Ready for a boom bang-a-bang

If you have money to throw away and a mind bunged up with prejudices you feel you must share, all you need do these days is contact the advertising department of The Times.

BBC’s Newsnight has been through seven turbulent months, taking in the Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine fiascos, and last night’s apology for a “misleading and unfair” item about the Help for Heroes charity. What the programme manifestly needs is an editor with good judgement. They have got Ian Katz, deputy editor of The Guardian.

Nadine Dorries, that ever troublesome Tory MP, wants to be the first to be chosen to run for Parliament in 2015 on a joint Conservative/UKIP ticket. Her announcement, via The Spectator, must have had the Conservative Party bosses rolling their eyes and wondering why they ever readmitted her to the party. They say they will stop her doing it, because a change in electoral law means that no one can now run as the candidate of a party unless they have been signed off by party’s headquarters, even if their local association is prepared to back them.

Nick Clegg has condemned the Tories' "endless navel gazing" over Europe, the latest outcome of which was today's draft referendum Bill, which the Liberal Democrats regard as a vast distraction from the issues that actually matter. But Mr Clegg was not always so sniffy. In 2008, his picture adorned a Liberal Democrat leaflet headed "It's time for a Real Referendum on Europe", which invited signatures to a petition calling on the government to "give the British people a real choice".

The original purpose for which the trade unions created the Labour Party was to get working-class representatives into Parliament. The old engineering union, the AUEW, which has now been absorbed in Unite, had a particularly strong record for taking members off the factory floor, training them up and getting them into Parliament.

David Cameron may be “relaxed” about having some of his backbench MPs table an amendment to the Queen’s Speech that will call for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union but, strictly speaking, it is nothing to be relaxed about.

Lord Hanningfield, the trougher in ermine, has extracted another wodge of cash from the public purse. The latest published list of expenses from the House of Lords shows that Hanningfield, who has done time in jail for fiddling expenses, claimed £3,600 in attendance allowances in December, lawfully this time.

UKIP’s success in last week’s local elections is having an impact already. Nadine Dorries, who had the Tory whip taken away because of her appearance on I’m a Celebrity, has got it back, thereby heading off the risk that she might defect to Ukip.

As the Tories absorb the consequences of last week's local election results, some of them have apparently arrived at the brilliant solution that the first thing they must do is be nice to Nadine Dorries.

On an exceptionally good day for Ukip, one of their most extraordinary results was in Essex, where they had no county council seats until today but now have nine. The Tories lost 19 seats. There was a local issue at work here, a leading Essex Tory tells me: the “Hanningfield factor”. Lord Hanningfield is well known in Essex as the former council leader jailed for fiddling his Lords expenses.

Martyn Underhill, a former detective chief inspector who is now Dorset’s elected Police Commissioner, has announced on his blog that he is trying to organise commercial sponsorship to help all five police forces in the South-west cope with cuts in their budgets. “The police family in Dorset is living in austere times with a shrinking budget and workforce,” he complains. “We are the lowest funded force and have seen the worst cuts. This is wrong, and I will continue to fight this…. I see huge potential benefits to forming appropriate sponsorship relationships with reputable organisations.”

It has been a long time since Michael Milken’s name was news in this country. He was the 1980s Junk Bond King, who piled up untold wealth in the boom years, but came to grief at the end of the decade when he copped a ten-year jail sentence, a $200m fine and a permanent ban on dealing in securities, after  pleading guilty to six felonies, in what was then the biggest fraud case in the history of the US securities industry.