April 23: Clegg under fire; Hague hits Kent and how you've paid £190,000 to bale out a council company
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NICK
Clegg gets a mauling in some of the papers today – notably
the Conservative-leaning Telegraph and Mail – who have re-hashed
what look like old stories about his expenses and his time as an
MEP.
This shows a couple of things –
namely, that the Conservatives regard the Lib Dem threat as a real
one and second, that such vituperative coverage shows that Clegg is
being seen as a politician that matters. So, it’s not all bad news
and there is a maxim in politics that it is better to be talked
about rather than ignored.
(Mind you, I'm not sure how helpful it
is to receive the sympathy of Lord Mandelson, who came to his
defence today on radio 4 The World At One.}
The interesting question is whether
any of this will burst the Lib Dem bubble. These papers are
traditionally Conservative loyalists and I wonder if – rather like
the leaders’ debate – people might just see this kind of personal
attack and smear and innuendo as a sign of the media
establishment protecting and promoting its own interests rather
than the interests of voters.
I suspect more people are likely to
take note of the way the leaders’ debates go rather than what might
be reported in Conservative-supporting national newspapers.
I see the Conservative blogger Iain
Dale has reservations about whether these attacks will backfire too
- read his blog here
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Away from the general election, I’ve been looking into a
story about how a limited company set up by Kent County
Council and Thanet Council has had to
receive a £190,000 cash injection courtesy of the taxpayer to
ensure its survival.
The company is East Kent
Opportunities (EKO) which was created in 2008 to steer the
regeneration of two key development sites in Thanet: Manston
Business Park and the Eurokent site.
How councils
agreed to keep EKO afloat - read our story here>>>
This joint venture was set up at a not
insignificant sum of £519,000 and in the last two years has cost
the taxpayer £833,665 to maintain. Now we can add the £190,000 to
this figure – bringing the overall sum to
£1.54million.
The principal reason KCC and TDC
agreed the loan, according to a cabinet report going to a meeting
next week, is that was necessary to ensure EKO remains a going
concern – in other words, to stop it having to fold.
Neither KCC, TDC or EKO has had much
to say about any of this and have issued rather bland statements
which are designed to give the impression that everything is going
swimmingly.
Questions like who proposed and who
agreed the loan, and whether anyone involved in the decision were
members of EKO as well as councillors remain unanswered.
I gather there is some confusion about
how the loan agreement came about, certainly at County Hall, where
the authority has placed no reports about it into the public
domain, even though it is perfectly clear there is a public
interest in the matter.
Even more unclear is whether EKO has
met the terms of its contractual arrangements with KCC and TDC to
repay within two years of it being setup the £5.4million advanced
by KCC to pay for the costs of the Eurokent Spine
Road.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I was
with shadow foreign secretary William Hague
yesterday for a small part of his marathon tour of Kent’s key
marginals.
Yet again, a supermarket was chosen
for his visit to Chatham and he popped in to the
Asda store for a tour and to chat to a few shoppers. (His PR people
missed a golden picture opportunity by overlooking posters
declaring "Saving Your Money Every Day.")
Not everyone knew who he was. He was
shaken warmly by the hand by one gentleman who said excitedly
‘That’s Jonathan Shaw!’ – the Labour candidate and incumbent MP.
Perhaps the case of mistaken identity was caused by the fact that
both are follically challenged, as the politically correct phrase
has it.
Thursday, April 22 2010
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