Mark Pack

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott is clearly not put off by coalition from his pursuit of Tory donors and their tax statuses. Today it is Jon Wood, whose tax affairs have been in the papers with Lord Oakeshott saying, “Now is the time to take... »

Labour-run Brent Council has hit the local and regional news for its decision to pay for 27 senior staff and Labour councillors to spend the weekend at a luxury country hotel – where they planned budget cuts. The council is quite right that it is good management practice for senior teams every now and again [...] »

For the Conservatives it’s the quitting of their next treasurer, David Rowland, whilst for Labour it’s John Prescott warning of the Labour facing bankrupcy (the context for which you can see in these graphs).  »

Two illegal donations totalling £101,500 dating back to 2004 and 2006 have been forfeited by the Conservative Party. »

Over on the Total Politics website they’ve been poking fun at the ‘house party’ instructions issued by the David Miliband campaign. On reading the piece at first I thought it was being a little harsh, because house parties (where you invite electors – Labour members in this case – to a small event to discuss [...] »

The BBC has the story about Lord Pearson standing down as UKIP’s leader following his less than successful general election performance (with that TV interview): In his resignation statement, Lord Pearson said he was “not much good” at party politics and UKIP “deserved a better politician… to lead it”. The outgoing leader had a difficult general [...] »

Andrew Reeves has got details of John Holden, charged over alleged benefit fraud, and Gilbert Davidson, accused of inappropriate behaviour towards a female colleague.  »

A quick update on Philip Lardner, whose suspension as a Conservative candidate during the election following homophobic comments we covered back in April – and who had previously been suspended by the Conservatives in 2008 for praising Rhodesian leader Ian Smith. After he made the homophobic remarks this year, he was also suspended from his [...] »

Throws a bit of a spanner in the works of the Labour rhetoric about how awful anyone who contemplates raising VAT is: Amid reported wrangling between No 10 and the Treasury, Lord Mandelson suggested in his memoir that Mr Brown rejected a proposal from the chancellor to raise VAT while Mr Darling quashed calls for [...] »

The Kensington & Chelsea Chronicle reports: Two Tory councillors have resigned after it emerged inappropriate emails had been sent using the council’s email system. Former Kensington and Chelsea mayor Councillor Barry Phelps fired off a series of emails to Councillor Mark Daley, displaying black and white images of young boys with sexually suggestive captions added [...] »