Our Top Five most clicked stories of the last seven days were:
Thanks to the 129,159 visitors to Scrapbook in the last month.
Readers will be well aware of the transparency crusade launched by Eric Pickles and his sidekick advisers Giles Kenningham and Sheridan Westlake. Having scrapped the Audit Commission, councils have been repeatedly urged to let untrained “arm chair auditors” (the public) cast their eye over the town hall books.
An eagle-eyed reader used our tips contact form to let us know that Messrs Kenningham and Westlake don’t appear to be abiding by their own rules. Data detailing their gifts, hospitality and media meetings has not been updated for nine months.
The gap between rhetoric and reality on transparency is becoming a chasm. This time last year, Eric Pickles wrote to councils last year telling them not to answer embarrassing FOI requests on spending.
Scrapbook will again have to ask: has Eric Pickles ushered in an era of transparency or an era of hypocrisy?
A contractor run by a former adviser to Michael Gove has been communicating with special advisers in Whitehall using their private emails, Political Scrapbook can reveal. The exchanges with the New Schools Network (NSN) – run by former Gove Adviser Rachel Wolf (above) and awarded more than £1.5m in contracts by her former boss — threaten to open up a new front in the battle over government business conducted using personal email accounts.
After revelations in the Financial Times that Michael Gove was using his wife’s “Mrs Blurt” email account and that his office had systematically destroyed official correspondence, the Department for Education fought a bitter battle with the Information Commissioner to avoid releasing such messages under freedom of information.
But the department’s excuse for nondisclosure — that the emails were “political” and not “governmental” — may not be welcomed by the NSN, who were gifted an initial contract to administer the government’s Free School programme without the usual tendering process:
“In answer to the Commissioner’s query as to whether the email would fall within the scope of the request, the DfE said that in its view the email was not held for the purposes of the Act. This is because, it said, the email was political rather than governmental.”
While also being a government contractor, the NSN is a registered charity — and is therefore banned from the kind of political communication cited by “Mrs Blurt” et al in their defence:
“The guiding principle of charity law in terms of campaigning, political activity and elections is that charities should be, and be seen to be, independent from party politics.”
Scrapbook wonders what excuse they will come up with this time — and which other Whitehall contractors have a direct line to the secretary of state’s private office via personal email addresses.
Michael Gove’s office have turned “bending the rules” into an art form.
News this morning that Adam Smith, the special advisor at the centre of Huntgate (watch your spoonerisms there), will be appearing at the Leveson Inquiry next Thursday afternoon. He will take the stand immediately after News Corporation Europe’s former public affairs boss Frederic Michel, whose communications with Jeremy Hunt’s office hold the key to the cabinet minister’s future.
The week promises to provide legion column inches, with Peter Mandelson (Monday), Tom Watson (Tuesday) and Jeremy Paxman (Wednesday) also appearing.
The Leveson Inquiry was set up pursuant to the Inquiries Act 2005. Falling on a sword to save your minister is one thing — perjury under oath is quite another.
Whilst we already knew that David Cameron was partial to iPad games such as Angry Birds, a Number 10 source has laid bare the worrisome portion of the PM’s day that such diversions take up.
Writing in the Telegraph, Fraser Nelson quotes one of Cameron’s advisers as saying the boss spends:
“a crazy, scary amount of time playing Fruit Ninja on his iPad”
As the UK economy slips back in recession and the Eurozone stands on the brink, it’s nice to know that the Prime Minister’s first priority is eviscerating cartoon fruit with a sweep of his finger. It also doesn’t quite match some of what Cameron has said about the job:
“I work extremely hard … it is very hard work.”
Such is his apparent obsession with the device, Number 10 have ordered a custom iPad app on which Dave can view figures on the economy and other key performance indicators from across Whitehall.
But can he beat his high score for long-term youth unemployment?
A favourite YouTube clip in the Scrapbook office is from Armando Ianucci’s Time Trumpet, in which a shallow David Cameron was filmed moving a charity wristband so it was clearly visible to the media – before quickly glancing to check that a camera crew would capture it.
But in his recent appearance on the Andrew Marr Show, George Osborne attempts to rival his neighbour for affectation. George looked distinctly unamused by Keane’s performance at the end of the programme. With another sly glance at the camera, however, he realises the nation is watching him and starts to bob his head.
He’ll be claiming he likes Arctic Monkeys next.
The official website of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea may not be the most-visited sites on the internet — but they might at least put enough effort in to get their former leader’s name right.
On the page featuring biographies of recently-deceased dictator Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung, both have been christened Kim Il Sung. But while the poor web editor is carted off for some, erm, re-education, we can at least click through to learn about how their former leader:
“… worked out powerful ideological and theoretical weapon for the Korean revolution by giving scientific and theoretical answers to the ideological problems arising in the revolution and construction.”
Answers on a postcard, please.
Boris on the Diamond Jubilee river pageant:
“A kind of Dunkirk except more successful.”
We didn’t realise Aidan Burley would be participating.
