What Would Kerry Say?

John Cowan is the Labour candidate for Cambridge and

regular contributor

to LabourList. He used to be in the Lib Dems before he was expelled for being a sex pest. He then tried and failed to join the Tories. Labour welcomed in with open arms and even made him candidate:

This is strange given it was a complaint from Labour's Kerry McCarthy that got Cowan kicked out of the Lib Dems in the first place. Why then is she now refusing to answer questions about this and apparently happy to see someone who, when a political rival, she objected to, but as a fellow candidate under the red banner apparently fine?

Stunning hypocrisy once again from the Twitter Tsar...

Guy News: The Fable of Vince Cable

Apologies for the lack of blogging. TB was having fun with this:



Raging at the stupid graphics messing up the damn border on the Youtube vid but you get the idea...

Quote of the Day

"I'm not taking advice from a Labour politician"

- A fiery George Osborne on in the Chancellors debate.

Who Do You Want Answering the Red Phone?

Daniel Korski

has an interesting piece about Clegg's achilles heel - his frankly terrifying appeasing foreign policy. Made TB think of this:



Replace the words "White" and "House" with "Downing" and "Street", "Hillary" with "Cameron" and Bob's your uncle.

The Tragical History Tour

Two videos hitting the Lib Dems surfaced over night. One from the

Guy News

room:



And the other interesting one from

ConservativeHome

:



The sun is shining, Clegg is unravelling and ComRes has Tories nine points ahead. Haven't Labour been quiet recently...

New Tory Poster

Looking good:

Very good.

Clegg Gets the Andrew Neil Treatment

Since when has "err I live in Sheffield" been an excuse for redoing your kitchen?

See post below. No wonder Cleggy isn't taking questions from hostile print hacks today...

Throwing the Kitchen Sink at Clegg

With great poll leads comes great scrutiny and surprise surprise Clegg is already beginning to show signs he can't take the heat. In the debates he said in a rather saintly fashion that "there are still people who haven’t taken full responsibility" for the expenses crisis. While this is true perhaps Clegg should include himself on that list.

At this morning's presser he came out with a pretty poor defence of his own claims. "“It’s a modest, semi-detached, pebble-dash home, it was in a state of complete disrepair, the garden was a complete eyesore" - What would the neighbours say!?

Having paid nearly £10k in legal fees to purchase the house, charged to the taxpayer natch, you would have thought that someone who claims to want to clean up politics wouldn't have bought a house that didn't need a publicly funded re-sprucing. But no, Nick thought he would go to town...

Two payments of £2,600 on kitchen refurbishment were claimed for. The first ‘to supply and fit kitchen as plan at the above address to include units, worktops, sink / taps, oven, hob and extractor. The second for ‘improvements carried out at the above property: Plastering of lounge; decoration of lounge, sitting room, hall stairs and landing; Supply and fit new carpeting to hall stairs and landing areas; selection flooring and tiles for new kitchen; decoration of kitchen; cleaning as necessary; organisation and supervision of all the above work.’

You'd think that would do it right? But no there was more. Another £2,147 in fact for, you guessed it, his kitchen. ‘To supply and fit pipework and new waste pipe to pantry for washing machine, hack off and re-plaster kitchen walls. Supply and fit laminate flooring, boxing to pipes under boiler and tiles to kitchen.’

And what about that eyesore outside? Nothing that £4k of gardening didn't fix. In March 2008, his gardener even wrote a summary of his ‘plan of attack’ for the year, which was to weed the front garden and keep up ‘pruning around back’. Such a good service!

Let's not forget the year he claimed 101% of the mortgage limit. At least he didn't have to re-mortgage his house for his kitchen repairs...

Making Your Mind Up

The things TB does for his good buddy TV's Shane Greer...



No sniggering at the back.

The City Speaks

Some interesting factoids out of Osborne's office this evening:

A poll

of senior investors at institutions managing a total of £1.75 trillion in assets has shown that:

• 77% think that a Labour victory or hung Parliament could lead to a downgrading of the UK’s sovereign credit rating.
• 74% think that a Labour victory or hung Parliament could lead to a fall in the value of sterling.
• 55% think that a Labour victory or hung Parliament could lead to a long term rise in interest rates.
• 68% think that a Conservative majority is most likely to lead to a rise in the stock market.

Nuff said.

Lib Dem Staffer Fired for Internet Tirade

Uber-clean and shiny Lib Dems have been left with red faces today after they were

forced

to fire a staffer for his tirades against religious people. Adam Webb wrote on his Facebook page that he wished "all religious people to just f**k off". He also said certain people should be "banned from breeding", including "vile women with too many kids". Nice.

Conservative PPB

The other laying into Brown big time was binned now Clegg is in the game.

Miliband's Moustache?

Is little David trying to look grown up?

His people refuse to deny or confirm...

Hague Vs Miliband - BBC2 14.15

Just Incase You Missed It...

This emerged when TB was in the pub on Friday night, he forgot to put it up over the weekend. Ladies and gentleman...Cameron Girls:



Well made, semi trained singers? Intriguing...

Mirror's Chicken Is Back

Errr why?

Spectacularly Poor Taste

One of TB's eyes and ears was a little shocked to see this poster at Stockwell tube:

The tag line reads "There's nothing wrong with a little shooting as long as the right people get shot." Someone should probably get a bollocking...

So seems TB was emailed something about three years old. Oh well.

The End to Old Politics

Don't let the Liberal Democrats pretend they are anything but "old politicians". The closet Clegg has got to ending "old politics" was his part in stabbing Ming Campbell in the back. And let's not forget the bunfight that followed...



And can someone please remind Clegg next time he discusses the very effective line of "the old parties" that the Liberals are older than Labour!

Guy News - Your Election HQ

What a Bott They Got

Tory activists have been left spitting blood after the defection of the delectably named Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, the former head of the Tories LGBT movement. She claims that since Grayling's comments she has suddenly seen the Labour light, no ifs, no buts, and shared a press conference platform with David Miliband this week. If she was ever a Tory surely it was about more than gay rights? The backside of this story is a little murkier though...

Along with photos, in no way safe for work, tales of party conference hotel shenanigans, unsubstantiated smears and the fact that Bott jumped before she was thrown out on her arse, have all come out in the wash. The detail is here if you want to get to the bottom of why she really left the Tories. Her former party colleagues are clearly glad to see the back of her, some have career reasons to fear stories about her will rear up again. It was always inevitable this attention seeker would return.

If her late night not-quite-WebCameron-antics, now circulating widely, are anything to go by, she is far from camera shy...