Wednesday 12 May 2010

Errors and Omissions.

As you can imagine there has been a huge amount of information flowing around the British political scene today. As a result I've made some mistakes and omitted some things.

  • I've been spelling the Foreign Secretary William Hague's name incorrectly. The correct spelling in H A G U E.
  • The Queen's Speech will also introduce a 55% margin of votes for a motion of no-confidence to be passed. This translates as 358 MP's. Assuming that the Conservatives aren't going to vote themselves down this makes it impossible for the coalition to collapse before the next election in 2015. In other words this government is as solid as a rock.
  • Theresa May is the Home Secretary and the Minister for Women and Equality. This puts her in charge of gay rights and at the mercy of the very vocal gay lobby. Both the Conservatives and Ms May have a poor record in this area so it's probably not worth her unpacking. Incidentally Theresa May shares her name with a reasonably famous British porn star. Over the years this has meant that many Conservatives looking for her website have got quite the suprise.
The other interesting thing is the manner of Gordon Brown's resignation. As I mentioned yesterday at around 14:00 I was spied by an army helicopter loading and unloading things into the car ahead of my routine shopping trip. This appears to have been transmitted to the Prime Minister's security team who were then seen loading luggage into a car in Downing Street. Apart from causing worry about what may have happened on my shopping trip this also started a media rumour that Gordon Brown was about to resign. Somewhere in the pressure and confusion Brown snapped and resigned. So although off plan the Queen wasn't as surprised by Brown's decision as she would like you to believe.

Elsewhere today the Labour Party have begun to choose their new leader. I haven't looked at this properly yet but the big news is that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have ruled themselves in while Alan Johnson and Yvette Cooper have ruled themselves out. Personally I think the party needs to take some time to have a long hard look at their situation before they make any rash decisions. I will try and provide everyone with a full debrief tomorrow but obviously that is quite long and time consuming.

All that's left for now is to come up with a name for this new coalition government. May I suggest "the Kipper Coalition" because in a few days it will dawn on the LibDems that they're only there to take the blame so they've been done up like a kipper.

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