WHAT DO YOU WANT DARLING?

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Alistair Darling hardly broke into a sweat during his interview with Jon Sopel. No wonder, as Sopel's questioning was temperate in character - in both style and content (I.C. of 0.9). The coming budget, spending cuts, defence, Iceland and Charlie Whelan were discussed. No time though for anything on Labour's donors of course. Had George Osborne been there instead of Mr Darling it's a pretty safe bet that time would have found to talk about Tory donors.

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The Politics Show's Max Cotton (the cocky one!) then trotted off to Buckingham to look at Speaker Bercow's challenge from Nigel Farage (go Nigel!!). Conflict within the Conservative Party over the challenge was Max's main concern. Problems for the Conservative Party are an obsession with the folk at The Politics Show. Lord Tebbit was one of the stars of the show (he always is). He dropped big hints that he would vote for Nigel, were he himself a constituent of Bercow's Buckingham seat. (As would I!). The BBC, as my I.C. survey has shown, dislikes UKIP and Max had a few digs here: "But Nigel Farage was perhaps too strident when he addressed the new president of the EU, Mr van Rumpuy in these terms..." (followed by a very short clip). "I asked the Speaker of the House of Commons what he thought of this outburst". In response Bercow accused Nigel of not behaving in a grown-up way and accused him of "simple, rabid personal abuse". He's also accused Nigel of campaigning in too many pubs. Nigel didn't get a chance in Max's report to defend himself over the van Rumpus over his speech in the Eurolandic parliament, but he did get a chance to defend himself over the "glorified pub crawl" allegation & did so with good sense and good humour: "So for him to make this comment , it's kind of a sneaky, backbiting way of operating. I don't work like that. I stab people in the front." Even Max liked that!

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Later Paola Buonadonna reported on 'What Women Want'. Her starting point was a survey by The Fawcett Society, a 'registered charity' and feminist organisation. We heard from Ceri Goddard of that left-wing pressure group, then three female candidates: Priti Patel (Conservative, pictured for some reason), Rushanara Ali (Labour) and Katy Gordon (Lib Dem). They discussed various issues, but the only one raised by Paola was the Tory policy on recognising marriage through the tax system, which prompted the inevitable ganging-up on Priti by the others. Isn't that typical!

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