A newly-elected UKIP councillor, at the centre of an investigation into a forged electoral nomination paper, has said he has not “done anything wrong”.

Jonathon Childs, who won a seat on Norfolk County Council, reported ahead of the 2 May election that the signature on his form was not his.

The Eastern Daily Press has more on that quirk of the candidate themselves saying their own signature looked to be forged:

Mr Childs has not responded to requests for comment, but on his Twitter page – @jonathon_childs – he wrote he had approached the borough council with concerns himself.

Another user asked him: “R U saying someone forged your signature?”

On April 28 he replied: “I am aware of it that’s why I went to GYBC [Great Yarmouth Borough Council] !!

“That mark ain’t mine that’s why I went there.”

Sending a criminal to prison costs more than sending a child to Eton and “we need a better return on our investment” Nick Clegg will say tomorrow.

Announcing an extra £7million of Government money to help the rehabilitation of offenders the Deputy Prime Minister will warn that successive Governments have been tough on punishing crime but weak on preventing it from happening again.

Ukip’s Chris Pain, leader of the opposition at Lincs Council and the party’s East Midlands regional chairman, wrote: “Have you noticed that if you ­rearrange the letters in ‘illegal ­immigrants’, and add just a few more letters, it spells, ‘Go home you free-loading, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, baby-making, non-English-speaking ********* and take those other hairy-faced, sandal-wearing, bomb-making, camel-riding, goat-********, raghead ******** with you.’”…

Peter Entwistle, party chairman in Bury, Greater Manchester, labelled President Barack Obama a Muslim, writing: “I bet he’s a closet ‘Imam’ as well!

“If I ever see him on a Greyhound bus wearing a rucksack, I’m getting off!!”

The party’s deputy chairman in Scotland, Misty Thackeray, “liked” a Facebook group claiming “paedophilia is part of Islamic tradition”.

He also praised far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, a self-­confessed “hater of Islam”…

Meanwhile Tiggs Keywood-­Wainwright, a Ukip councillor in Boston, Lincs, complained about mosques being built in “quintessentially English” Cambridge. “Is nowhere sacred for the Brits in Britain any more?” she wrote.

“Bottom line is we have too many muslims in this country!”

Then there’s Huffington Post following up with yet more news about Chris Pain:

Ukip’s leading councillor for Lincoln, Chris Pain, has been embroiled in a second scandal over his Facebook page, with another posting that appears to show him suggesting that asylum seekers are benefit-scrounging terrorists.

Perhaps UKIP should just simplify things for everyone and change its name to United Kingdom Haters Party?

Although it isn’t only hate that UKIP has a problem with. It’s not so good with money either as Lib Dem MEP Chris Davies pointed out:

Also on YouTube.

1. Public supports same-sex marriage;
2. The public thinks more positively of David Cameron because of his support for it; and
3. Of those who say it will be an important issue in deciding how they vote at the next general election, those who say they will be more likely to support a party that backs same-sex marriage outnumber those who say it makes them less likely to vote for such a party.

So: the public support it, the public thinks better of your leader because of it and people are more likely to vote for a party that supports it. What should you do? PANIC AND DEMAND AN END TO THIS DISASTROUS POLITICAL MOVE, of  course.

Battling from letterbox to letterbox to anchor the government in the centre ground?

Then this surely is what you need:

On a more serious note, I really do wonder about the wisdom of the new Liberal Democrat catchphrase about anchoring the government in the centre ground. The sentiment over avoiding the extremes of the other parties is a good one. But anchoring in the centre ground? It’s not the sort of language real people use.

If you’ve been canvassing yourself, I doubt very much you’ve had someone say to you, “You’re an anchor!”. If you think you have, I’m sorry to break it to you – but you misheard.

True, some great political orators do use language out of the ordinary. But they don’t lift themselves onto that special plane by dropping ordinary language in favour of insular geometrical patterns salted with a nautical touch.

So anchoring in the centre ground? Nah, I can’t see that working as a phrase.

* Even if you are, you will still be 4 hours behind Paddy Ashdown. Sorry.

LIVERPOOL City Council has hired a consultant spin doctor who charges local authorities up to £1,000 a day for his services.

PR guru Mark Fletcher-Brown is working three days a week for Mayor Joe Anderson – after the council haggled a discount on his normal daily rate…

Last night a spokesman for the cash-strapped council admitted he did not know if the figure included vat and expenses – which Fletcher-Brown normally adds on to his hefty base day rate … But even without those add-ons, the figure is commensurate with a full time salaried post of £169,000.

Over the years I’ve come up with a variety of answers, all pretty much of the same sort – using the internet is important, it’s becoming even more important but it’s not the only thing you need to do.

But I’ve now got a new answer to all those sorts of questions: “You’re asking the wrong question”.

If you are doing internet campaigning really well, it ends up being so closely entwined with your offline campaigning that you can no longer tell the difference between the impact of one and the other.

Your email campaigning depends on your door knocking to gather email addresses; your door knocking depends on your use of social media to mobilise volunteers; your use of social media depends on your face to face training of key activists; your face to face training of key activists depends on seeing what works online for others; and so on and on.

Take any one strand of activity and you will find online and offline so closely bound together, so mutually supportive, that trying to separate out one from the other is impossible.

When you’re doing it right, you can no longer separate out your online and offline campaigning. Asking about the relative importance of one compared to the other becomes as meaningless as asking how important vowels are compared to consonants for a piece of writing. Neither can prosper on their own; both have their biggest impact when combined.

To find out more about how to combine them well, of course, take a look at 101 Ways To Win An Election.

His book kicks off with a complaint from Peter Mandelson that his attempt to sound out Paddy Ashdown on a hung Parliament in advance of the election by walking up to him in public on a train and starting to chat resulted in Paddy hot footing it to the toilets rather than in staying to talk.

Imagine Paddy had stayed sat there, chatting away happily. Imagine then the political gossip stories that could so easily and so damagingly have spun off reports of that encounter. If someone walks away from you when you walk up to them in public like that, you shouldn’t blame them, you should thank them for showing some basic common sense.

But even if the train carriage had been completely empty of other people, why would Mandelson have expected a Liberal Democrat to stay and chat meaningfully? After all, remember what happened to Ming Campbell when Gordon Brown tried talking to him about a coalition back in the early days of his government? Someone in Labour leaked the story at time and in a way designed to maximise the damage to the Liberal Democrats.

When you’re own party has such a record of setting out to deliberately sabotage such talks, only someone who expects others to have no more of a memory span than a goldfish would then take umbrage at someone being reluctant to places themselves in an embarrassing situation again.

For Andrew Adonis’s complaints about the Liberal Democrats to start with a moan that Paddy Ashdown showed both basic common sense and the merest hint of a memory shows how weak they are.

Don’t blame the Lib Dems for Labour lack of preparation and unwillingness to deal fairly with other parties, Andrew. If you want a different outcome from a future hung Parliament, you need to get your own party in order.

An apology: I apologise, of course, to goldfish for repeating the myth that they have short memories.

You can buy 5 Days in May: The Coalition and Beyond by Andrew Adonis here.

Four Conservative councillors dramatically resigned from their group at a council meeting tonight over claims of “backstabbing and duplicity” in the party.

The resignations of Councillor Suzanne Evans, for Hillside ward, and Councillor Richard Hilton, for Lower Morden, Councillor Rod Scott for Raynes Park and Councillor Linda Scott, also for Raynes Park, come after the group elected Councillor Oonagh Moulton on Monday as their third leader in three months.

Crikey.

Hat-tip: Shas Sheehan.