Who dunnit?

Got a rather interesting text message:

"An unsuccessful attempt has been made to access your Voicemail
account. If this attempt was not made by you, please contact Customer
Care on 191 immediately."

Give TB some credit, he's not that silly. Not sure what

the thug

is still moaning about not being told about having his phone "hacked".

Why can't he just retire gracefully?

Totty Watch: QT Special

TB didn't catch Question Time last night, but there was much post-boozy lunch excitement when a rather inebriated co-worker returned having remembered he had fallen in love with this rather lovely lady from the audience last night. About 13 mins in

here.

Anyone know who she is?

Who was the hackette?

The delectable Kevin Maguire is putting a

bit of stick about

for Gordon once again:

"Home Secretary Alan Johnson was a picture of innocence during the plot to oust Brown and replace him with a former postie with the initials A J. Not so his entourage. It has come to the attention of No 10 that one of his team offered a job in Downing Street to a hackette."

Via the

Coffee House

this little bit of gossip begs the question - who was the hackette?

Could it have been

Allegra Stratton

?

Her articles did play a rather key role in the botched attempt to oust Brown?

In Dave We Trust

He hasn't quite got the Messiah like qualities of Obama quite yet, but things are looking good for Dave.

Apparently

he could be a direct descendant of Moses.

An actual watergate...

Iain Dale

has a wonderful scoop this morning about the fact the Liberal Democrat candidate in the Norwich By-Election April Pond has a rather lovely house... surrounded by a defensive trough full of stagnant water.

Yes one of the few things that really came to symbolise the expenses scandal was the ol' moat cleaning. No wonder Pond was Clegg's third choice for candidate. Was it really very wise of the dead duckers to choose a woman, who not only isn't very local, but during a by-election that will be dominated by the scandal is hardly a clean break from it?

Looking a little closer.. wait... what is that? Is that... is that... a duck house floating there?

Sorry who is Vince Clegg?

It is often said that Vince Cable should be the leader of the Liberal Democrats but someone in Liberal Youth is clearly a little confused...

These pictures sent to TB from last weekend's "Activate" weekend for the yellow kids are apparently from a training seminar where they were being taught by Cowley Street officials about leaflet writing. Anyone who has even gazed half an eye over any Lib Dem election literature will recognise the usual lies and bullshit that they push on the doorstep. Looks like the record isn't going to change anytime soon.

Particularly enjoyed the "Vince Clegg saves Christmas" line. Surprised the deluded dead duckers haven't pushed that one for real yet.

Genius.

Classic.

Via

Beau Bo D'or

Tory fingerprints are all over this...

Donal Blaney

has got the scoop:

"It is, however, abundantly clear that the Tories have a real case to answer. Tory fingerprints are all over the scandal - as I can exclusively reveal here.

Theresa May - once possibly bought a copy of The News of the World. What did she know that we ordinary mortals didn't, eh?

Michael Gove - worked for The Times (wink, wink) which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch (nudge, nudge) and believed to have maybe picked up a copy of The News of the World on a train once. What clearer evidence of Tory complicity in this could you want?

William Hague - wrote a weekly column for The News of World. Rumoured to have been the real editor, publisher, proprietor and driving force behind the entire newspaper since 1977.

Boris Johnson - was one of The News of the World's victims but in his case he deserved to have his voicemail hacked into because he's a Tory toff and he stood for the Mayor of London against St Kenneth of Livingstone, the High Priest of Political Correctness.

John Gummer - might own a Sky satellite dish. Or might not. BSkyB is owned by Rupert Murdoch. So is The News of the World. Ohmigod, the circle of connectivity gets closer still.

Richard Ottaway - represents Coulsdon, Surrey in the House of Commons. Coulsdon sounds like Coulson so clearly he too had intimate knowledge of what The News of the World was up to."

The fake Labour outrage is pathetic. John Prescott was nailing his staff on his desk while he was Deputy Prime Minister. Of course he was going to be targeted by journos.

The

real attack dogs

are very quiet today.

Busy...

TB is not only very hungover but extremely busy.

Apologies for the radio silence.

Brian Coleman is being a twat.

Pack it in.

Enough said.

Guest Post: Ahh University

Recent graduate and co-author of an upcoming book with the bear, Ed Kozak has written another guest post. Never a man to mince his words, his last post caused quite a storm. Here he reflects on that bastion of left-wingery - university.

Ah, university. Having just graduated and, like so many of my fellow graduates, being unemployed, I've recently had the time to reflect on the past four years of my life. I was trying to think of what, if anything, truly defined my time at uni. Was it the boring lectures and seminars? Or maybe the heavy drinking and occasional use of rare herbs? Perhaps it was the ridiculous post-Marxist bullshit masquerading as 'social' and 'economic' history I had to learn as a historian, destroying all real interest I ever had in the subject. Close, but no.

What truly defined my university experience was, in a word, opposition. Opposition to the legions of left-wing students of various shapes and sizes, opposition to their monopoly on student government, opposition to their bullying tactics and oppressive measures that monopoly enabled them to implement, and opposition to the P.C. propaganda shoved down our throats at every turn as 'fact' or 'truth'. You see, for a conservative-libertarian like myself, a university isn't just an academic institution, the time spent there no simple educational experience. It is, rather, a sort of mild form of torture, each lefty slogan yelled and lefty action taken a drop of water on the forehead, driving one slowly insane.

I've been interested in politics for years, and strongly right-wing for almost as many. But when I graduated high school I was under the impression that my political views would mellow out, that I'd inch closer to the political centre with each passing year. I was leaving New Jersey, that bastion of rampant left-wingery it is. I was going back to the United Kingdom, there had to be like-minded conservatives there, right? Maybe not ones as avidly and gun-totingly libertarian as myself, but still conservatives nonetheless. After all I could only assume that there would be others who loved Margaret Thatcher as much as I did, especially having had to deal with New Labour for the better part of a decade. Of course there were and, being one of maybe five conservatives I knew growing up in the States, that was wonderful. But then there were the lefties. And they were everywhere.

I wasn't at university too long before the alarm bells started ringing in my head. As I walked through the square where lectures were held and through the union buildings for the societies fair, I could hear Robin Leach's voice in my head; welcome to lifestyles of the left and dirty, with their champagne socialism and communist dreams. Seriously, before I went to university, socialist was just a dirty word, an insult I used to fling at my Democrat-supporting buddies in America. Surely after the horrors socialism inflicted upon the twentieth century - the horrors of National Socialism, the mass starvation, torture, and murder in the USSR, the crimes of men like Pol Pot and Che Guevara - no one could possibly think it was a good idea. How wrong I was.

I was soon taken over slowly by the painful realisation that I had landed squarely in the middle of one of the most oppressive, free-thought-stifling, bleeding-heart, left-wing environments imaginable. I would see and hear things that would make Hilary Clinton and Stalin blush. To put it bluntly, the amount of utter left-wing crap spewed daily from the mouths of students and professors alike astonished me. I couldn't help but recall Thomas Sowell, 'socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only and intellectual could ignore or evade it''. God was he right, and I certainly couldn't ignore or evade the plethora of lefty radicals, of tree-huggers and champagne socialists, working-class heroes and coffee shop revolutionaries that populated my university.

Ah, university. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Editor: Three guesses what the book is going to be about.

They say 10% like it's a bad thing...

One of the things TB found most hilarious about the Mr 10% Cuts attack, devised by a

liar out of his depth

, was the fact that when the 10% cuts figure was suggested to anyone not playing politics, anyone with the interests of the country at heart, they said "good.. and then what?"

Rachael Sylvester

has an a fascinating scoop in today's Times, that no doubt DC/GO are slightly annoyed has leaked:

"A few weeks ago an extraordinary meeting took place that could determine the future of public spending in this country. The venue was a white stuccoed house in Carlton Gardens. The chairman was Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary. Under discussion was whether drastic cuts in expenditure — of up to 20 per cent — will be needed to tackle the spiralling deficit. In the room were senior officials from across Whitehall and Conservative frontbenchers — but not a single minister.

In 1994 Canada was running a deficit of 9.2 per cent of GDP, about the same as Britain’s today. It had tried “efficiency savings”, public sector wage freezes and departmental budget cuts with little success.

Then the Liberal Government launched a fundamental review of the role of the state. Public expenditure was cut by a fifth across the board, and the number of state employees reduced by 23 per cent. Although health had only a small reduction in funding, defence spending was cut by 15 per cent, the transport budget was halved and industrial, regional and agricultural subsidies slashed. Within three years the deficit had been reduced to zero and the Government re-elected. “There was blood on the floor everywhere, but at least everyone could see that others were hurting too,” said Marcel Massé, the minister responsible. Voters told him: “This is butchery, but at least you seem a good surgeon.”

How long do we have to wait before this much needed surgery can start? Labour are going into scorched earth mode. Once again the Tories will be the ones that have to pick up the pieces but perhaps the most exciting prospect comes toward the end of Sylvester's piece:

"Senior Tories cite Tesco’s slogan “every little helps” in discussing cuts. But the real aim, they say, is to follow the Canadian example and rethink the role of the State. “There will be examples of painful decisions that we will need to take — but that’s more about showing people that we are serious rather than solving the debt crisis,” says one strategist. “You are not going to get anywhere near enough just by cutting even quite big things, the real point is that we have got to make fundamental changes in how we do things.”

Hallelujah!

Ver are your paaapers?

Oh wait we aren't allowed to make that joke are we...

Oh well.. another day,

another step closer to that police state

.

TV's TB...?

They seem to have cropped Sky News biggin' up torybear.com but for those of you who missed it, check out TB chatting about Palin and computers...



Think TB could do with a couple of day's in the sun.

Email Gordon

The Number10 website has finally managed to get it's arse in gear and fix the system for emailing the Prime Minister...Why not drop him a line:

Closest guess left in the comments at what TB emailed in will win a prize.

Who is TB?

TB will be on Sky News tonight talking about the web's biggest stories of the day.

Will be on sometime between 19.15 and 19.30. If you can't get to a telly you can watch the program online from seven

here

.

Not blowing his whistle now is he?

Independent candidate in the Norwich by-election

Craig Murray

, the volatile former Ambassador to Uzbekistan who "

quit

" on an apparent crisis of conscious, has begun his campaign with some heavy spin. He is standing on an anti-sleaze platform. His

website

is full of rants and ravings about expenses and, generally, he isn't a fan of politicians. This is his first leaflet:

However Craig fails to mention the fact that he

hard-balled the FCO out of six years full salary

before he would fall on his own sword and is thus still on the taxpayer funded payroll to this day.

Surely the voters of Norwich have a right to know about this little bit of hypocrisy eh Craig?

Crash Gordon

Another weekend gone and time for another cartoon from

Posh Tory

.

Another cock up for Crash Gordon...

Check out PT's work

here

.

Guest Post: The Truth About Cats and Dogs

After his diatribe against vegetarians last week,

Working Class Tory

goes all Doctor Doolittle on us for a moment:

Cats are independent, free minds and spirits who are capable of gathering material through their own enterprise and thought. If the cat owner represents the state, cats regard the state with a healthy degree of scepticism and perhaps, even, contempt. They act outside the state, and exercise their civil liberties to the polite maximum. Whilst they take advantage of some state-provided benefits (such as food), they only take what is necessary, and they do it sparingly. They also take less than any other animal.

Conversely, dogs are socialists. For the most part, they possess a lower level of intelligence, compared to cats, and they are entirely dependent on state benefits. They wait for the state to tell them to do something. They never exercise their civil liberties, believing submission to the state to be the best way forward. Throwing a stick for a dog to retrieve it, it simply wears the dog out, and produces nothing for either the state or the dog. In fact, if we consider that fox-hunting is about the only time they are free to use their instinctive individual enterprise, it is only under heavy regulation by the state.

Another dimension to this is that when dogs, or socialists go wrong, they become wolves, or communists. Yes, wolves are communist. They are isolationist, protectionist, secretive, belligerent, act as packs, not as individuals and are treated as dangerous pariahs by the mainstream animal community.

Bears, are a little like Tories. They’re more libertarian, though. They don’t need the state, they rely on their own good instincts, and they are also rather wild.

Well TB would agree with that one...

Hack Watch

TB was bored and sniffing out a developing story that somehow resulted in him ending up on "Labour Feminist" Grace Fletcher-Hackwood's

Twitter page

. Despite having a good laugh at the name that could have come straight from the pages of Private Eye, the funniest was yet to come when he attempted to follow this mouthful:

What exactly does this "

amateur vegan

" have to hide from the bear, and what if anything does blocking TB achieve? He can still read every one of her bleeding heart tweets, and if anything the fact she has attempted to stop him doing so has spiked his interest.

Guess TB will just have to add Gracie to the list of New Labour careers to end.

UPDATE 18.09: TB is going to tread carefully with this one, it seems The Hack has a

history of thumping tory boys

and thus her political career is

pretty much dead already

.