The morning catch-up: a Battlebus poll, a surprising secrecy advocate and a majestic gaffe

Spotted around the internet by our internet spotter

1. The ComRes Battlebus poll of 40 marginal seats suggests a hung parliament with Labour the largest party.

The poll suggests a 2.5-point swing to Labour since the last election in these battleground seats, which is equivalent to a 2-point Conservative lead nationally. If repeated in next year's election, Ed Miliband would have more seats than David Cameron. The previous poll, last month, suggested the Tories would be the largest party.

This month's poll also asked what people thought of the four party leaders. David Cameron was the most likely to be seen as "intelligent", by 42 per cent, with Ed Miliband on 29 per cent, Nick Clegg on 25 per cent and Nigel Farage on 18 per cent.

2. Joyous. Neal Lawson, the director of Compass, writes in The Guardian, the newspaper that is proud of its role in reporting American spying, complaining about the press finding out what a politician said in a "semi-private" meeting and reporting it. "Our political culture is diminished, maybe fatally."

3. Map of the Day. Net migration in Europe 2010-12: blue are countries with net immigration; yellow to red those with net emigration. It is notable that highest net immigration was to Switzerland and Norway: neither of them members of the EU, but both were part of the free movement of EU workers (Switzerland voted in a referendum in February to end it).

From a report by Rainer Münz for Bruegel, a European think tank, published in March, but I've only just caught up with it.

4. Shtum, shpilkes, kvetch: I did my Top 10 Yiddish words in The Independent on Sunday yesterday.

5. Also in The Independent on Sunday, I wrote about David Cameron's defeat by Jean-Claude Juncker and suggested that, Did it mean that Britain has moved closer to the fabled EU exit door? might be a Question To Which The Answer Is No.

6. Finally (thanks to Iain Macintosh), Daniel Finkelstein in Saturday's Times (pay wall), recalls William Hague's visit to Japan:

He went with a group of MPs, and one of them had a pressing question to ask the mayor of Hiroshima. “Everywhere else we’ve been in Japan,” said the MP, “the streets have been higgledy-piggledy. Yet here in Hiroshima your streets are laid out in a well-organised grid. How did you achieve that?”

The mayor paused and quietly responded: “We had some help. From the Americans.”

Finkelstein insists the story is true, but he won't say who the former MP is.