Society

Just to point out an important post by Sam Coates over at Red Box.  Turns out the House has chosen today, when the airwaves are dominated by the Heathrow announcement, to publish an audit of MPs’ expenses (pdf here).  I’ll leave you to check out the details in Sam’s post, but it’s now looking less likely that we’ll see a full publication of expenses or, indeed, any proper restrictions introduced.  All in all, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the Government’s quite pleased that John McDonnell has been suspended from the Commons for protesting the Heathrow expansion.  There’ll be even less room in the papers for these dispiriting cover-ups to be exposed.

What to make of Peter Mandelson’s latest idea to prop up the car industry, as splashed by today’s Times?  Basically, the plan is that the Bank of England will use taxpayers’ cash to back the loans offered by finance companies to potential car buyers.  And the hope is that this will free up credit and stimulate demand for all those cars sitting unsold on garage forecourts across the nation.  There’s much room for initial mischief from the Opposition – “Gordon Brown: buying someone else’s car with your money,” that kind of thing – but greater damage will come if the plan simply doesn’t work.  And there’s certainly potential for that. To my mind, it all comes

Over Christmas, William Hague’s standing in the party and David Cameron’s authority took a beating from reports that the shadow foreign secretary was prepared to resign rather than give up his outside interests. Today’s joint Cameron-Hague interview in The Sun can be seen as an attempt to move on from that. In an attempt to minimise the part-time issue, Hague tells George Pascoe-Watson, “I have been drastically cutting my outside interests. That will continue. There won’t be a lot left by the time we are approaching the election.” For his part, Cameron tries to show that Hague is not a semi-detached member of the team by stressing that Hague is his

An article in today’s Times says that a return to the Tory front bench for Ken Clarke is looking increasingly likely.  But a more striking revelation is contained in this paragraph: “The Tory leader believes that the former Chancellor is the only senior Conservative, other than himself and George Osborne, who can command the media spotlight.” To my eyes, there are a bunch of “senior conservatives” – including Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, Eric Pickles and Nick Herbert – who are, at the very least, effective media performers.  Whether or not they “command the media spotlight” is a slightly different question.  But – as James suggested a couple of weeks ago