Remember “Biscuitgate” – which Stephen reported on last week – the apparent inability of the Prime Minister to decide which sort of biscuit he liked?

Turns out there’s not a crumb of truth in it. Private Eye’s Adam MacQueen reports for First Post:

“Being more decisive would spare the Prime Minister needless embarrassment” declared the leader column of the Times, and even David Cameron weighed in at Prime Minister’s Questions: “Are we really going to spend another six months with a Prime Minister who cannot give a straight answer, who cannot pass his own legislation, and who sits in his bunker not even able to decide what sort of biscuits he wants to eat?”

Except, er, no one asked him. As Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts has now clarified in a posting on the website, the biscuit question proposed by various messageboard users was never put to Gordon Brown in the hour that he devoted to the interview.

“The truth is that Gordon Brown didn’t follow the live chat on the screen directly – he answered the questions grouped and fed to him by Mumsnet HQ and his advisers. He didn’t avoid the biscuit question because it didn’t cross his path…

“We were conscious of not merely focusing on frivolities. Fun as biscuits are, access to the Prime Minister is precious and we would have hated to waste time on Rich Tea Fingers at the expense of miscarriage or school starting age. Plus, of course, we’d rather not be seen as a soft touch.”

It does rather beg the question about how Gordon Brown let it be thought for so long that he didn’t have a view on biscuits when he could have squashed (fly) the stories. At time of writing 154 mums have weighed in on the issue over on Mumsnet – with more than a few participants feeling sorry for how the PM has been portrayed.

It’s not just UK post offices that are at risk of closure and taking steps to campaign to keep themselves open, as this story from Florida reveals:

Residents of a Florida town are sending coconuts to the U.S. postmaster general as postcards asking him to reconsider the closing of their post office.

Locals in Lantana and surrounding areas said they are mailing coconuts, which cost about $4 postage, to Postmaster General John Potter with marker messages asking him to reconsider the planned closing of the small Lantana post office, one of three in Florida’s Palm Beach County marked for closing by the Postal Service, the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post reported Thursday.

A Wednesday rally in support of the initiative was attended by Lantana Town Manager Mike Bornstein, Lantana Mayor David Stewart, town council members and County Commissioners Steve Abrams and Shelley Vana. The event was also attended by mayors of towns served by the post office, including South Palm Beach, Hypoluxo, Atlantis, Manalapan and South Palm Beach.

“They’d have to be nuts to close this post office,” Abrams said at the rally, explaining the pun behind the choice of coconuts.

Residents said they are also circulating petitions to save the post office and have thus far collected 5,300 signatures.

On Monday I reported that a scandal was unfolding concerning Samantha Cameron’s “£65 M&S dress” worn at Conservative party conference.

On one level, it really doesn’t matter what the spouses of party leaders wear, and, within reason, how much they pay for it, particularly since the Camerons are well remunerated for David’s parliamentary work, as well as being privately wealthy.

On another, when strenuous efforts are made for one thing to appear as something else entirely, that’s hypocrisy and it should be exposed. So when, as the Mirror reported last Sunday, strings are pulled to obtain an off-the-shelf dress that hasn’t been on the shelf for months, it’s worthy of comment in organs such as this.

Today, a story appears in the Times that deepens our understanding further, and unveils a further set of complications.

Mrs Cameron set in train a series of events that led to her getting the dress. The Mirror reported it as finding too large a dress and having it altered. Today’s Times suggests it was more radical than that:

M&S said initially that they could not get hold of the garment in store but it was believed that they eventually found a press sample.

In truth it was a practically bespoke £150 sample, not a £65 off-the-peg garment as previously claimed.

The controversial viscose shift was run up specially as a favour to the company by Amanda Marshall Ltd, run by Alison Mansell, which supplied the dresses. This was despite M&S having dropped them as a supplier in February, placing 15 jobs in jeopardy.

And a further few interesting details:

Mrs Cameron, who was charged £57 for the dress after being given a staff discount of 20 per cent, strode out on to the Conservative Party conference platform wearing the very same garment on October 8. Ms Markeviciene, who was at her sewing machine when she spoke to The Times this week, said: “It’s a great dress — it’s famous.”

A spokesperson for David Cameron stated that Mrs Cameron was not aware of the history or the fact that the dress cost the company nothing. Mr Cameron delivered his speech in a £3,500 bespoke suit from Richard James although, Conservative Central Office insisted, he paid only £1,185.25.

… which just begs many more questions! Why did the Camerons get M&S staff discount when neither of them work there? Why would M&S go to such lengths to obtain a dress, without taking credit for those lengths by telling the client? How on earth is a suit worth £3,500? Was Mr Cameron shopping in the sales to get an almost £2,500 discount? Was the difference in price declared in his register of members’ interests? (I can’t see it here?)

It’s Thursday, it’s 10.35 pm … it’s BBC1’s Question Time.

It is, of course, the most highly anticipated Question Time ever with a colossal media storm surrounding the invitation of BNP leader Nick Griffin. The evening news says that there are massive protests outside BBC TV Centre, with twitter reports that staff are almost under siege. Across the country, protests are happening at regional BBC offices.

For the Liberal Democrats, it’s leadership contender and Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne taking up cudgels for the yellow corner. Baroness Sayeeda Warsi will be in the blue corner, and Lord Chancellor Jack Straw in the red. The celebrity non-political punter will be Bonnie Greer. Stephen reported earlier on with Griffin’s response to his co-panellists – and handy links to what other Lib Dem bloggers are thinking about the approaching debate.

If you’re tuning in, you can join the simultanous online Twitter debate here at #bbcqt, or the LDV debate in the thread below. Meanwhile Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson will be liveblogging events via CoverItLive at his own blog.

Good morning readers. It’s the 22nd October and there are just 70 days left til the end of the year. Today is Derek Jacobi’s birthday, the 43rd anniversary of the first time an all-female group topped the charts in the States, and the 114th anniversary of a rather scary train-wreck at Paris’s Montparnasse station.

Train wreck at Montparnasse, 1895

2 Big Stories

Postal strike poll puts blame on government as union announces action

The Guardian reports a Yougov poll in which voters put the blame for postal strikes squarely on Gordon’s shoulders.

Gordon Brown’s handling of the Royal Mail strikes comes under strong criticism from the public and Labour backbenchers today, with a new poll showing most voters believe the government should get directly involved in the dispute and force management and unions to go to the conciliation service Acas.

Microsoft’s Bing signs landmark deals with Twitter and Facebook

Over in the Telegraph, we learn that a valuable deal has secured Twitter’s finances for another few whiles.

Microsoft’s recently revamped search engine, Bing, has signed a deal with Twitter and Facebook to add real-time updates from their users to its search results. It means people using Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, will soon be shown the most recent and popular results, rather than the just the most popular.

This almost at the same time as a tweet arrives telling me of Google getting into bed with Twitter too. And as if by magic at precisely the same time, my daily google alert email which runs a search on my own name for vanity and libel reasons pops into my inbox. And it includes a tweet I sent yesterday morning.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

Meanwhile over at Lib Dem Blogs, a number of people are talking about the 10:10 campaign and how it applies in their areas –

• Maureen Rigg – Carbon reductions on track in Stockton

At full council tonight the Tory Cabinet member had put a motion on the agenda supporting the 10:10 campaign. Sadly, she’d forgotten to arrange for someone to second it. We’d already decided that I was speaking on the motion and that we of course would support it. After all, all the Lib Dem group are already signed up to the campaign along with other members of the party all over the country. That gave me the chance to second the motion and to thank her for saving me the effort of writing it!

• Jane Watkinson – The ‘Special Relationship’ vs. European Fascists?

Meanwhile Jane is pondering anew the issue of the re-alignments of the Conservatives in Europe – this time from the perspective of UK/US relations. If we are to have a Tory government next year, how will Washington react if the UK is isolated in Brussels?

The question is clear for the Tories. They can either carry on with their stubborn denial attitude, which places them on the outskirts of all forms of decent society, or they can break their ties with the extremes and join the mainstream. Either way however, there will be major conflicts within the Tories.

These are just my quick picks for yesterday. Please let us know in the comments if you read anything great yesterday.

At the Tory conference, a few acres of of newsprint were dedicated to what the Tory leader’s wife wore. Apparently, it was a £65 dress from M&S, which she paired with some £29 shoes from Zara.

Goodness me. Who cares? I mean, you expect people in the public eye in receipt of a pretty decent wage to be turned out nicely. And on occasions such as this where you know people will be taking pictures and you can be pretty certain your photo will show up in prominent places in national newspapers, it’s entirely acceptable to make sure you’re wearing something nice. It’s also fine, I would put to you, for people in this situation to spend a reasonable amount of money on clothes. Mrs Cameron was being set up to contrast with Mrs Brown, who’d spent rather more on her togs. If both women looked nice, and neither was dripping with jewels, I don’t really care how much either woman spent on her frock.

Ultimately, it’s pretty unimportant – almost as unimportant, I’d say as that thorny issue of how long people clap for at conferences. But for some reason, the national newspapers think it matters that DC got a few more minutes and a few more standing ovations than GB, despite the fact that they are wholly different audiences and no-one but no-one in the country cares whether Labour loyalists are loyaller than Tory loyalists.

Then today I read something even more daft in the Mirror.

Apparently the process by which Mrs Cameron obtained her £65 dress didn’t go quite the way you’d think. I’d imagined, foolishly, that Mrs Cameron went into a shop, looked at a few dresses on their hangers on the shop floor, tried a few on until she found one that flattered her, then took it to the cash desk and paid for it.

If the Mirror is to be believed, what actually happened is that Mrs Cameron wanted to wear a particularly rare M&S dress, as modelled on the television by Myleene Klass (who she?). In order to find it, her people spoke to M&S’s people, who issued an order to every M&S in the country to find precisely the one dress. This entailed dozens of staff across the nation in including M&S’s beknighted CX in the pursuit of one dress. When that proved impossible, they found a dress that didn’t fit, and paid a dressmaker conceivably more than the dress cost to make it fit.

Was this all done in a vapid game of oneupmanship between two camps, using women’s dresses as a skirmish in class warfare? If so, what a horribly pointless waste of human endeavour, and what a sad indictment of the state of political discourse in our country.

Here’s a little something that found its way into my inbox in recent days.

During conference season, a friend of mine heard something in the tone of the Leader of the Conservatives that reminded him of the leader of… something else entirely. The rising inflection. The increasingly manic tone. The stilted rhetoric and the faux outrage.

I think there are questions to be answered.

Is David Cameron secretly Davros?

Yesterday we brought you links to discussion in Parliament about disreputable oil company Trafigura’s legal shenanigans to prevent discussion of their activities on the Côte d’Ivoire.

Today here’s a little more, courtesy of Private Eye’s blog. Ian Hislop, the editor of the magazine, appeared with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger at a select committee hearing discussing the damage injunctions can do to real, investigative journalism. An unedited verbatim transcript can be found here, with the juicy bits starting around Q850, about halfway down the very long page.

In it, Hislop talks candidly about a number of incidences where he has wanted to report but has been prevented from doing so by court action. Please don’t talk about them in the comments – our pockets are considerably less deep than those of Private Eye! Don’t mention Andrew Marr, either.

Other LDV stories about Trafigura:

• Send a “thank you” card to Trafigura
• Net mightier than gag
• Heath and Burstow table urgent questions
• Nick Clegg tweets about Trafigura

Some weeks ago we asked for your initial views about a “Lib Dem internetty meet up thing.”

Some good ideas emerged from the comments, and I am pleased to announce that after weeks of work for m’colleague Helen Duffett, we are able to set up the first of these meetings.

Some of the details are a little sketchy, but here’s what we know for sure:

Venue: Edinburgh – Scottish Lib Dem HQ, 4 Clifton Terrace EH12 5DR. Map here: http://bit.ly/5hFce

Date: Saturday 21 November 2009

Time: 10am-4pm

Facilities: Wireless network will be available, meeting room and (tbc) a smaller breakout room

Transport: Haymarket Station opposite, good bus links, parking not so good on the doorstep but is available within a few minutes’ walk. Edinburgh airport to the west of the city.

At least four of us so far are planning on making a weekend of it, and we are lining up fun politico things to do for the rest of our time on the Sunday.

To attend, you must register via this thread in our Forum

We very much hope this event will be the first of many, and next year (General Election willing) we hope to explore the other offers of accommodation made in Reading and Nottingham.

Good morning? Is it? Pah. I got the date wrong when I started writing this, and looked up all the exciting facts on Wikipedia. So, here, have some exciting facts about yesterday instead:

Good morning, and welcome to Daily View, on this, the DAY AFTER THE 943rd anniversary of the fateful day when King Harold got something in his eye in the opening foray of what turned out to be the Norman Invasion. 723 years AND ONE DAY later, George Washington proclaimed the first Thanksgiving Day whilst revolutionary fervour swept much of the world. Birthday boys today yesterday included Steve Coogan and the late e e cummings.

Anyway, more importantly than all that, it’s Thursday, so it’s polling day in a couple of local by-elections in Barnsley and Basingstoke – and also for that very rare of political occurrences, a by-election for an elected mayor. All the very best to Dave Hodgson for taking Bedford today – and do pop by his website or his town if you think you can help out.

2 Big Stories

MPs’ expenses: Tory David Wilshire pays £100,000 to company he owns with girlfriend

Ah yes – MPs expenses – the story that keeps on giving for the Telegraph.

Mr Wilshire claimed for more than three years for office assistance provided by “Moorlands Research Services”. Parliamentary expenses rules forbid MPs from entering into arrangements which “may give rise to an accusation” of profiting from public funds. But on Wednesday night, Mr Wilshire – the MP for Spelthorne in Surrey – admitted that he and his partner, Ann Palmer, were sole owners of the business.

The Telegraph has established that, between 2005 and 2008, Mr Wilshire paid up to £3,250 a month to the business. Extra invoices were also submitted and the total paid to the firm was £105,500. However, there is no official record of the company’s existence and it has never filed public accounts.

NB, this story is about David Wilshire, the Tory MP for Spelthorne, and not about the Tory MP for Wiltshire (North) who is a cad for a whole different set of reasons.

A year after the crunch, it’s boom time again for bankers

For story 2, we turn to the Times, with their exposé of of bankers’ bonuses:

Just 12 months after the global economy was brought close to collapse by reckless lending — forcing banks to turn to taxpayers for help — stock markets in London and New York are enjoying one of the strongest bull runs in decades and investment banks are preparing to announce huge profits.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

• Andrew Reeves: The big football game is back on- Paris Foot Gay vs Creteil Bebel
  An update on a story here on LDV last week.

  The Director said: “We had rejected playing this match not on the grounds of homophobia, as we have been accused of doing, but simply because the name of the club did not seem to us to reflect our vision of sport.”

  I have no idea what that means and it sounds the lamest excuse I have ever heard. Sport has nothing to do with people’s religion nor their sexuality. Paris Foot Gay seems to have been around at least two and a half years and perhaps before the Muslim team announced their refusal to play the team last week their Directors should have done a wee bit of research.

• Lansom Boy: New Wind Turbines approved

  An ill wind blows through Cornwall Council’s planning committee as councillors take an unpopular decision.

  Quite unexpectedly (at least from my expectations), the Council’s strategic planning committee last night voted to approve applications for new wind turbines at Davidstow and Otterham.

  It was a really packed meeting with lots of locals present who objected to the schemes. There were also a few people in favour but the majority of the audience were resolutely opposed.