He couldn't, could he? After the debacle of the election that wasn't last autumn, which many blame for Gordon Brown's subsequent slump in popularity, surely the PM couldn't be considering calling an election next year.
But there are the first signs that the "E" word is returning to the minds of party activists. Yesterday, Tory spin doctors were canvassing the lobby, asking journalists what they thought the chances of a 2009 election were.
Labour’s national executive committee have started an election fund campaign. Why all this sudden election fever?
It's been a while since we heard about the London mayoral race. No surprise there. Boris won. He's busy getting his feet under the table and making his mark. Livingstone lost. The Evening Standard, which ran a fierce campaign against him, got its way. End of story. But is it?
You might not guess that by today's edition. The former Mayor's tormentor-in-chief, reporter Andrew Gilligan, spends two pages reporting on how Ken is "plotting" a political comeback from a "City Hall-in-exile" in north London.
In defending the Standard's numerous stories on Ken during the campaign, Gilligan wrote in the Independent that it was Ken's obsession with the Standard that gave its stories so much impact. But today's double-page really makes one ask, who's obsessed with who, Andrew? Did no one tell him that the war's over?
There's more than a little outrage floating about over the revelation that Prince Charles' income has gone up by £1m while his tax burden has gone down. How can that be? Because he earned tax breaks on income tax when he spent money on green measures.
I'm a little baffled by the outrage. In managing to achieve this, Charles should be used by the green lobby as an example that green living need to cost the earth and can save money, while the government could use him to demonstrate that its policies to modify behaviour and encourage people to go green can work.
I was supporting Spain during Euro 2008 - not because I love tapas, spent a glorious summer in Galicia, or have a soft spot for Real Madrid. I supported them because I fully expected them to lose. In that respect, it was a comforting feeling with the absence of our own team of underachieving players. Alas, they went and won it. But the victory also means a lot to a country that has suffered in the past from divisions, within football and within society more generally.
For some interesting views on just what the victory means to the Spanish, we're going to have a couple of guest posts on the subject. Watch this space.
I'm going to cheat. I thought I would take the opportunity to have a closer look at the Conservative's pamphlet on the first year of Gordon Brown. Forgive the temporary obsession with this primitive pamphlet, seemingly knocked up as part of a computer publishing GCSE project, but the more I read it, the more juvenile and counter-productive it becomes.
I'm afraid I cannot link to it - it was sent out to newspaper offices across the capital. If I could, the first thing to strike you would be the pictures: Brown with shoe tucked into sock, Brown with face (partially) obscured by autocue, Brown (looking like he's) caught in a net, Brown pulling a funny face while playing tennis. hmmm. Not really losing the keys to Trident, is it?
And there's the bad jokes, repeating the Mail's assertion that "Gordon Brown said "he intended to meet the Diyli Lammer. He makes the Dalai Lama sound like an Aussie newspaper." Oh, and then there's that time when he broke into his own office, and got lost in Buckingham Palace. Hilarious.
I've just seen the pamphlet issued by Conservative HQ on Brown's first year in charge. It doesn't hold back - the chapters are broken down into the following:
* Brown the failure
* Brown the incompetent
* Brown the ditherer
* Brown the opportunist
* Brown the hypocrite
It also includes embarrassing pictures (the standard issue "PM asleep at important UN conference), a "Gaffes" section and a whole part dedicated to "Brownies" - new Conservative speak for Prime Ministerial fibs. They also include a handy "TImeline of Failure".
So is this the return of the nasty face of the Tories? Hardly an end to Punch and Judy politics is it?
So, Robert Mugabe is to have his knighthood withdrawn. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, had defended the decision not to remove the honour on his blog and on Question Time, arguing it would only add fuel to the fire of Mugabe's tactic of blaming the UK for interference in the ZImbabwe political process - this attempt to use the old call to arms against the old colonial power has been very evident in the editorials of the state-run media, which we regularly post on our "Pick of Overseas Comment" section.
Miliband had said:
Removing a knighthood will not bring food or help to people in desperate need - but will fuel Mugabe's game and we should not be party to that.
There's a little online debate going on about the way John Simpson has reported on the current difficulties in Zimbabwe. Danny Finkelstein and Iain Dale have concerns that the grand old man of the BBC, who swans into an international crisis whenever it hits the top of the news agenda, is reporting the situation as if Robert Mugabe was a master political tactician, rather than a man responsible for brutality and murder.
He describes Mugabe as pulling off a:
"remarkable victory, when only three months ago he seemed to be on the ropes".
It is odd, but this is not the first time Simpson has filed a grating report from Africa. Though his career demonstrates he is one of the country's finest journalists, he has form here. Back in February 2007, I watched another John Simpson report in amazement, this time on the crime problem in South Africa.
So it seems that maybe Ian Usher's idea wasn't so great after all. Selling his whole life on eBay (including an introduction to his friends on top of a house, car, and extreme sports equipment) has so far attracted a top bid of Aus. $155,100 (£75,000) - bids had reached over Aus. $2m, but dozens have had to be retracted as false bids. Oh dear. But no doubt it will fetch a tasty price by the end of the auction, in five days.
He's not the only one to try to make a quick eBay related buck. Other weird auctions include several people selling their souls, baby teeth (gross), a tie-dye T-shirt baring a resemblance to Jesus Christ, and an onion ring that looks like a peace sign. In fact, there are websites dedicated to odd bids.
Many people have a weird eBay story. The oddest thing I ever bought? A VHS video of an Australian animated film called "The Phantom Treehouse" that my sister and I loved as children. One copy turned up in a shop in Tasmania. It took three months to arrive via "Sea Mail", which presumably amounted to a dinghy propelled by an old sheet.
Other bizarre/favourite/useless eBay purchase stories welcome...
There was a time under George W Bush that many thought the White House had become a history-free zone. Apparently, that was only until 9pm, when, according to the outgoing President himself, he would curl up in bed with a good book. Usually, that was a history book.
Until recently, I wouldn’t have given any credence to the tale about Dubya’s evening routines, but events this week have made the image of Bush tucked up in bed with a weighty tome slightly more believable. That’s because it emerged that when he came to London as party of his European tour, he went to dinner with a bunch of our finest historians. Not only that – he was the one who asked them to come.
One in attendance, to President Bush’s right in fact, was the historian of France, Alistair Horne. As he wrote in the Independent this week, he had met Bush before – the President had read his book on France’s occupation of Algeria and the subsequent guerrilla battle, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962.
Recent Comments
THE OPEN HOUSE TEAM
Open House recommends
Issues
Archives
Complain about a comment