The growing scandal around Ken Clarke’s disgusting remarks on rape brought the following observation from Fraser Nelson earlier this afternoon:
“By my count, this is five Cabinet members now in ‘dead man walking’ category: Clarke, Cable, Huhne, Spelman, Lansley. #zombiecabinet”
Will someone please put them out of their misery?
It looks like Chris Huhne has finally crawled out from under his rock.
Does this look to you like a man who really “welcomes” a police investigation?
The prospects of Chris Huhne’s survival as a cabinet minister are diminishing by the hour. As the Liberal Democrat stands accused of fraudulently dodging speeding points, a taped phone call is now reported to have emerged in which he pleads with an unnamed individual not to discuss the issue with the media. The matter has now been reported to Essex police.
And in an ironic twist to this cautionary tale, the Sunday Times reports (£) that the energy secretary — who has been banned from driving at least once before — as the former director of a speed camera company.
Huhne, who made a fortune in the City, is a former director of a company that pioneered speed cameras and mobile CCTV systems used by police forces. He resigned from his post at Traffic Safety Systems in December 2003, not long after he was banned from driving.
To compound the hilarity, Huhne also had held shares worth £250,000 in a second CCTV company even as he pledged to ”stop the surveillance state in its tracks” and ”regulate the growth of CCTV”.
The only thing stopping in its tracks now is Chris Huhne’s career.
Our North of England Correspondent was sorry to hear that the recent cutbacks have triggered the demise of a local community organisation from Baguley, South Manchester.
The group, calling themselves The Liberal Democrats, received the last rites on Thursday night as voters decided that they no longer wished to mandate the party’s head-spinning U-turns.
It was only last May that the Yellow Peril managed to take a quarter of the votes cast in the local council ballot, but after this week’s by-election that had collapsed to just 3.7%!
The only crumb of comfort for Baguley’s LibDem activists was that Chris Huhne had guaranteed this would happen back in December, so the annihilation was far from unexpected:
It will be right across the board; some areas where it’s difficult for us, and some areas where it’s difficult for the Tories. I’ve always thought we would have two years of immense unpopularity.
So cheer up, Nick – at least one Lib Dem has delivered on a promise!
With their commitments on tuition fees reduced to smouldering ashes, it seems that the Libereral Democrat manifesto bonfire continues apace! Having spent years railing against a new generation of nuclear power plants, eight prospective sites for precisely that were announced last week by energy secretary Chris Huhne.
And it’s great to see they’ve even got around to updating some of their websites. The “No to Nuclear Power” microsite was a flagship implementation of their (rather good) ourCampaign system. Starring, erm, energy secretary Chris Huhne, the page has mysteriously vanished from the internets in the last week. Luckily, Scrapbook had alreadt grabbed a copy for posterity:
An article on Lib Dem Voice this week counsels that campaign videos should be “valuable”, “visual” and “visible”:
Make sure it gets seen or no-one will watch it. It sounds obvious, but you need to put your video about. Embed it on your website or blog, and encourage others to do the same. Link to it in your local emails or on Twitter. Add relevant tags to help it to get picked up in YouTube’s search results and related videos.
In the respect of “putting the video about” one assumes Mr. Huhne may regret following this advice so closely:
A sniff of power and Lib Dem MPs are literally queueing up (in division lobbies) to burn their idols.
Next stop for Nick Clegg’s iconoclasts? Control orders!
The addition of Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi to BBC Question Time on 22 October completes a lineup of Chris Huhne, Jack Straw and Bonnie Greer to appear alongside BNP leader Nick Griffin.
Reaction on the blogs has been mute, with Sunny Hundal questioning the appropriateness of a softly spoken, middle class American playwright (flanked by two white, middle class frontbenchers) to take on Nick Griffin:
“Middle class people generally hate cheap populism and the use of emotion to make political points. They prefer ‘rational argument’. Fuck that. The way to destroy the BNP is through emotional narratives and populism.” – Sunny Hundal
Further reaction available from Nothing British and ConservativeHome [will update this later this with more as it comes in]. The Times also has something from earlier today mooting Warsi as a possibility while arguing that William Hague would have been the better choice.
Scrapbook can’t promise not to shout at the TV.
