PCC 2012: Melvyn Barrett Quits Commissioner Race

Mr. Mervyn Barrett OBE has withdrawn from the contest to become Lincolnshire's first Police and Crime Commissioner the Lincolnshire Echo is tonight reporting.  Mr. Barrett's decision followed a campaign which had fallen to pieces in recent days after a disastrous turn at a hustings event in Boston, the resignation of his entire campaign team on Saturday because of revelations which were subsequently published in The Sunday Telegraph regarding the financing of his campaign by a group likely to lobby for greater privatisation of policing services.

Mr. Barrett confirmed he was pulling out ahead of tonight's and Crime Commissioner hustings at Lincoln Drill Hall, organised by the Lincolnshire Echo.  Mr. Barrett said:

"I will be withdrawing from the election and will be issuing a press statement tomorrow."

The Telegraph's Andrew Gilligan, online, was quick to claim the scalp for the paper:

"Mervyn Barrett, the remarkably well-funded independent candidate to be police and crime commissioner in Lincolnshire, reacted with the standard huffing and puffing to our expose on Sunday about his links with a neo-con US thinktank. Not that he’s actually denied it, or anything else specific that we wrote, of course. And tonight, inevitably, two days after his campaign team resigned, Mervyn has followed them out of the door."

Mr. Barrett, one of the more high profile candidates, worked for the crime reduction charity NACRO for more than three decades and was granted an OBE in 1999 for services to crime reduction.

'Raving Lunatic' or 'Courageous Soul'?

Austin Mitchell MP, Labour (Cleethorpes), once changed his name by deed poll to 'Austin Haddock' to highlight the plight of British trawlermen, however, cold water is not for him, it seems. Attending a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee, he talked about the 'raving lunatics' who go swimming in the wintertime.

Right: Edward Leigh MP swims in a hole made in the ice covering the Serpentine in Hyde Park on Thursday, 8th January 2009.

Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Edward Leigh MP, Conservative (Gainsborough), pointed out that he himself swims in the Serpentine in Hyde Park every day, come rain or shine. A flustered Mr. Mitchell implored the official shorthand writer to substitute the phrase 'raving lunatics' for 'courageous souls'. Mr. Tim Walker of The Daily Telegraph notes gleefully that:

"Happily, Hansard does not go in for redaction."

GE2010: General Election Summary Day #12

More progress for the Welsh Conservatives. A YouGov poll last night for ITV Wales had the Conservatives on 32% (Up 1% point), Labour on 35% (Up 1% point), Liberal Democrats 13% (down 1% point) and Plaid Cymru 13 (down 1% point). That would mean nine more Conservative MPs from Wales if translated into a uniform swing on election day. UKPollingReport has more (here).

Labour plan five new pledges for the General Election campaign. Gordon Brown is drafting five reasons to vote Labour and five reasons to reject the Conservatives. ConservativeHome has more (here).

Overnight, there were newspaper stories of immediate cuts from the Conservatives, cuts in the arts budget, cuts in the aid budget, cuts in middle class welfare, cuts in defence. ConservativeHome front page was plastered with it (here). However, The Economist was not satisfied (here):

"The squeezes [George Osborne] identified amounted to £7 billion ($11.4 billion) a year. In 2009-10 the deficit is £178 billion."

David Cameron underperformed at Prime Minister Questions on Wednesday. The Evening Standard (here) did not think Mr. Cameron has really been winning PMQs for a couple of months now, nor can it be said he been losing. He normally provides enough of a strong soundbite for the news bulletins and that is where his battle is to be fought.

Grant Shapps, Conservative (Welwyn Hatfield) and Shadow Housing Minister, has had a hit rate in the media which has been truely remarkable. He had a big splash in yesterday's Sun (and other newspapers) which showed that government spending on propaganda advertising was soaring in this election run-up. Labour ministers, said Mr Shapps,

"should not be raiding the taxpayers' pockets to try to keep their own seats."

Meanwhile Nick Clegg, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats told Attitude, a gay lifestyle magazine, that David Cameron was

"someone who is 'very difficult to trust' on the issue of gay rights."

I wonder if he will play as dirty in the televised debates?

Watching the media, watching us. One of the most important roles that the blogosphere can play in the election campaign is to keep an eye out for media bias. Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome knocked The Telegraph yesterday evening for a story that The Mirror would have been proud of (in fact, it was written by an ex-Mirror journalist now working for the Barclay Brothers). Iain Dale has a bigger target today. He's got the BBC's One Show in his cross-hairs for an appalling piece of anti-Conservative bias last night.

Acknowledgement: ConservativeHome | ToryDiry | 15/01/10

GE2010: General Election Summary Day #4

The big freeze became the big news story of the day virtually wiping out election stories. None of the parties launched big new initiatives, wisely deciding that any election initiatives would be buried in a snowdrift of weather stories.

David Miliband MP, The Foreign Secretary, was almost as much a loser from the SnowStorm Plot as Brown. Andrew Grice noted that the Foreign Secretary had sat on the fence during all three botched coup attempts against Brown 'and fallen off'. David Miliband's hesitation, yesterday, will have appealed to neither the loyalists nor the insurrectionists. As One Blogger put it:

"He ended up looking both tame and disloyal at the same time."

Mr. Miliband was, not of course, the only Cabinet minister to give a grudging endorsement of Brown. Iain Martin speculated that Darling even asked Brown to consider quitting. Andrew Neil concludes that the legacy of the SnowStorm Plot will be the "half-hearted" support that the PM enjoys from his Cabinet. Read my summary of events today here.

The Sun has fresh figures from YouGov in this morning's edition and show a shift back towards the Conservatives. The topline figures with changes from yesterday’s poll prior to the SnowStorm Plot are Conservative 42% (up 2 points) Labour 30% (down 1 point) Liberal Democrats 16%(down 1 point). The exact timings of the poll were between 4:00pm Wednesday and 12:00noon yesterday. Sample size was 2,832.

In Lincoln the Lincolnshire Echo published their first 'Question Time' article with Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, Cllr. Reg Shore (more here).

Janet Daley of The Daily Telegraph despite the chilly weather seems to be warming to the Conservative Party Leader, David Cameron MP. ConservativeHome summarised the Mr. Cameron's BBC Radio 4 Today Programme interview here. Janet Daley enjoyed his willingness to apologise for his marriage policy gaffe. She thought he has been coming out of his PR man years and becoming himself:

"Admitting that he had simply screwed up earlier in the week with his unintentionally ambiguous wording on the marriage question, he sounded as
engagingly frank as he generally does in private conversation."

There have been a stream of anti-Hilton stories in recent days (another one last night) and it was rumoured by Tim Montgomerie to be 'coming from within the Conservative machine'. Mr. Steve Hilton has been vital in broadening the Conservative Party's appeal.

And finally, spotted on Gray's Inn Road, London; a defaced Tory poster spotted byVirtual Economics.

The Morning After the Pre-Budget Report Before.

If the chancellor had a pound for every negative verdict on his budget plans in this morning's papers, the United Kingdom's finances might be in better shape!

The Times says Alistair Darling's pre-Budget report is the latest instalment in a farcical but unfunny comedy series it dubs 'Carry On Spending'. Whilst The Daily Express reports a 'furious backlash' over an epic election spending splurge.

'Pain postponed' is the view of the Independent front page.

A Guardian editorial suggests the chancellor 'did enough... to secure a few not-entirely-awful headlines'. But that prediction is only really backed up by the Daily Mirror, the front page of which offers in tabloid style: 'Bank you Darling!'

"Some early Christmas cheer"

was delivered, it says, by a tax on bonuses

"bashing the bankers who dragged us to the brink of economic meltdown".

More typically, the Daily Telegraph brands it a 'political survival plan' not an 'economic recovery plan'. The Daily Mail suggests that it was a time for:

"acutely painful and inevitably unpopular measures necessary to pull Britain back
from the brink of bankruptcy".

But the chancellor

"shut his eyes to the reality of our plight"

Amid

"the biggest economic crisis of our lifetimes"

Mr Darling's answer is replacing old boilers, jeers The Sun.

And finally The Daily Star offers its readers 'one silver lining', pointing out that:

"Darling's likely to be unemployed himself by next summer!"