Welcome to Lib Dem Voice’s Catchup post in the poignant week when the newest little Clegg entered this world (pics here) and one of the little Camerons left it, and politics as usual was suspended for an afternoon.
It was also the week Alix Mortimer made the longlist of the new Orwell Prize for Blogging, and Lib Dem Voice itself spent a day in cryogenic suspension as technical wizard Ryan Cullen migrated us to new, private, expensive server.
Our outage led to one angry customer: James Graham’s provocative “Is Lord Ashdown the IT Industry’s Patsy?” went live 24 hours before the closedown, which meant Lord Ashdown was unable to respond. His angry email to our Editor at Large led to his strongly worded rebuttal being inserted manually into the system during the purdah period. You can read Paddy’s response – and also James’s fisking thereof – here.
Other posts attracting a lot of comments this week included a piece revealing the shocking truth about Mark Pack’s arrival on this planet. He was in fact born, and not dropped fully-formed by aliens from the Planet Bile, as many have until now supposed.
Alix Mortimer’s defence of Chris Grayling, in a week when politicians were taking flack on housing expenses, allowed commenters to share with us the fact that Lib Dem MP for Cambridge, David Howarth, commutes in to London each day.
But the most comments this week went to Colin Lloyd’s continuation of the timeless Lib Dem debate “what is a Liberal?” His most recent piece is a paean to pleurisy pluralism, and can be found here, if you want to join in yourself in helping refine the definition.
In Op-eds this week, Hywel Morgan heard worrying echos of Hitler in Harriet Harman’s comments about enormous banking pensions, whilst Stephen Tall thought sauce for the goose… Merlene Emmerson’s musings on matters economical is worth a read, and Stephen’s piece on being either a Labour or Tory MP right now seems to have made Iain Dale choke on his toast.
Also of note this week: Green Zones in Brent; David Lammy exaggerates the BNP, and the Telegraph extrapolates from citizen journalism. Statporn puts us over 24,000 Absolute Uniques (yes, certainly sounds like the Lib Dems, but I’d have to see them to be sure) whilst February’s polls put us up 2%. Mark Pack had two good pieces on the Cabinet minutes on Iraq, here and here. He also had a very useful summary about Lord Ashcroft.
The week in numbers
Y Barcud Oren #5
Lib Dig Pig #12
Golden Dozen #105
Just two in CommentIsLinked@LDV this week
Clegg – We need to clean up our act
Cable – let’s make a virtue out of thrift
In our Members only forum
Northumberland Lib Dems on Twitter
Child tables in SQL databases
Postponed election technicality
Niles's Blog 