DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived Cleggeron era

Sent the phonehack link to one of my senators and my congressman. The senator is Al Franken, author of this masterpiece: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_and_the_Lying_Liars_Who_Tell_Them so wahey, this could be fun.

This means that the Lib Dems - and the coalition as a whole, because Clegg is deputy prime minister - have now trumped Labour, who have just been calling for the bid to be delayed.

ehh, i don't think so; I think that being first to raise something trumps going to a slightly greater degree. i also think that for all intents and purposes calling for a delay is equivalent to calling for it to be scrapped. really just reacting to how flaccid clegg is being here, belatedly trying to righteously straddle a populist cause, as w/the NHS bill.

Nick Clegg still exists? Huh, I presumed he died.

nah you're thinking of the Labour party

That's what you throw for someone on the day a friend is going to give birth, right?

/young person in new world politics

This is an advantage of being in power. Cameron can delay/postpone/cancel the bid now and it doesn't matter who bought it up first, he'll look quite the decisive statesman.

maybe true, i still think it leaves him looking pretty limp & late to the party. it also seems like, the extent to which he was loyal to coulson bespeaks how enmeshed he was with the murdochs & the extent to which he feels obligated to be involved with them. it's still a blow to him to have to nix the deal in the face of overwhelming opposition (which there was before hunt okayed it, over which they still okayed it, let alone now)

This is getting fun:

@GeorgeMichael
Just spoke to my lawyer.... apparently they want to interview me about my comments on Rebekah Brooks here on twitter...

"they"?

Police, apparently - he says Rebekakakaka showed up at his house (as a gatecrasher) in the company of friends who had been invited and proceeded to tell him all kinds of hubristic shit about what the Sun/NoW had been up to.

that would all be hearsay surely?

doesn't have to be evidence, it could be a bunch of lines of enquiry

Then there was a puff of smoke and he woke up with his car crashed into a Snappy Snaps.

george is an intensely private man and wd never say a bunch of stuff just to get his face in the papers

Just read the full Kavanagh piece in a cafe on lunch, it's a doozy. Think his line is basically that phone hacking is really bad but that it's also really rude to keep pointing this out, and thus the Graun is the real enemy because nobody likes a gloater?

He seems hilarously unable to decide whether he can bring himself to credit the hated Graun with striking the killing blow, or whether the NoTW's wounds were self-inflicted and it went out in a blaze of heroic macho stupidity, so he just argues both in different paragraphs.

Overall Trevor Kavanagh seems confused, and upset.

I guessed he missed the training day on Journalism 101 where they advise 'don't give your rivals anything to write about.'

xp Probably also tired and emotional.

Maybe as more people get dragged into this we will enter a golden age of publish-and-be-damned drunken editorial nihilism

the fall of whatever the opposite of civilization is

I flicked a look at the Sun in the newsagent, and saw his col.

Something about the "death of the newspaper" bringing a "lump to the throat", etc.

More Twitter:

@BBCMichaelCrick I hear that Gordon Brown going to make statement re activities of Sunday Times this afternoon.

This is an advantage of being in power. Cameron can delay/postpone/cancel the bid now and it doesn't matter who bought it up first, he'll look quite the decisive statesman.

You mean like Gordon Brown did during the expenses scandal? There's no way Cameron can come out of this looking good.

Overall Trevor Kavanagh seems confused, and upset.

Good and even better.

xp speaking of Gordon Brown...

@BBCMichaelCrick
I hear that Gordon Brown going to make statement re activities of Sunday Times this afternoon.

http://twitter.com/#!/BBCMichaelCrick/status/90393397713580032

Upthread, Cis. I am assidiously on this thread today as am in limbo, waiting on plumbers' comings and goings.

aha.

i can't remember whether i saw something first on twitter or ilx or the graun or the beeb liveblog any more, it's all one big multicoloured news mulch.

NEWSMULCH

keeping your news moist and aerated for over 50 years

fieldproducer Neal Mann
by Dorianlynskey
Woah if true RT @MichaelWolffNYC #MURDOCHGATE Get out of Dodge strategy being discussed at News Corp: Sell all of News Int.

Saw this Michael Wolff guy being interviewed, not sure I trust him entirely

This story, a natural lull in ESM production before the next issue and FUCKING PLUMBERS means no work's getting done here today.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53982000/jpg/_53982888_jex_1103637_de52-1.jpg
Danny Alexander: "The idea that the man in Whitehall knows best... is very old-fashioned"

Don't trust him at all. Although in my ahead-of-itself imagination they're already basically one step away from losing BSkyB and closing the Times, so selling NI seems totally plausible.

It is a good time in that people keep making strong attacks on wicked people.

Bad things keep happening, like the privatization thing or whatever. And the good things will not all end well.

But I still think it is a good time, for the good society we would like to have.

"uk end of season finale" so otm

word to the wise: never trust michael wolf

he is a moron who says things for attention

otoh he wrote a biography of rupe

you can't just announce that a business of that size that is part of a publicly traded company is "for sale"

News Corp could presumably dump all their NI shares and decouple the businesses?

Danny Alexander: "The idea that the man in Whitehall knows best... is very old-fashioned"

then fuck off out of it, sunshine

"The idea that the Head of Communications for the Cairngorms National Park knows best... is very old-fashioned"

"The idea that anyone that isn't me knows best... is very old-fashioned"

Chaz + Camilla hacked

"we see the 14% decline in BSkyB's share price in the last two days as an attractive entry point … The long-term fundamentals remain strong, in our view."

goldman sachs otm :-(

You mean like Gordon Brown did during the expenses scandal? There's no way Cameron can come out of this looking good.

We shall see. Cameron and Brown have rather different relationships with the media/I was being sarcastic about the decisive statesman.

Cameron and Brown have rather different relationships with the media

So it seems!

Cameron and Brown have rather different relationships with the media

So it seems!

indeed. it's a fundamentally different situation on account of cameron's implication, also.

So where are all these leaks coming from now?

The suggestion is the list, known as the green book, had been stolen and offered for £1,000 by a police officer.

The Metropolitan Police responded by saying the disclosures were part of a deliberate campaign to undermine its inquiry into alleged illegal payments.

yeah that met statement is just baffling

it's kind of amazing, really, the amount of time tory politicians palled around with NI hacks, that the latter never gave the former juicy information about political opponents