And So It Begins...

Britain’s most highly decorated serving soldier last night personally attacked Gordon Brown for ‘disrespecting’ the Armed Forces.

Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry also revealed that he refused to shake the Prime Minister’s hand at a Remembrance Day event last year.

Mr Brown has now written a personal letter of apology to Lance Corporal Beharry, who in 2005 was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in Iraq.

Lance Corporal Beharry said that Mr Brown had fidgeted throughout the two-minute silence held at the Cenotaph in November. “We were representing the Army in front of him and he didn’t seem to care less,”

Let's hope Brown spelt his name write in the apology

letter

.

Chris Gayling

This is not a matter of Grayling standing up for what he believes in, if it was he wouldn't have voted for the legislation he was speaking out against. Right? If this was a "matter of principle" Grayling would have resigned on a "matter of principle" when he refused to vote with his Party. Oh wait. Instead he has shown himself to be a hypocritical careerist toad, biting the bullet and swallowing his beliefs for a sniff of power. It's a mess and safe to say, even if he clings on for the next five weeks, he won't be won't be taking up an office anywhere near Horseferry Road.

Over promoted, gaffe prone and completely lacking in any any savvy-ness, Grayling has been a walking shit-magnet ever since he was given the Shadow Home Office brief. He was a great attack dog but that doesn't mean he is suitable for high office. TB doesn't believe he is homophobic, but he should have been more shrewd. For better or worse, he may well have been standing up for Christian rights, but he must have realised this close to an election that people would be on the look out for any excuse to piss on the Tory bonfire. An idiot rather than bigot. Grayling is clearly not A-team material and has ruined an otherwise perfect eve-of-the-election-weekend. Well done.

But this is not the first time Grayling has caused a sharp intake of breath for TB. He sums up everything wrong with the authoritarian, "hang em and flog em" tory-ism. Want to see this hard streak? Just look at his cosying up to the likes of Alan Johnson whenever the D word is mentioned.

So we have established that Grayling is a tit. But that doesn't give an excuse for the scummy fringe of the left to bring out their classic attacks on gay Tories. The LGBT Labour movement should take a long reflective moment before they carry on with how they have begun today. Take one of their most vile, aggressive and disgustingly bigoted members Kev Peel for example.

Young Kevin has used today to spread some of his more

ignorant and inflammatory ideas

. He has suggested that all gay tories are "self loathing, repressed and rather homophobic". Sorry but WTF?

Since when does who someone beds determine their entire political outlook? Why should someone's sexuality, unless standing purely on these particular issues, determine how they vote? What goes on in the bedroom is nothing to do with the state, a political party or even a hotel owner. Peel should apologise for the disgusting slurs. His amateur and immature arguments should be immediately disowned by LGBT Labour and the Party as a whole. If they are not they are showing a fascinating insight into the homophobic mindset of their party.

Yes you read that right, to suggest that someone should be enslaved by their sexuality and make sure it determines every single decision they make is an homophobic outlook. It shows they feel that somehow a gay person is unequal from someone who doesn't have to make every decision based on their sexuality. Grow up Kev. 


UPDATE: A gay Tory gets in touch to say of Kev: "It's disgustig, similar to what Ben Bradshaw comes out with. I like how he's now trying to portray himself as a 'minor labour person' and his views are just his own. So were Graylings but he's still insulting thousands of gay people who vote Tory."

Labour's Casual Regard for Privacy

While in government Labour have lost thousands of gigabytes of data be it secret military inteligence or the personal details of thousands of citizans. It will come as no surprise that at party level they have an almost piss-taking attitude toward the Data Protection Act. Sites like

Ed's Pledge

and

Back the Ban

are nothing more than email address harvesting exercise.

Greg Hands is clearly enjoying his new role as the Tories attack dog. He seems to have been charged with going after Blair and he's doing rather well at it. In a

long piece on ConHome

he unravels how by signing up to receive email updates from Downing Street in 2007, his data was transferred through Tony Blair's murky business and charity dealings and finally ended up in the hands of the Labour Party. This being a breach of not only Data Protection Laws but also highlights some intriguing questions about Blair's charities and their connections to his business interests and the Labour Party.

Read Hand's excellent investigation

here

.

Dust to Dust

Labour aren't having a good weekend. On the eve of the election being called the momentum and the lead is back with the Tories. Much of this is down to George Osborne who once again playing a great hand on a fiscal announcement. Once it was the IHT cut and now it's the pledge to make seven out ten working people better off by removing Brown and Darling's national insurance increase.

And of course Labour's bad weekend can be blamed on their poster disaster. Expect the Milibands to come under much fire next week for the cock up. Already the blame game is starting. TB put a call into one of his best Labour sources, a senior party figure who had seen an advanced copy of the poster, to poke fun. He wasn't expecting quite such rage though:

"We're getting the worst reactions at the doorstep: indifference and inattention. Even people who watched the show last night didn't get the reference, and the vast majority of the country didn't watch the show. HQ just don't get it."

Another Labour hack said "I can't believe what a f*** up this weekend has been."

Every newspaper and even the BBC are slamming the poster and the polls tonight are expected to show an increased Tory lead. You want to get yourselves a decent ad agency chaps.

Don't Miss

TB is enjoying a few days off catching up on lots of things before the scrum kicks off on Tuesday. It seems the campaigns are still going strong though over the weekend. If you are switching off for the a couple of days make sure you note these two must reads/watches. Firstly David Cameron's

pitch for PM

in The Telegraph and how his political journey makes him the man for the top job:

"It was nine years ago, but every second is etched on my memory. I couldn’t stop fidgeting as I chewed gum, paced the draughty hall and smoked (I still hadn’t given up by then). The hours dragged by, the torture seeming to get only more intense. Every ballot box that was emptied appeared to have crosses for my opponents, not for me. My stomach was in knots, a gnawing dread that my second attempt to win a seat in Parliament would end in failure again."

Secondly catch up with BBC Parliament's half hour "

Hard Talk

" with Heather Brooke:

She get's quite a grilling and handles her own well in yet another, but ultimately fascinating, insight into her campaign against the establishment. 

Labour's Taliban Moment

For all the smug stirring that Labour did during a wee bit of Tory PPC trouble in Norfolk and Westminster North, they don't half know how to have a bun-fight themselves. Tristram Hunt's selection in Stoke-On-Trent has gone down like a cup of cold sick. The Labour spin operation and more feverent loyal grassrooters have gone into overdrive dismissing any criticism of the selction process as "pathetic" or "beserk". Others are worried though and a clear split in the Party nationally is emerging.

The main lightening rod for the "forces of hell" appears to be Gary Elsby, who believed that he was the favourite to take the seat and is having one mighty tantrum now he has been pushed aside by Mandy's little friend. He is now running as an independent labour candidate and threatening to take the CLP with him. No fewer than three of TB's more metropolitan Labour chums have pointed out 

this piece

by Ed Howker this morning. It seems Mr Elsby has a track record as a loose cannon and it's perhaps for the best that someone with his thought process is kept as far away from Westminster as possible. Here is a selection of comments Elsby has left on blogs:

Iain Dale's Diary: June 23, 2006 2:13 PM Gary Elsby said...

"MI5 undermined Wilson.
MI5 led the miners.
MI5 infiltrated the EC of scargill
MI6 set up the Falklands war
Why do you consider it patriotic for the state(?) to usurp the people?
Why do you support a party that instigated crimes against society of
which we cut off a King's head?
The Conservative party are aparty of traitors. Accept it..."

Iain Dale's Diary June 25, 2006 3:56 PM , Gary Elsby said...

"My point is really quite simple and appears lost to you die hards. The Tories funded Hitlers rising Nazi party and are mostly responsible for what happened next. Your lot tried to stop it by collaborating. Hess, Speer and hundreds of Nazi's colluded with the Tories to accept a Nazi Britain. You have MI5 and MI6 to give you a hand and Labour have no-one. The Falkland islands was a definite Tory plot defining Britain against allcomers. The Tories deliberately weakened our protection in full knowledge of mpending invasion. I'm thinking of writing a book...'The Tories are treacherous,treasonous bastards' Available from all good books shops. Gary"

Dizzy Thinks: 20 Feb 2008 22:44:00 Gary Elsby labour said...

"The only good Tory is a dead Tory. gary"

Dizzy Thinks: 21 Feb 2008 10:43:00

"CORRECTION:
The only good Tory is a dead Tory. I'm sorry, this is a tad wrong. The only Tory is a dead Tory that I am present at the burial. You know what lying bastards Tories are! They say they are dead, but they lie! Gary"

Ministry of Truth: March 20th, 2008 Gary Elsby stoke-on-trent said...

"Tories are lying, cheating bastards. I already knew this. Gary"

You can see now why Mr Elsby's claim that he was an appropriate candidate for Parliament might have been met with some disdain by the more sensible elements of the Labour Party.

Quote of the Day

Labour thinks the 1980s were unpopular. The truth is, nothing in the 1980s was more unpopular than the Labour Party itself.

-

Greg Hands

Why Labour Should Learn to Stop Panicking and Love the Eighties

After all the fuss about the open-sourcing of the new Labour poster, it seems Victoria Street would have been better off sticking to their own in-house washed out ideas. As even the left online are accepting, the Ashes to Ashes spoof poster is a spectacular own goal. Well done, rather than exploit weaknesses, you've managed to associate Cameron with a popular, working class, funny figure. And sorry, what exactly was wrong with Eighties?

If the 1980s were so bad, why was the key moment of change in the Labour Party the dropping of Clause Four and the acceptance that the values and practices of the Eighties made this country great and changed for the better how it was run forever. New Labour was built on Eighties values.

Labour seem determined to take us back to the Seventies, to the days of strikes and unions holding the country over the barrel. The reason Labour don't want the Conservatives to take us back to the Eighties is because it would make the entire Labour Party as it stands today an irrelevance. New Labour was an Eighties-lite project and an incoming Conservative government will force it into the dustbin of history where it belongs. 

This last ditch attack shows just how shallow and hollow the whole idea was. Labour supporters clearly do not understand what made Blair and New Labour attractive and electable. Just look at the disgusting class-based drivel of the entries that didn't win the competition to show you just how idiotic and moronic the active Labour grass-roots are. It was Blair's embracing of the Eighties that means the Labour Party, for better or worse, still exists today. Bring on May 6th so this floundering, broken, deluded and misguided project can finally be put out of its misery. 

The Election is Called

The Mask Slips

TB somehow strolled over to look at the entries into

Labour's poster competition

. A glimpse into the most unpleasant sections of the Labour movement. Apparently because a Paint graphic will be displayed on an electronic poster board (a campaigning method that Labour have attacked in the last three months,) for about ten minutes this weekend, they are leading an online revolution. The results have produced nothing more than base class warfare at its very worst. Bring it on, you really do look that desperate. This particularly dreadful example caught TB's eye though:

Nice spelling of "hospitals" there. That's what you get from 12 dreadful years of Labour run education.

Bradshaw Running Scared?

Is it just TB or does anyone else think Ben Bradshaw's choice of clothing on his Sky News interview a moment ago was a little odd for someone addressing the nation from Central London on a Wednesday afternoon?

Looks like he is bunking off  from his ministerial duties early this week to hit the stump and defend his increasingly shaky Exeter majority. Off for a meeting with cider producers perhaps? Bet he would be popular there.

The Saint Still Marred in Scandal

Some of the more hysterical Lib Dems would have you believe Sarah Teather has been cleared over her dodgy rental agreement with Brent Liberal Democrats:



As Guido

points out

though, just because the complaint was dropped does not mean Teather has been exonerated.


UPDATE: As TB just wrote on

LDV

(no doubt they will delete his criticism as they always seem to do):
Lyon dismissed the complaint on the:

“basis of the evidence which I received”
well Labour couldn’t run a bath let alone put a decent complaint in.
just because they cocked up the complaints doesn’t mean there isn’t a case.
and don’t forget the age old sniff test, if the rent agreement was within the law then the law is an ass."

Can Twitter Predict the Election Result?

There must be something in the lefty water this week that is bringing out some comedy gold:

"Alberto Nardelli, co-founder of Tweetminster,

said

: 'The Chancellors' Debate officially kick-started the election campaign in great style. The TV debates, alongside many other "new variables", such as Twitter, are likely to have a strong influence on the outcome of the election. We will only know the importance of such an influence on May 7 though.'"

Sit on the fence there why don't you oh "Twitter expert". 

TB is getting increasingly irritated with the lefties over at Tweetminster. He has made this clear before, but today they took the biscuit with their latest sidesplitting

attempt

at justification for the £100k they talked some PR guy out of. Apparently, and wait for it... TWITTER CAN PREDICT THE ELECTION RESULT!

Let the dull thud of TB's head hitting the desk reverberate across the land. 

"Our inspiration for this experiment comes from last year’s General Election in Japan, when a group of software engineers and PhD graduates from Tokyo University undertook a study analysing the correlation between ‘online buzz’ and election results. The aim of the study was to assess if word-of-mouth mentions of candidates could help to predict which ones would be successful. The study found that in a majority of constituencies the most mentioned candidate won the seat."

Umm was the fact you aren't allowed to

campaign online for the two week

before a Japanese election taken into consideration before a glorious success was called?

How about the methodology, is it local mentions?

What about the fact that Twitter in the UK is full of fellow lefties and they spend most of their time attacking opponents. Lots of mentions, but many won't win.

What happens about nationally unpopular figures with large majorities - lots of mentions but no chance of being beaten?

TB thinks John Rentoul, who must have been orgasmic with Blair's return to the scene today,

hit the nail on the head

by including "can Twitter predict the election?" on his list of questions to which the answer is a resolute no.

If they pull this off they will be very very rich. Something tells TB they are going to look a little silly though.

Seriously, stick to the N64 lads.

Just Jealous Because TB Didn't Get "Tory Bear"

Amazing what you overhear in the Guy News room.

Emily Nomates

, having applied for a press badge for the Tory campaign media events, received a phone call regarding some name confusion:

CCHQ: You seem to have two different names on your media pass form?
EN: No one is my name and the Emily Nomates is a different name.
CCHQ: They are two people?
EN: Err no they are the same person...

Pause while TB strained to hear what was being said..

EN: Yes Ms.Nomates will be fine.

Brilliant security.

The Delusion of James Macintyre Part 45

James Macintyre

writes

: "With a few exceptions, the dark briefings by ministers against other ministers within Labour went away with the departure from Number Ten of Tony Blair"

Is he mental or just spinning out of control? Brown's entire government has been one big internal briefing mudbath. Has James been hanging out with Draper again?


UPDATE: The fact that former defence minister Eric Joyce is the f

irst person to comment

on Macintyre's piece and pours scorn says it all.

He's Not the Messiah

They just can't let him go can they? The media really do purr and role over to have their stomachs tickled whenever St. Tony cares to grace these humble shores with his presence. During Chilcott it was bad news for Labour, but today they have dominated both Sky and BBC for the last four hours, and given the rate hacks are blogging about it, tomorrow's papers look set to be a tonefest.

It's incredible that the man they cast out because "he would not win another election" has come back to attempt to shore up the worst of the damage for his old foe. TB is impressed TB didn't tell Gordon where to go, though with Mandy and Campbell back at centre of operations it must have been just like old times. Liked the tacit endorsement of Miliband too - the project must go on.

A good day for Labour. Thanks to media's really rather pathetic Stockholm Syndrome, Blair has drowned out almost all discussion of debate last night and stopped the Tories from getting coverage while they pursued a pretty big cock-up by Darling, live on TV, and a humilating climb down for Burnham and Labour over their disgusting death tax plans. A very useful resource for Labour to deploy when they need a media blackout.

Shame the rest of the country still thinks Blair's a...


UPDATE: Just spotted this

gem

from secret crush Margot James: "Suspect Blair will be as much use to Brown as Bill was to Hillary on the campaign trail" Spot on. While the media had a field day with Bill, the question must be posed... how'd that nomination come along Hillary?

Quote of the Day

As a very orange Blair spends one of his ninety days in the country giving a speech for Labour, TB was reminded of Mr Miliband's astute

analysis:

"People will be saying 'wouldn't it be great to have that Blair back because we can't stand that Gordon Brown'"

As the Dust Settles

So as Hague, Huhne and Wee Dougie work the spin room, TB's initial thoughts are firstly Cable was further to the left of Darling, and secondly he really needs to get over his five minutes in the limelight. Sadly with the way things are the Lib Dems are getting far too much oxygen than they deserve.

Darling was the only one that told genuine porkies about Tory policy and despite the furious spinning from Labour all day that his neck was on the line, Osborne held his own competently and calmly. For better or worse he was the only one who stuck to the question where the others were able to dodge and duck and fight back through refusing to answer.

Cable had the audience on side and TB suspects large swathes of the undecided public. Good news is this socialist snake charmer will never get near No11. It was soundbite central from the yellow team.

There were no killer blows though, no shrapnel wounds really either and for all the hype, the leadership debates better be a bit more than exciting. Nothing that happened tonight will be remembered by election day, but Labour will have to pack the Osborne's rubbish spin in. The real winner was the genial host.

Tweets from the Debate

Chancellor's Debate Warm-up

A little something to get you going before the big showdown.