Westminster

Sorry Pete, but I don’t think there’s anything hugely ambiguous about the result from the Inverclyde by-election. This was a pretty solid victory for Labour and another reminder – if these things are needed – that Westminster and Holyrood elections are played by different rules. Labour and the SNP ran neck-and-neck in the gibberish spin stakes last night as some Labour hackettes, preposterously, tried to claim that the seat “was the SNP’s to lose”; for their part the nationalists tried to suggest they’d never been very interested in winning Inverclyde at all. More weapons-grade piffle. Then again, without this stuff how would anyone fill the weary hours of television before

For all the talk of Cameron and his grasp of detail the fact remains that Miliband may, as Swot of the Lower Fourth, have the nuts and bolts but he’s wrong – hopelessly, utterly wrong – on policy. To recap, today he asked the Prime Minister: “Around 5,000 people each year are arrested on suspicion of rape and not charged … in certain cases these individuals have gone on to commit further offences and be convicted as a result of the DNA being held on the national database, but his proposal is that for those arrested and not charged the DNA would be disposed of straight away. “I ask him

So Ed Miliband brought up the Flashman thing at Prime Minister’s Questions today. How rum. Now I think it would be sensible for the Prime Minister to be polite to his opponents. There’s no need to belittle Mr Miliband when he does such a good job of doing so himself. If Labour think attacking Cameron’s privileged background is a winning tactic then good luck to them. I rather suspect the public have already priced that in to their view of Cameron (and George Osborne) and so this ploy cannot do much more than entertain Labour’s backbenchers. I suppose Labour are thinking of the Harry Flashman* of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.That Flashman

Crivvens, the idea of an SNP-Labour coalition refuses to die. Here’s Iain Macwhirter in the Herald: The rule seems to be that, in Scottish politics it’s easier to work constructively with parties you don’t agree with than with parties you do. Labour and the SNP now agree – independence aside – on most of the big issues, such as NHS privatisation, comprehensive education, free university tuition, more powers for Holyrood. But unfortunately they hate the sight of each other. Could they ever bury their differences? Most polls suggest that this is the coalition partnership Scots would most like to see. A grand coalition, perhaps, against the Tory cuts. Scotland’s two

Come the revolution, you’re supposed to hang the lawyers first. Which is fine. But it might be better to start with the judges. Specifically those that are happy to grant injunctions that prevent members of the public from raising matters of concern with their local MP. I ken that commonsense need not be compatible with jurisprudence but this oversteps the mark by some considerable distance. It is outrageous and so outlandish that one wonders how it can actually happen. But happen it does and, it turns out, more frequently than you might think and certainly more often than you’re supposed to know. So three cheers for John Hemming*, MP for

Amidst tough competition it is possible that Channel 4’s Gary Gibbon has written the stupidest thing yet about the Libyan civil war: Wherever this ends, those close to David Cameron will be hoping that he has done enough to avoid the blame if there is more carnage in Libya. I think even demented Guardianistas might be capable of appreciating that the violence is scarcely David Cameron’s fault or responsibility* Nevertheless, Gibbon’s post is useful in as much as it demonstrates the limits of the View from Westminster Bridge while simultaneously having it both ways: Cameron is, implicitly, criticised for lacking “influence” with the President of the United States but you