Weekend Round-Up (Feb 15th)

This weekend’s most interesting posts for those that weren’t tied to their computer:

• Obviously the biggest political event this weekend was Gordon Brown’s much trailed interview with Piers Morgan. It turned out he didn’t really cry and generally the Blue blogosphere didn't enjoy it. Iain Dale wrote about it here, Tory Radio wrote a different view here, Guido thought Alastair Campbell had worked miracles here and the Spectator CoffeeHouse had an interesting view too.
• Elsewhere after the interview a new hashtag and topic for blogging and tweeting started #questionsforGB lists the questions that Piers Morgan should have asked Gordon Brown.
• The Daily Mail (just whose side are they on now by the way?) wrote a piece about an event where Cameron had allegedly bussed in Conservative Future members to puff up his audience. They even handily circled these people in a photograph and named and shamed them. The only problem as LondonSpin Online pointed out was that they weren’t actually the people they said they were and the entire story was wrong.
• LondonSpinOnline also revealed that an Ipsos-Mori poll asked potential voters their views on a 10% death tax, proving that the latest Conservative poster claiming 20% was wrong by 100% so clearly had no validity. Meanwhile Fitaloon at Microshaft was more concerned about the fact that the department of Health had spent £27million on polling in the first place.
• Aspiration for All examined the rising costs of Government advertising
• George Osborne was on Sky News on Sunday morning and responded in kind when questioned about Lord Ashcroft’s tax status by asking the interviewer why no one ever asks about Labour’s own non dom contributor Lord Paul. Guido has been pushing this for about a week so he was very pleased.
• Tim Montgomery on Conservative Home pointed out just how much money the Unions give to Labour and how Tory plans to remove their automatic donations from members could in-fact bankrupt the party. Union funding of the Labour party is becoming a more and more divisive issue as the government continues to give money to the unions for charity work etc and after a recent poll showed that 73% of union members do not want their money to go to the Labour Party.
• The latest polls showed Conservatives back in the lead, Iain Dale reported on them pointing out that although our lead is now back up to 11% only 44% of voters said they were certain to vote compared to 56% in February 2005 suggesting a low turnout.
• David Cameron launched a new video trying to convince people who have never voted Tory to vote Tory this time.
• Byrne Tofferings suggested that the New Economics Forum should be called the Non Economics Forum for saying that we should all work a 21 hour week.

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