Politics

John Bercow has lost his biggest attempt at a power grab after MPs recommended that the appointment process for the Commons clerk be terminated. The governance committee set up after the row over the Speaker’s desire to appoint Carol Mills became too big to handle has called for a new director general job to be created and that and the Clerk job should be readvertised. Now Mills can notionally re-apply for the job but would struggle to meet the new criteria set out by the committee. It says the Clerk is ‘adviser to the House of Commons on the procedure and practice of Parliament, including parliamentary privilege’. The row about

Ukip’s commonwealth spokesperson Winston McKenzie – he of Carnival of Colour fame – is never far from controversy. It was only a matter of time before a devout Ukipper compared their hero Nigel Farage to a deity and we should have all guessed it would be Winston: ‘Jesus was one man. We are his army. Nigel Farage is one man and we are his army and that’s what it’s all about’ Happy Faragemas, everybody.

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the ‘P’ word: privatisation. Ed Miliband’s team hasn’t done the hard policy work to revitalise Labour as a party of government, and it is beginning to show. His platform for next May has a lot of sticky plaster policies, but very little that addresses structural problems like the housing market and transport costs, to name two issues close to my heart. Instead, catnip like ‘no privatisation of our NHS’ and ‘reversing the privatisation of the railways’ is being wheeled out to fill the Left’s policy void. This conveniently ignores the Blair and Brown government’s enthusiasm for market – rather than state –

Ukip has confirmed this morning that Nigel Farage’s wife is still in receipt of public money — despite an on air denial from her husband. The party could not have paid for better PR on Channel 4 last night, with Farage meeting Gogglebox poshos Steph and Dom for a special one off programme. One exchange caught Steerpike’s eye, regarding employment of his wife. Nige claimed Kirsten was no longer ‘paid by the public sector’. In fact, the Ukip leader could not have been clearer: ‘Dom: But she is also your wife and she’s working for you Farage: She is no longer paid by the public sector. Dom: Ok so now you have

MPs are often fond of complaining that they are ignored by senior figures in their parties as orders are passed on from central HQ with no explanation or opportunity for backbenchers to discuss strategy. Yesterday’s mess over Labour’s internal memo advising MPs on tackling Ukip partly explains why that high-handed approach often happens. Emailing strategy documents to MPs is like leaving a toddler in a freshly painted room with a set of marker pens and expecting to come back to find everything in pristine condition. There is a reason why such papers should be numbered, handed out in a locked room for discussion and collected at the end, if you don’t

I have been passed a snap of the Christmas tree inside Brighton and Hove’s Green Party run council building. Or more accurately, I have been passed a snap of some bits of old shit collected from Brighton beach and put on a shelf under the title ‘One Planet’. After a year where rubbish has gone uncollected from the streets of Brighton due to an industrial dispute between the lefty council and the evil capitalist refuse workers, the irony of this installation will not go unnoticed: Hardly very festive, and are those bulbs energy efficient? We should be told.