Mayor Johnson
The headline news is, of course, the victory of Boris Johnson. It is no secret (at least if you’ve been reading this blog!) that I was and remain a strong supporter of Ken Livingstone and that I have very grave doubts about the Johnson mayoralty. I have tried to draw a comparison between [...]

Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Fabian Society, has written an open letter to Lib Dem MPs in London asking them to give their second preference. I hope that they do make public statements in support of Ken. The race is close and Ken’s prediction from a while back when people were treating Johnson as [...]

As we all now know, Nick Clegg will not be joining a Conservative or Labour government. His speech at his party’s conference was unequivocal:
Will I ever join a Conservative government? No.
Will I ever join a Labour government? No.
He’s starting to sound like Iain Paisley. Unfortunately, like the good doctor, he’s a slippery wee thing. You [...]

A recurring theme of late is honesty in politics or, rather, the lack thereof. Politicians want to appear as straight-talking but frequently are not. Three things have struck me on this today.
Brian Paddick, the Lib Dem candidate for Mayor of London. As the Evening Standard reports, he has said that the Underground is the most [...]

Had I been voting in the recent Lib Dem leadership contest, I would have voted for Chris Huhne as the candidate most identifiably different from Gordon Brown and David Cameron. In voting for Mr Clegg, they have chosen someone who looks and sounds like Mr Cameron and, I feel, impacts in a similar manner. Mr [...]

The video of last night’s mayoral debate between Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick is available here at ITVlocal.com.
xD.

In light of today’s PMQs and the debate about whether MPs should be excluded from Freedom of Information requests, it’s worth pointing out that ministers can’t decide themselves whether they can or can’t answer questions about meetings they’ve had. Norman Baker has been asking some dull questions (and, yes, I know he’s a LibDem) and [...]

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I thought that the LibDems were effectively two parties: one is essentially a social democratic party and the other is classical liberal in nature, and the two come together by both being socially liberal.

The classical liberal or Orange Book wing of the party appears to be in the [...]

Everyone seems to be expecting the Liberals to do well at the forthcoming election. The alternative to Labour, positive campaign, new baby and so on. The LibDems are split between the social democratic wing and the so-called ‘Orange Book’ group and at the moment it seems that the former are in the ascendance. Rather than [...]