Today’s Yorkshire Evening Post has a rather boring story about Ed Balls being concerned about local road safety. However being photographed at the “junction of Melton Avenue and Sharp Lane” he’s not actually in his constituency. Everything to the left of the motorway on this map is actually in Hilary Benn’s seat. It seems like a pretty basic error for an MP not to even know where his own constituency starts and finishes, but as so often with Ed Balls, this is surely too much of a coincidence…
When the result of the Parliamentary Boundary review is announced, Leeds is expected to lose one seat – which is likely to result in an all out punch-up between Hilary Benn, who is currently in Leeds Central, and Balls who only just retained his neighbouring Morley and Outwood seat at the last election. It Looks like Ed is already parking his tank…
Guido’s man-in-the-know tells him that Johann Hari has confessed all to Andreas Whittam Smith, who is charged by the Independent with investigating the plagiarism charges. He has apparently owned up to being “David Rose”. Which means he has implicitly confessed to harassing the likes of Christina Odone, Nick Cohen and Francis Wheen, altering their Wikipedia pages to reflect negatively on them. In Odone’s case he went so far as to question her sanity and accuse her of all manner of falsehoods. He has, Guido is told, blamed his lying, cheating and smearing behaviour on “depression”.
http://twitter.com/#!/david_singleton/status/110708708572528640
The move to the new HQ must have gone well then…
Along with Alastair Campbell’s partner Fiona Millar, Francis Gilbert is the co-founder of the Local Schools Network – an anti academy front group set up to try to derail school reform. Paul Goodman over at ConservativeHome is a real fan. This morning Gilbert took to BBC Breakfast in a last ditch effort to talk down the Free School project that is seeing the first batch opening their doors this week:
FG: You’ll get a certain type of middle class parent putting their child into this school and then the local state school will take the more socially deprived pupils who don’t have the savvy parents. So you get this kind of segregation which has led to things like the London riots in our schools already…
BBC: Let me just stop you there. You’re saying segregation in education in London schools led to the London riots..?
FG: It contributed a certain factor because you’ve got the poorest students concentrated in a quarter of our schools in this country and that’s a real problem. So we really need to solve that by bringing all our children together and this free schools programme will contribute more to this social segregation.
No doubt he is fully signed up to the non-reality based community theory that the riots were caused by teenagers having their Educational Maintainence Allowance cut…
One day back in Westminster and the gaffes begin. Diane Abbott thinks Tony Blair overseeing the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects and cutting a deal with the murderous Gaddafi regime isn’t as bad as the fact he is godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids:
Guido would like to know how many of her Labour colleagues agree…
The Prime Minister’s Spokesman told the Lobby this morning that Cameron wants an inquiry into allegations of extraordinary rendition of terror suspects:
“We’ve shown that we’re prepared to look at what happened in the past and ensure that way we behave stands up to scrutiny”
It’s at rare times like this that Labour must breathe a sigh of relief that Ed is their leader, rather than his brother – the former Foreign Secretary. This could get very messy for Labour and it’s an obvious open goal for the government. Though any inquiry should be given much more scope than just these allegations. Hague’s line at the weekend pretty much sums up the Tory position: The allegations “relate to a period under the previous government, so I have no knowledge of those.” Ouch…
