Perception, especially in politics, is as important as reality. The way people feel and what they see really counts.
So the news that Mayor of London Boris Johnson is to carry on writing his Telegraph column worries me. I’ve said I think he should stand down as MP for Henley ASAP (especially given the disasterous LibDem candidate selection decision) and let another fight the by-election. I don’t think he should write newspaper columns regularly either.
It doesn’t matter if he has the spare time to do it on a Sunday or otherwise. It’s the message it sends.
He wants to say, “I’m a full time Mayor, I am working all day to make the City better for you.” This move doesn’t say that. Come on, Boris, speaking as someone who has read your column year after year, it’s time to hang up the pen and get on with enacting your excellent manifesto.
In my second bizarre incident of the week (I may tell you about the first later on), we managed to get caught up in an attempt to defraud Norwich City Council of a car parking fee.
I have attended the farewell party for the outgoing Lord Mayor, Cllr Roy Blower, and on leaving headed to the St. Giles Car Park to give a lift home to my new ward colleague, Niki George.
As we got out of the barrier, the car behind shot out under with us. I thought this was odd, and looked in the mirror to see him waving at the security guard; but on second glance the security guard was chasing him as he had just got out without paying. I did an emergency stop to block their exit; the security guard finally caught up with them. Now that might have been the end of it … so we went to pull off again and the car behind shot around St. Giles Street, trying to pull around us. It takes more than that to stop a pair of Tory Councillors, so we pulled across the single lane road to block them. Luckily, the bollard on the other side of the pavement stopped the other escape route.
Finally, having been blocked for a few minutes, they got their number plate taken and it all finished. The easy thing would be to drive off and let it happen; he could have got stroppy with us and the whole incident. It could have been nasty. But we couldn’t let people get away with ripping off the people of this City and I am glad we did our small bit to do that.
I still wonder what will happen to that motorist. Does anyone know the penalty?
I mentioned the case of Independent MEP for the East of England, Tom Wise, a few days ago when Mr Wise was caught admitting how much he was enjoying milking the EU cash cow for himself. Now Mr Wise, who was first elected under a UKIP banner, has said he is pleased to have been caught because it would show up the problems in the EU.
Well done Mr Wise; a good point, well made. You have been honest in an odd sort of way that others wouldn’t have been. Now emerge from politics with at least some dignity by resigning as our MEP.
I can’t pack up for the night without saying that tonight I Chaired the first Conservative Group Meeting since the election. Tails are up, the opposition are in our sights and the feeling in the camp is good. We sorted out committees and the new shadow cabinet. We started to discuss political tactics. More to come on that, but we are probably sharing the same good feeling being experienced by a lot of Conservative groups in the country.
Never before have we witnessed such a mess as a Chancellor trying to get out of a political hole by carrying on digging. Yet today that is what we saw today from Chancellor Darling as he tried to put the 10p tax rate debate aside by putting up the tax allowance on the basic rate. This will cost £2.7 billion but …
It is a one-off payment, a one-off solution to a problem created by Gordon Brown.
It is being paid for by borrowing! We’ll end up paying this back one way or the other.
22 million better off, but only 4.2m of those were impacted in the first place and Darling still misses 1.1 million people!
It may have caused a humiliating backdown from Frank Field but it won’t pass the opposition or the media test. The news is pretty damaging and the papers will say so. Darling will always have this U-Turn around his neck and the issue will become attached to Gordon Brown too.
Am I the only one who thought Darling should have started with an apology too? I also thought that both Osbourn and Cable did very well … but they did both have an open goal, I suppose.
Poor old Darling; the unluckiest Chancellor attached to the unluckiest Prime Minister ever.
When I got up this morning, I was under the impression that Frank Field, the former Welfare Reform Minister under Tony Blair, was placated and that the crisis over the 10p tax band cut was put to one side. However, when I got home from Climate Change Panel at Norwich City Council tonight, it had all seemed to blow up again. Cabinet Minister Ed Balls (hate figure of our staff room) has told him to shut up and Mr Field says he’ll be surprised if Brown is still in his job in 2 years time.
Putting aside the disasterous split in Labour, you have to ask what the future holds for Mr Field. He is either right and has large numbers of the PLP behind him, in which case Brown is dead in the water and he will be heralded a hero. Or … if he is a “one man band” on this, then he has surely lost the confidence of the party and definitely the whips. He may not care, but can he stay within the PLP? I don’t think so; for me, its just a case of when he joins a growing list of MPs in the cold – joining the likes of Clare Short and Bob Waring.
There is a lot of speculation that Boris Johnson, newly elected Conservative Mayor of London, will step down immediately as MP for Henley, Oxfordshire, despite a Times claim on polling day that said he would cling onto both jobs.
I think this would be a mistake and that Boris must step down immediately. The public are very suspicious about politicans, and more so when they appear to hang onto jobs for the sake of it. The news that Independent MEP for the Eastern Region Tom Wise has been recorded saying he is surprised how much money he can screw out of the EU should shock, but not surprise us. If you have the time and energy to do both – for example, a county and district councillor – then that is fine (although you’g have to have very nice constituents to manage that and hold down a full time job!) but you cannot possibly represent a constituency as an MP and be Mayor London.
Do it, Boris, resign. Go out on a high, give the people of Henley the chance to vote for new Conservative representation. It’ll look good on you, on the party and on politics itself.
Gordon Brown is not going to resign; no matter how low they go in the polls, or how much local or by-elections they lose or how much he destroys the country. He slogged through the Blair years, yearning for this job and he will not go down in History as one of the shortest serving and most useful Prime Minister’s ever.
However … if he were to fall under a (political) bus, what is clear is that it’s Jon Cruddas who will carry to flag of real Labour forward. His excellent showing in the Deputy Leadership contest – coming from nowhere to winning on first preferences – plus the dignified way he has handled himself since has put him in poll position. With all of the other Deputy Leadership candidate pretyt much humiliating themselves (including the eventual winner), he still holds a place in the heart of the Labour Party membership and the Trade Union movement if not the PLP.
So, if its Cruddas then who will he be against? I believe that the deal will be done to ensure only one candidate emerges from the Blairite right of the party; they won’t want to split the vote and will want to be seen to be united. They may find themselves against a self-styled “unity” candidate like Jack Straw, but the Milliband-Balls-Burnham-Purnell alliance will be at work.
If I were in that alliance, I’d be working out who is going to be doing the challenge in the next 2 years – because they’ll need all the traction they can get to beat Straw out of the traps and beat Cruddas to the votes.
The Conservatives have taken the lead in the new Norwich South constituency, according to respected political pollster “Electoral Calculus”. Reflecting massive Tory poll leads and victories at last week’s local elections in the City, the latest poll puts the seat at: Conservative 30% Labour 29% LibDem 25% Green 15%
I check the site regularly because of the seat-by-seat breakdown of its poll findings and this is the first time and suggests a win for the Tories (albeit with a majority in the hundreds) for the first time. It also shows the lack of impact of the LibDems, who continue to decline across the City.
I take some comfort from this but think things may change between now and polling day; I think the Greens for example will do better but at the further expense of Labour and the LibDems; but it does suggest that our campaigning locally and nationally is working.
Interestingly I was talking to a friend of mine, staunch Labour, today who said that for the first time his vote was up for grabs. He thought Labour had lurched into one too man disasters and that Clarke’s time was up. If I vote tomorrow, he said, it would be for you. But, he added carefully, it isn’t tomorrow so things might yet change. I can handle that caveat to his support; because it’s my job in the next 2 years to give him a positive reason to vote for Cameron and myself.
Armed only with four gallons of water and a vat of suncream, we all headed to the Garden Show at the Norfolk Show Ground this morning. The weather knocked both of the girls out (pretty much) although Emily shot back into life when she saw a giant flower that you plugged into the garden tap and it squirted randomly around the place a high volume stream of water. Unfortunately, after parting with a fiver, we got home and the damn thing exploded at the plug end and the flower ended up drooping with a disappointing dribble coming out of one end. I felt rather more crushed than Emily, who soon moved on to the next fad, but it played on my mind for the rest of the day.
The show was very, very good and was incredibly diverse; more than just plants, equipment and garden furniture, it also included charities and community groups from around the City and I enjoyed the chance to talk to some of the organisers and businesses about how they views the current situation. Many spoke about increasing burden of red tape, from all quarters including national and local government, and the fact that such problems put people off volunteering.
One advantage of having fought the parliamentary seat before and having a high profile in local government is people knowing who you are and coming over to chat. That was helped today but a rather flattering piece about me in the EDP and also a letter in the Evening News which dug down deeper into the election results which showed the strenght of the Tory vote in Norwich.
We then came home to clear up the garden and set up the kids toys; sadly after about 5 minutes my back went and I was forced to watch my poor, long suffering, wife did all the work (!!!) although I never get away with it for long.
This evening, up until this blog post, I have spent writing our “thank you” leaflets and rather splended they look too.
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