesting that they didn’t see fit to say sorry for including a quote from SpinWatch’s David Miller in the same story. The same David Miller who is rather fond of printing neo-Nazi essays and believes in vast “Jewish lobby” conspiracies. Perhaps the Guardian should have had a look through their own archives before giving Miller coverage. Here’s what they published about him in July:

“SpinProfiles and Neocon Europe are projects that, under the guise of academia, are used to carry out campaigns of smear and harassment by creating selectively produced profiles of people and groups with different political outlooks, often ignoring facts that do not support their agenda. This approach characterises both of Miller’s projects, and to treat them as academic endeavours is to do a great disservice to British academia’s long tradition of neutral and unbiased inquiry.”

One of these factors alone can be spun as an oversight. But two…

Channel Four’s FactCheck is rarely disputed with much vigour. Most people seem to take their rulings on the chin and move on, except of course if you are Ken Livingstone. Last week his supporters were frothing that C4 had dared to challenge their voodoo “Fare Deal” figures. Retaliations were pushed to unpopular parts of the blogosphere and the usual level of Twitter vitriol was thrown about. Well it seems that didn’t go unnoticed with the FactCheck team who have given Ken another slap this morning:

“The claim:
“Fares might be soaring, but the service is plummeting! Delays and line closures have become a daily part of Londoners’ lives.”
“Sack Boris” election leaflet, 30 January 2012

The verdict:
The figures speak for themselves, and the difference in passenger hours lost – an average of a million a month more under Ken – is particularly striking.

It’s like shooting fish…