Blog Posts by Ian Dunt

What's going on?

Allegations of sexual harassment by Lord Rennard have come to light and there are concerns they were brushed under the carpet by the Liberal Democrat leadership. Nick Clegg is front and centre of the row after he released a confusing statement about what he knew and when.

Who is Lord Rennard?

He's not exactly a household name, but inside the Westminster bubble Chris Rennard is celebrated as the backroom strategist responsible for the success of many of the Lib Dems' local campaigns. He enjoyed extraordinary respect and influence in the party's Cowley Street headquarters as the mastermind behind campaigns which entrenched the party in local areas.

He was director of campaigns and elections between 1989 and 2002 and then chief executive from 2003 to 2009, when he stepped down - ostensibly for health reasons. At the start of his employment the party were a half-remembered appendix to UK politics. By the time he left, they were a professional operation poised to enter

By Jenny Jones

Yesterday’s ruling by the court of appeal put a spanner in the government's workfare schemes, but it didn't wreck the whole machine. The government, and the mayor of London - as partner to a new £12 million workfare scheme in London - have brushed off all the past criticism. I hope this might make them change their mind, but unfortunately it doesn't block their plans.

The court backed the government's right to establish workfare schemes with benefit sanctions. But it ruled that there was, in effect, a mismatch between the regulations and the schemes they were supposed to apply to, and that participants, including Cait Reilly, had been given bad advice as a result.

Anti-workfare campaigners have been blogging and tweeting about endless examples of people being misled about the risk of benefit sanctions for years. Now it turns out the whole system was at fault.

This spanner has suddenly made most workfare schemes unlawful and may open the door to thousands of people who

A man who reintroduces red papal shoes sends a mixed message. On the one hand, he is clearly fond of tradition. On the other, he must like a bit of glamour. The papal shoes were so fashionable the Vatican had to deny they were from Prada. Anyone wanting a pair would struggle. They came from the Pope's personal shoe-maker.

If progressives thought the Pontiff's penchant for eye-grabbing fashion was a sign of good things to come, they were very much mistaken. The shoes came with the return of Latin Mass and a reduction in marriage annulments. They were part of a fierce theme in Pope Benedict XVI's papacy: the rejection of change. 'Semper eadem' – always the same.

Pope Benedict, formerly Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, was a conservative candidate for a Vatican hoping to find a stop-gap amid increasingly vocal demands for change. Even when he was made Pope, there were worries about his age, not least from the man himself, who had hoped to retire following a hemorrhagic stroke in the early

The Conservatives' choice to select Maria Hutchings for their crucial by-election fight in Eastleigh is a curious one, not least because she already failed to win the seat.

Hutchings was parachuted into the constituency, having uprooted from Essex, ahead of the 2010 general election.  As a colourful woman candidate running for a party expected to take Downing Street, she had been predicted to wipe out incumbent Chris Huhne's pitiful 568 majority.

The signs were all around. In the Lib Dems 'golden triangle' in the south, Romsey and Winchester would both fall to the Tories in 2010. But in Eastleigh, Huhne increased his majority to 3,864.

Hutchings was a self-professed life-long Labour supporter who switched to the Tories after a well-publicised altercation with Tony Blair over plans to close her autistic son’s Essex special school. Later reports suggested there were no plans to shut the school. Regardless, she came out the row very impressed with the then-prime minister.

"Tony Blair was

The last 24 hours have seen some of the strangest arguments ever constructed in mainstream political debate. With their enemies on the front foot, opponents of gay marriage adopted remarkable twists of logic, most of which focused on how people have sex.

Numerous MPs in yesterday's debate seemed obsessed with how gay couples consummate their relationship. After a while, this became disturbing. Of course, it is not beyond the wit of man to create legal arrangements for this standard in gay relationships, by which we can establish the validity of a marriage and whether a partner has been faithful. But it was enjoyable to put the moment off, if only so we could spend more time watching elderly Tory MPs stumble uncomfortably around the subject, like a drunk in a decrepit hotel.

Other Tory backbenchers insisted the government could offer churches no protection against a future legal challenge to their refusal to conduct same-sex marriages. This is true, in so far as every statement of its

All the usual truisms of politics will be rehashed for the fall of Chris Huhne, with a few new ones thrown in for good measure.

The former Lib Dem leadership contender fell victim to that tried-and-tested political adage of being caught out for the lie not the act. His particular case had added elements of 'a woman scorned', giving the press some extra titillation - not least because his new lover is bisexual, a fact few articles thought to leave out. The guilty plea was surprising and dramatic. Everything is in place for a good press frenzy.

Huhne appears to have swapped points lost for speeding, something which presumably happens fairly frequently. In court, this has the more sombre description of 'perverting the course of justice'. The law is right: there must be penalties of this sort for the law to work at all. But I will not pretend, as some of his political enemies have done, that I am particularly offended by the act. It is the kind of thing friends will admit to each other

Prime ministers only call referendums when they are fairly certain they will win, so it was ironic that Tory eurosceptics met David Cameron's promise of an EU referendum with such jubilation. Perhaps the subdued demands of an MP's lifestyle have dulled their intellectual abilities.  Or maybe they simply waited so long to hear the phrase 'in-or-out' that its mere expression made them take leave of their senses. Or, just possibly, they were never really eurosceptics at all, just right-wing Little Englanders with a penchant for Victorian-era working conditions.

Whatever the cause, they are now celebrating a course of action which will kill off Britain's chances of leaving the EU for a generation. Cameron is the most eurosceptic prime minister in British history, but his framework for a referendum is specifically designed to keep Britain in the EU – albeit without any of its progressive ideals.

Historically and internationally, the voting public tends to embrace the status quo the closer

David Cameron is about to get a lot of very good press. The British media loves it when a prime minister looks strong and decisive. After many months of to-ing and fro-ing, Cameron is finally the agent in a massive, interwoven, continent-wide political narrative. He is blackmailing Paris and Berlin to the negotiating table with the not-so-subtle suggestion Britain will leave the EU altogether if it doesn't get more "flexible" membership. He is calling the bluff of Ed Miliband, who predicted Cameron wouldn't offer a referendum and must now either follow his lead or stand against public opinion. And he has, at least for the time being, pacified his backbenchers, whose rebelliousness was becoming election-threatening.

In the short term, Cameron is man of the hour. The eurosceptic right-wing press (in other words: majority of the press) will praise him in gushing tones tomorrow morning. But in the long term, he has taken an extraordinary gamble over which he has very little control. The