Gary Gibbon
Is Jacqui Smith just the first?
Sources closes to the PM are now confirming that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is to go in the next reshuffle.
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Gary Gibbon
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Jon Snow
They talk of radical change. But will it happen?
Gordon Brown talks of radical constitutional change. So does David Cameron. So does Nick Clegg. But is it going to happen? It was the 19th century radical John Bright who conjured the phrase “Mother of Parliaments”. It’s a cosy, reassuring concept and has often been distorted to suggest Westminster is the “Mother of Parliaments”.
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Jon Snow
Do politicians ‘get’ transparency?
If the expenses scandal is about anything, it is about the public’s right to know what politicians do in their name and with their money. Yet as the parties attempt to purge the transgressors, all the indications are that the same secrecy and attempted cover-up that led to the leaking of MPs’ expenses to the…
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Jon Snow
Lincoln's message to Brown, Cameron and Clegg
A hundred and fifty thousand people over 10 days, packing events and discussions that range through politics, philosophy, economics and high culture. The Hay festival appears if anything to have benefited from the recession. “Stay at home” Britain has come in its droves. I have never seen the place fuller.
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Jon Snow
Tony Blair's expenses un-shredded!
I have been conducting an interesting correspondence with both Tony Blair’s office and the House of Commons commission which is currently dealing with MPs expenses. This follows my posting re. the shredding of Tony Blair’s expenses. A number of UK news outlets – the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail among them – “revealed” that Blair’s…
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Jon Snow
A day of miscalculation by the political classes
How convenient, the Whitsun break. Have you ever wondered how many weeks the political classes absent themselves in a year? But the problem today is not absenteeism. In some cases it’s a lack of it.
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Jon Snow
Our love of hierarchy means little will change
I first set eyes on Gordon Brown at Edinburgh University in 1970. We were both involved in student protests in our respective universities and I’d been invited from Liverpool University to give a talk to him and his fellow protesters on the campus in Edinburgh.
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Jon Snow
A full-blown constitutional crisis
This is a heck of a day – today, Tuesday 19 May. We’re in the midst of a full-blown constitutional crisis. The Speaker is suddenly resigning (2.30pm). Gordon Brown has summoned an emergency press conference at 5.30. There is a febrile political atmosphere. Nobody knows what the course of events will be.
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Jon Snow
From Speaker to Sri Lanka, yesterday in Parliament
spent yesterday afternoon in the environs of the House of Commons. An extraordinary experience. Normally, ostentatiously crawling with MPs and peers anxious to be recognised, stopped and interviewed – yesterday the place was completely deserted.
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Jon Snow
'This is Gordon Brown. Now, about my expenses…'
The Telegraph editor-in-chief, Will Lewis, has been telling friends of the extraordinary night his newspaper went to press with the first of its revelations. In the middle of the evening he gets a call from the prime minister, Gordon Brown. Mr Brown is well aware of what is about to happen. His call is not…
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Jon Snow
Why were Tony Blair's expenses shredded?
There has still been no explanation forthcoming as to why, amid all the other expenses details to have emerged from the Commons, only one named MP’s expenses seem to have been shredded. It has been reported that other MPs’ expenses were also shredded. But I can only find the name of one MP to whom…
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Jon Snow
Lords' expenses: it's a wonderful life
I am reliably informed that when new peers arrive in the House of Lords, there is a kind of informal induction process. Baroness Helena Kennedy of The Shaws tells me that when she arrived in the house, a peer came up to her and almost immediately opened the question of “second homes”.
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Jon Snow
Dishonoured honourables and the honours to come
I am very struck by the huge response to both Snowblog and Channel 4 News this week – high-quality contributions and a number of very personal comparisons with what is happening in regard to disclosure of MPs‘ arrangements. Stan, as you return to work today after nine months without a job, I wish you well.
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Jon Snow
Does the whole system need root and branch reform?
Legal sources I have spoken to tell me there could be a case to answer under both the fraud act (over the specific claim) and under the theft act. If it came to it, there’s a real danger that the Metropolitan Police may be put off investigating former Labour minister Elliot Morley by the chaotic…
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Jon Snow
Expenses, recession, war will dominate the election
The juxtaposition of the huge surge in unemployment with the latest revelations of parliamentary sleaze concentrate the mind no end. According to one of my well-informed sources, David Cameron’s greatest fear about this continuing crisis is that a credible group of people will come forward and form some sort of party that will contest the…