See you soon, Hoon

Transport secretary Geoff Hoon (right) has resigned his position, making him the third minister to go in a day. The MP for Ashfield had been barred from standing at the next election due to his dodgy expenses claims.

Hoon claims to have been "singled out without knowing why," evidently forgetting that he recently had to pay back £384 which he had claimed for two separate homes at the same time, despite the fact that MPs are allowed to claim expenses only for one second home. Although the amount is tiny compared to the figures some MPs have been linked to, Hoon's situation is one of the most blatant examples of expenses abuse.

The resignation comes during Brown's reshuffling of the Cabinet, leaving yet another hole the Prime Minister must fill with someone who will remain loyal to him as he fights for his future as the Labour Party's leader.

When's Broon goin' doon?

The results of yesterday's elections are coming in, revealing that our green and pleasant land is rapidly turning blue and Tory as the Conservative Party gain control over vast swathes of the South, East Anglia and the Midlands. The LibDems have won in Bristol, but that tiny patch of orange is beginning to look like a satsuma floating in a deep blue ocean.

At present, the Tories have gained three councils while Labour - as of yet unrepresented on the map - have lost one. However, there are now 29 more Conservative councillors - bringing their total up to 166 whereas Labour have lost 25, which brings them down to just 22. These figures will change as more counts are completed but thus far it's looking like Brown's party are not just going to suffer a defeat but are in for the sort of kicking that can sometimes finish a political party off for good.


In the last week, four prominent Labour members have resigned their posts. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith - still recovering from the embarrassment of her Parliamentary expenses paying for her husband's porn viewing habits - announced her resignation on Monday, then Hazel Blears went just ahead of her almost certain sacking in the current reshuffle. Next came Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell, who left after sending a sensational letter to Gordon Brown in which he pleaded with the Prime Minister to step down for the good of Labour's future. Now Defence Minister John Hutton has gone. Brown is desperately trying to fill the yawning hole left in his party by filling the gaps with people who will remain loyal to him. David Cameron has said that "the Government is falling apart," and just for once it looks as though he's right - Labour is in a shambles.


Brown has insisted that he will not stand down but there is increasingly little faith in his capabilities amongst back-benchers from his party. If 70 MPs are willing to sign a petition, Brown will have no choice but to face a leadership contest - and according to last night's Daily Politics BBC TV show 80 of them have shown willingness. Paul Farrelly, MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, says, "There have been too many mistakes and misjudgments over the last two years. In the interests of the country and the Labour party, I think Gordon must really consider his position." Barry Sheerman, Huddersfield, is more scathing. Brown "clearly doesn't like" the Labour party, he says, adding that neither does he "rate it, and takes no notice of it ... I would vote for a change of leadership."

Despite messages of support from remaining Cabinet ministers, Brown is now quite possibly the least popular leader amongst rank-and-file Labour MPs in the party's history. Today's results indicate that, without a miracle, Labour is heading for a crushing defeat in the General Election which must come next year at the latest. However, with the Chief Whip and - more importantly - six out of ten voters saying they think an earlier vote is desirable, it may happen even sooner. Whenever it happens, there seems to be very little chance of Labour getting away intact as a political entity.

If he truly respects, loves and believes in the party he represents, Brown must step down. Whether or not the's the right man for the job is irrelevant: his leadership is opening deep rifts in the Cabinet and among the back-benches, creating turmoil. Though a new leader will have virtually no hope of steering Labour to another election victory, he or she will represent an opportunity to begin picking up the pieces if what has been a most extraordinary and destructive year in the Commons and to batten down the hatches ready for the storm to come.

Blogging...

Fun and games on a tropical island

Four-year-old Taiwanese boy Yeh Chien-Anda-Lou scooped an amazing prize in a lottery aimed at raising public spending during these difficult economic times earlier this year when he won exclusive rights to a tropical island in the Taiwan Straits, allowing him full dominion over the island until September. The tiny, previously uninhabited island boasts golden sandy beaches, lush rainforest and a number of crystal-clear streams along with beautiful waterfalls and is home to an impressive selection of flora and fauna including fruit, parrots, fish and wild pigs.

The lottery draw took place in late February, and Acid Rabbi obtained the boy's family's telephone number shortly afterwards at 8.30 Taiwanese time; but we were unable to speak to Yeh because, as his mum told us, "He's fast asleep, tucked up in bed - he has a spelling test tomorrow, so he needs a good night's rest," preventing us from bringing you the story as it happened.

Yeh-Chien Anda-Lou and friend Pih-Gee have been enjoying "fun and games" on the tropical island, despite early fears that the boys may be too young to take responsibility for themselves.

There were early concerns that such a young child was not yet mature enough to fully benefit from the prize and that he might not yet be mature enough to be left alone. However, he elected to take a group of friends with him, including some older boys, and it seems the gang has been enjoying all manner of fun and games.

We were able to contact the boy yesterday, who has now settled in at a specially-constructed hut on the island. "It's been so much fun," he said, "My best friend Pih-Gee and I found a pretty shell which we can use like a trumpet. It's very handy because with it we can call back my other friends from the forest when they've gone to pick fruit. We had a bit of an argument on the first afternoon, because my other friend - Yah Khmer-Idu - was getting a bit bossy because he's older than me, but we had a vote and everyone decided I should be the chief."

It has not been all plain-sailing for the boys though - some of them have been suffering from acute diarrhoea, possibly as a result of the vast amounts of fruit they have been consuming. Some of the younger boys have also been experiencing nightmares due to their childish belief that the island is inhabited by some sort of monster, a belief that was quickly dispelled when Yah Khmer-Idu and a few of the other older boys proved that what the younger lads had actually seen was one of the wild pigs.

"The island is absolutely safe," claimed a Taiwanese naturalist and government minister. "We've sent some of our people out there a few times in the past and they've all come back talking about the place like it's some sort of tropical Eden. None of them saw any poisonous snakes and the pigs seem docile. In fact, the only dark patch in the island's recent history was one soldier who parachuted in a few years back and was never heard from again - we believe he probably landed badly and was killed."

Yeh adds, "Yah Khmer-Idu and some of the bigger boys have formed a hunting party to try to catch one of the pigs, because we need to eat meat as well as fruit, or we'll keep on being ill. He says it'll be fun." The young lads will doubtless be further comforted once a pig is killed, displaying to them that it is merely a normal animal and not a monster.

More on the orange UFOs

Well, seems I had no chance of seeing those orange UFOs no matter how near to Huntingdon I was on Sunday night, because the people who saw them saw them on Wednesday last week. Which just happens to be the same day that friends of Kim Huckle, a Huntingdon resident who died at the age of 53, released Chinese lanterns into the sky to mark her passing. What a coincidence.

Onoes! We're all too stupid to vote!

The United Kingdom Independence Party, desperate as ever to do all they can to ensure the maximum number of people vote for them, are threatening legal action due to the way the ballot papers being used in today's election are folded. In areas with many candidates, a larger ballot paper is being used to fit all the names on - polling station officers have been instructed to unfold the papers before handing them over to voters.

The anti-EU party is at the bottom of the list of parties contesting the European election on the paper which is folded in half - this has apparently proved sufficiently fiendish to confuse many a poor, simple UKIP voter, a number of whom have contacted the party to complain. Godfrey Bloom, UKIP MEP, says that if it proves to have been as much of a problem as suspected, his party will demand a re-run of the entire voting process. He added that UKIP fears it will lose thousands of votes (with any luck, that's quite a few more than they'll get anyway) as supporters prove to be in possession of insufficient intelligence to work it out for themselves and unfold the paper - presumably they'll then pick whichever candidate has the funniest name instead.

"Even people who have been going in to the polling stations intending to vote for us have not been able to find UKIP on the list because the paper is razor-folded along the bottom edge. It makes it extremely difficult in some parts of the country to find us on the list and several hours have elapsed in which this fault has not been rectified," he says.



Meanwhile, Labour's Tom Harris - who appears to have a little more faith in the public's intellectual capabilities - has argued on his blog against those who have compared the deviously-arranged papers to electoral fraud in Zimbabwe.

"The thousands of political refugees who have claimed asylum in Britain in recent years rarely mention the murders, rapes, beatings, intimidation and land-grab. No, no, no… It was the insistence by Harare returning officers on folding ballot papers that finally persuaded them to jump in the back of that lorry for the 3000-mile journey to Blighty," writes the Glasgow South MP.

So, UKIP voters...how does it feel when the party you wish to represent you and your country in Europe publically declares you to be stupid?

Silly Season begins!

We've had a few days of (bloody awful, in Acid Rabbi's opinion) hot weather, which once again has brought swallows, swifts and UFOs flocking to the British skies. People across the nation (and in Holland too) have been reporting squadrons of bright orange objects which defy all attempts at explanation despite the fact that the look exactly like Chinese lanterns, known to have been the cause for many a flying saucer flap in the past. The newspapers are elighted to have something other than political scandal to print now that quite a large percentage of the UK population is becoming bored with the expenses outrage.

How to start a UFO panic. You will need: paper, wire, glue, instructions on
building Chinese lanterns, several gullible witnesses.

Witnesses on Sunday night in Lincoln and Liverpool claimed they watched the UFOs fly in formation before breaking rank and flying straight upwards into space, although one Liverpool resident who is more into vaguely plausible theories than alien craft blamed a mysterious military activity which apparently took place in the Irish Sea and which involved one Naval vessel. Meanwhile, families in Huntingdon watched the lights for half an hour - Acid Rabbi spent several hours in a garden near Huntingdon on Sunday night, but saw nothing despite what he was smoking.

Mark Rosney, a member of the Merseyside Anomalies Research Organisation (who have an impressive name but nothing more than a FaceBook page online) which investigates similar sightings, claimed "Witnesses saw them travelling from south to north. If there are military aircraft in the area, they should be logged" while discounting the possibility of the lights being the result of an astronomical event such as a meteor shower. I want to believe, eh Mark matey? Another witness, who believes the secret military operation theory, said "They may have been quiet aircraft and fly at night so people don't see them. I don't think they were aliens." Well, the last part is probably right, so at least this chap (or indeed, chappess) doesn't fall for any old rubbish. The RAF would be unlikely to attach bright orange lights to anything they don't want people to see, though.

Over in Oxfordshire, the first major crop circle of the year has appeared in a field, causing around £600 of damage with more likely to arise from fans trampling all over the place. Earlier versions of the story put the figure at £600,000 - which the landowner quickly corrected in case anyone thought they were growing cocaine, since that'd be a hell of a lot of wheat. The phenomenon, which resembles a jellyfish, is 250 metres long and may have been caused by hippies. Could it be that the Summer of 2009 will see the news full of similar stories? It's been a while, after all.

It Lives Again! Mandelson to get Miliband's job

Peter Mandelson, The Man Who Would Not Die, looks set to rise from the grave once again this month - he's in the running for David Miliband's Foreign Secretary position in the forthcoming ministerial reshuffle.

Mandelson, the ultimate spin doctor, rose to fame after his instrumental role in bringing what passes for the Labour Party to power in 1997 but was subsequently twice forced to resign. The first time was in 1996 when it was revealed that he'd bought a house using an interest-free loan of £373,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, the millionaire MP whose business affairs were investigated by Mandelson's own governmental department. The resulting scandal - especially after it turned out that he hadn't declared the loan to his building society - would have been sufficient to kill off a lesser politician's career, but it was just a temporary setback for Peter, who after just ten months returned to life and became Mo Mowlam's replacement as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Claims that this was made possible by slitting the throats of virgins and allowing their blood to drip into his coffin are unsubstantiated.

Biologists predict that, following a nuclear holocaust, only three creatures

will survive: rats, cockroaches and Peter Mandelson.

Then, in 2001, it emerged that Mandelson had made a telephone call to Home Office minister Mike O'Brien on behalf of Srichand Hinduja,the Indian businessman who was seeking British citizenship and had been involved in the Bofors scandal, a serious corruption scandal in India during the 1980s. Although Mandelson claimed to have done nothing wrong - an investigation also stated that he had not acted improperly - he was nevertheless forced to resign once again.

But still he wouldn't die. Proving that he was even harder to kill off than Rasputin, Mandelson walked amongst the living and decided he'd like to become a European Commissioner - which he managed in November 2004 when he was made Commissioner for Trade. During his time in that position, he "“requested a luxury £80,000 Maserati as his official EU car” according to the Daily Express, and it emerged that melamine added to Chinese milk had hospitalised tens of thousands of Chinese children as it caused kidney stones and other problems - to show that he believed Chinese milk to be safe, Mandelson drank a glass of it in front of television cameras and nine days later was himself in hospital to have...a kidney stone removed.

Mandelson was also caught up by the Deripaska Affair, which revealed that he had maintained rather a chummy relationship with Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, whose company RusAl was set to benefit financially from the decision to cut EU aluminium tariffs - a decision made by Mandelson as Commissioner for Trade.

October 2008 saw him return to the British Government, when Gordon Brown gave him the Business Secretary post - he also became a Life Peer, entitling him to a seat in the House of Lords. The Guardian claimed him to be, in all but title, "the new deputy Prime Minister" which must have irritated Harriet Harman, who held that post.

In January this year, the Mail on Sunday reported that Mandelson has purchased a London property in 2006 for £2.5 million - around 16 times his European Commisioner salary. mandelson claimed that he had raised the money by selling shares he held in an advertising agency, combined with a large legacy from his mother. However, further investigation discovered that records held at Companies House showed the shares had not been sold until 2007. What's more, the legacy was £452,000 - less than 20% of the property's value.

More recently, the Daily Telegraph - in its ongoing MP expenses investigation - has revealed he claimed £3000 for maintenance to his Hartlepool constituency home during the week after he announced his decision to stand down.

Although Mandelson has claimed to support Miliband and says that he is happy to stay put, senior Government figures have said that he has expressed an interest in the position to Gordon Brown who is believed to be undecided on the issue due to the fact that it would be seen as insult to Miliband and uncertainty as to how British troops overseas would feel about an unelected peer filling the role, which assumes responsibility for military action in other nations such as Afghanistan. The PM doesn't seem too concerned about how the British electorate might feel about having such a slimy little toad, elected or not, representing their nation.

The reshuffle is planned for 5th June, after the local and European elections which may see Labour beaten into fourth place behind the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and even the BNP.

Blears clears her desk

Say what you want about the expenses row - we've found it just about the most entertaining thing to have happened in politics since the Westland Affair back in 1986 permanently screwed up Heseltine's chances of ever becoming Prime Minister - but you have to admit it's had its good sides.

The latest of these has been Hazel Blears' (pictured right, top) decision to resign. Blears says she plans to quit because she wants to "return to the grassroots (where I began), to political activism, to the cut and thrust of political debate." Not because of that £13,000 you rather deviously didn't pay in capitals gains tax on the second home you sold until you were forced to because the story became public, then?

All in all, this has been a pretty good week - we've also got rid of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (pictured below left)- and it's still only Wednesday! Smith, of course, was somewhat embarrassed when payment for two porn films her husband (who is also employed as her assistant) watched on pay-per-view showed up on her expenses, an incident that quite possibly sparked off the Daily Telegraph's interest in the phenomenon and led to their getting hold of the report they've subsequently used to ensure what is probably the first increase in sales they've had in many moons (or at least since most people realised the paper is little more than a journal for semi-fascist Tory old farts, at any rate). In March this year, a poll of Labour Party members - which was then leaked - revealed that just 56% thought she was doing a good job and many considered her to be the worst-performing Cabinet minister. Since then, it has been revealed that Smith claimed a total of over £157,000. A week is a long time in politics, or so the old saying goes, so who knows how many more high-profile fraudsters...er, we mean politicians (though it increasingly looks as though we were all correct in assuming the two words mean the same thing) will do the honourable thing by the end of the week?

Interestingly, nobody is quite sure who leaked the story of the porn films. However, it seems that only two people knew about it. One of them was Gordon Brown, who for all his faults is a relatively professional man and who would be unlikely to want to rock his government with scandal so soon after achieving prime ministership. The other was...Hazel Blears - the Telegraph reported that "Sources close to Downing Street suggested that Miss Smith’s decision only became public after it was leaked by friends of Miss Blears." Blears and Smith are known to have been friends and, well...if one of my friends had found themselves in a sticky and potentially very embarrassing situation, I'd try to protect them - but then, I'm not a politician. Blears has also been a very vocal critic of both Brown - most notably attacking his regrettable (for anyone who has seen it) YouTube appearance - and recent government performance. It was after she made her comments on the YouTube video that Brown attacked her expenses in a classic example of a playground feud, adding fuel to the fire that has grown from the increasing friction between Blears and No.10 which has caused many to speculate that the Prime Minister would either demote or sack her come the next ministerial reshuffle. Another of the Telegraph's sources claimed that the story would likely have been leaked by somebody who wished to "destabilise Gordon Brown", which is interesting as back-benchers have been urging her to challenge Brown and put herself forward as a potential Labour leader.

So, did she stab her supposed friend in the back? Just goes to show - she's not to be trusted. Which is, of course, precisely what we have learned from the whole expenses row - politicians are incapable of regulating their own activities and cannot be trusted. An independent body, with the powers to keep checks on them, is desperately needed if we are to ever have faith in them from now on.