Labour’s slogan for the summer really runs off the tongue:

“The Choice – The Labour future / The Tory threat”.

Of its eight words, three of them are “the”. Catchy.

Worse still, the party has now deleted a tweet plugging another new slogan to accompany Ed Balls’s speech on the economy:

“A choice between a Labour plan to make Britain better off and fairer for the future or more of the same from the same old Tories.”

Tough on punctuation, tough on the causes of punctuation. 

Could they have come up with anything clunkier than “make Britain better off and fairer”? It has a grand total of 2 ‘a’s, 3 ‘the’s, 2 ‘same’s, an ‘of’, an ‘off’, a ‘for’, a ‘to’ and a ‘from’. It is supposed to clarify “the choice” between Labour and the Tories, yet you have to read it three times before you can work out where the praise for Labour ends, and the criticism of the Tories begins. Britain can do better than this…

“If you want a politician who thinks that a good photo is the most important thing, then don’t vote for me,” says Ed.

Just days after begging for a certain photo-op.

There is no mention of Ed Miliband’s unscheduled ‘brush-by’ with President Obama in Mike Allen’s Playbook, the morning round up of anything going on in Washington that matters to anyone who is anybody in Washington. Sebastian Payne at the Post reports that Ed is scheduled to meet national security adviser Susan Rice this afternoon, officially the White House pointedly says there is “nothing to announce on the president’s schedule”. Presumably at this point Obama will drop in, if he doesn’t have a world war to avoid. Damian McBride, recounting the President’s five snubs of Gordon Brown and subsequent humiliating chat in a kitchen, has his fingers crossed:

“Team Miliband will have left nothing to chance before their man’s meeting at the White House today. For starters, they will have ensured he gets at least as much ceremony and time as David Cameron enjoyed in his first visit to President Bush as leader of the opposition. Aides will have their stopwatches out, ready to squash any suggestion that Mr Miliband was given less time than he was due…

The reality is that every presidential summit, visit, brush-by, drop-in, and walk-and-talk is nowadays so stage-managed that only someone as afflicted by bad luck as Gordon Brown could ever come a cropper. Provided Obama turns up and the White House doesn’t serve bacon sandwiches, today’s meeting will be the diplomatic equivalent of the speaking clock.”

Miliband’s intellectual henchman Stewart Wood was responsible for White House relations under Gordon Brown, surely he will ensure that this time there is no screw up. Interestingly McBride names Dougie Alexander as the source of the leak of the ‘five snubs’ story back in 2009. Which goes some way to explain the enmity between him and Michael Dugher, then Brown’s comms chief…

As revealed by Guido yesterday – and followed up on the front-pages today – government files relating to Diego Garcia and rendition have mysteriously suffered from flood damage.

Co-conspirators point out, this excuse is hardly watertight.

As Yes, Minister puts it:

“It is possible to remove everything of significance from a file released under the 30-year rule by saying that it is complete except for: 
a. A small number of secret documents. 
b. A few documents which are part of still active files.
c. Some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967.
d. Some records which went astray in the move to London.
e. Other records which went astray when the Department was reorganized.
f. The normal withdrawal of papers whose publication could give grounds for an action for libel of breach of confidence or cause embarrassment to friendly governments.”

Appropriately, Sir Humprey’s quote is from an episode called Skeleton in the Cupboard.

“It’s really a deliberate misrepresentation to have the few Tory women MPs clustered around the Prime Minister so that they can be picked up by the TV cameras while the rest of the government benches are nearly exclusively men.”

– Harriet Harman, 8 July 2014

Now what sort of self-respecting, proud feminist would ever allow herself to be used in a wheeze such as that?

– Harriet Harman, 25 July 2007

Oh Hatty.

Eurostar travel chaos struck this morning, as 382 passengers and four dogs were left stranded on a broken down train to Brussels in the middle of the 30 mile long Channel Tunnel. Among the passengers, who had to be evacuated, was newly-elected UKIP MEP and former People’s Army spokesperson Patrick O’Flynn. Normally Patrick spends his time struggling to get out of Europe, not the other way round…