Harriet Harman got £5,000 from Janet Kidd, a director of David Abraham’s Durham Green Developments Limited, for her deputy leadership bid. Presumably she knew who it really came from – or are we expected to believe she had no idea who was backing her? Really?
Raymond Ruddick and Janet Kidd are directors of the company. Details of their directorships here [PDF]. They donated some £400,000 to the Labour party, secretly on behalf of David Abrahams, the owner of Durham Green Developments Limited.
In October last year the objection to the massive development was dropped by the Department of Transport. What a coincidence…
UPDATE : BBC reporting that Labour’s general secretary Peter Watt has resigned.
“Mr Watt told a meeting of officers of Labour’s National Executive Committee that he had known about the arrangement.”
So who else knew? Douglas Alexander was the Minister responsible for the planning objection…
Trevor Kavanagh is the sage of Wapping. Today his regular Monday Sun column says definitively
Trevor Kavanagh appears to have done an about turn. Cast your mind back a few months (Monday, July 23rd) Kavanagh told us equally confidently that“Gordon will never govern in his own right as an elected Prime Minister.”
“Gordon Brown is going to win—and win big. In the process he will likely set Labour up for a fifth term and 20 unbroken years of socialism.
Guido suspects that Mystic Meg’s job on the Sun is safe…
The British government is not cooperating with the investigation. Hardly surprising when Blair blocked the BAE/Saudi corruption investigation on security grounds. Will they try that line again?
Last week Andrew Marr had a go at Sky News for being less accurate than BBC News and Current Affairs. So two days of misreporting from Newsnight gives us a good laugh.
On Thursday, BBC Newsnight reported that the “Dow Jones was substantially down amidst more credit crunch fears”. That inaccurate insight and analysis was based on what? Based on bollocks.
It was made up. There were no credit crunch fears spooking the markets. The market was closed for the Thanksgiving day holiday. The economics editor Stephanie Flanders has ‘fessed up that it was “unforgivable and embarrassing”. Peter Barron contritely said on the Newsnight blog on Friday afternoon that it won’t happen again because they will check the U.S. market is trading. So Emily Maitlis was much more careful with Friday night’s market report:
“…the FTSE 100 share index closed up, sadly we can’t show the exact figures, um, holiday season as you know in the US, so the Dow Jones remains unchanged. Against the Euro, the currencies here, the pound up, against the dollar the pound was down. You’ll just have to take my word for it. We’ll get you some figures by Monday.”
The market was actually open and up 181 points closing at 12,981 (according to Sky News). So did they actually check the market was trading? Doh! Can they get it right tonight or will it be three days in a row?
Hat-tip : Biased BBC
Sajjad Karim, Liberal Democrat MEP for the North West of England is joining the Conservative Party.
Saj is a free trader, helping to negotiate for an EU-India free trade treaty, in 2005 he was named as “a high flyer of British politics” by The Times in its Who’s Who of 2005.
The news will shake LibDems who are polling very shakily in the mid-teens. Saj, who was the first ever Muslim member of the European parliament, will be welcomed by Dave with open arms.
UPDATE : Why didn’t the Tories wait until the day of the LibDem leadership election result? Than they could have made him say “Tweedledee is not the right man blah blah blah…”
