In London Until Wednesday!

Yep, that's pretty much what I'm doing.

In between ringing people in Westminster and asking them to consider the possibility of thinking about hiring me.

Fun times.

Shall also be having a look round the Houses of Parliament themselves: should be fun!

Take care people, sorry it's been a light this week,

The Evening Stanners

PS The 2010 General Election has finally finished! The Conservatives won the seat of Thirsk and Malton last night, so they now have 307 seats, giving the coalition Government a majority of 38. Exciting times.

Labour Leadership: Still Just The Two Of Us

Oh dear. Labour MPs haven't quite got the hang of this, have they? In a contest that ultimately needs to include at least one non-Miliband, we still haven't seen anyone else been nominated so far. Which would be all right, if it wasn't for the fact that nearly half of all Labour MPs have already voted: 114 in total, with 144 still to declare their allegiance.

The one interesting movement we've seen in this latest update is that Dave, for the first time, is beating Ed. Whilst Ed's nominations remain on 41, Dave has shot ahead with 48 nominations. Ed Balls now has fifteen, and Andy Burnham has moved into double figures with ten signatures to his name.

Just as well they've got until the 9th June, isn't it?

The Evening Stanners

Labour Leadership: Milibands Advance

Yep, thought that might happen. David Miliband has now secured the required number of signatures needed to advance to the ballot stage: he has 37 signatures, and has almost caught up brother Ed, who has 41. Meanwhile, Ed Balls has moved onto er, fourteen. And Andy Burnham has, er, eight. That's exactly 100 Labour MPs who have put down signatures, by the way.

Very open contest, right?

Meanwhile, here are the important backers so far:

Ed Miliband

Hilary Benn (Former Environment Secretary)

Peter Hain (Former Secretary of State for Wales)

Sadiq Khan (Transport Minister)

Stephen Timms (MP for East Ham: in news recently after being attacked)

David Miliband

Alan Johnson (Former Home Secretary)

Douglas Alexander (General Election Co-Ordinator for 2010)

Jim Murphy (Former Secretary of State for Scotland)

Tom Harris (Influential backbencher and MP for Glasgow South)

Ed Balls

Er, himself.

Another update in two minutes!

Also, I've e-mailed Vince Cable about possible work placements/vacancies. A bold move, non?

The Evening Stanners

Labour Leadership: Ed's Ahead

Well, that was quick. The nominations by MPs for the Labour Party's next leader have only been open for a day and already Ed Miliband has taken a storming lead.

The nomination process is a bit complicated, but basically it works like this: there are 258 Labour MPs who can pledge their support to any one of the six candidates. They do this in the form of a signature, and every candidate has to get at least 33 signatures in order to advance to the "next stage", as it were.

Anyway, in a somewhat surprising development, Ed Miliband has already achieved that, with 35 signatures to his name. His brother David is on course to get enough, but is still trailing significantly with just 19 signatures. Ed Balls is third with four, Andy Burnham has one, and Diane Abbott and John McDonnell do not have any support so far. That should change in the next few minutes, however, as the Labour Party website is updating the signatures at 12:30pm and 5:30pm every day until the 9th June.

So in short, this could take a while: but expect both Milibands to have advanced to the next stage by the end of the day.

The Evening Stanners

Speechifying

Today is when the Queen gets up in Parliament and basically outlines what on earth this next Government's getting up too. She should be fairly used to it, mind, having survived about a dozen Prime Ministers. You can find the BBC News live feed here.

Unfortunately, several parts of the Queen's Speech, such as the scrapping of identity cards and the Lib Dem proposal of pupil premiums, have been leaked to the press. Indeed, the leaks have extended themselves to the Evening Stanners, where we discovered an attempt to modernise the rhetoric of the speech, so that it might appeal to an electorate of the 21st Century...




I'm representing for them monarchs across the world

Still treating them corgies with some Rolos, girl


Still taking my time to perfect the Speech

And I still got love for the beach

Clegg: Cowabunga dudes...

Bill: SHUT UP, CLEGG!


The Evening Stanners

Recent Bereavement

Hello everyone,

Apologies for the blog being so light over the weekend: sadly my Grandmother, Elizabeth Grey, passed away yesterday morning after suffering a heart attack. I will be up in London for the funeral at some point in the future, but for now would like to thank all those I know who passed on their sympathies to me yesterday: it was greatly appreciated. The news did come as a slight shock, but she had a good innings and she went peacefully, and I am grateful for that.

I would also like to dedicate at least part of this blog to my grandmother, as a great deal of my time during the election campaign was spent in her company. She was exceptionally adept at discussing politics to the last, and a great deal of my knowledge about both past and present governments is largely thanks to her (especially about that "crook" Harold Wilson, and the politics of Northern Ireland). She also made a point of giving me far too much food in the mornings, but grandmothers do have a habit of spoiling their grandchildren, and mine was no exception.

Possibly one of the most amusing incidents during the election campaign was when I brought a copy of the Guardian into her house: my Gran is instinctively Conservative, and she was quite glad when I recycled the offending copy! That said, she never paid much attention to the newspapers: as long as she listened to Desert Island Discs on a Sunday, got the occasional tenner on the lottery, and lived under a strong (and preferably Conservative) Government, she was happy. She will have died safe in the knowledge that the Tories were in power: it's the way she would have wanted it.

R.I.P. Gran. "Hello, 0929?" won't sound quite the same on the phone now.

The Evening Stanners