No geek
is an island

I was very pleased to see this morning that Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ Acting Leader, is to boycott the state visit of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah - a move described in The Herald as unprecedented (”It is highly unusual for a leader of an opposition party to snub a royal visit. Foreign Office officials could not immediately recall any precedent”).

One of the perks of being a party leader is getting to go to state banquets and the like, and with only two months in charge of the party, Vince is unlikely to have many opportunities, which makes his gesture all the more significant.

Taking a stand for human rights and against corruption is absolutely what the Liberal Democrats are for - and the dismissive response of Liam Fox shows why the Tories, despite all their pleas, aren’t about to attract the liberal vote. It was, after all, the Conservatives who oversaw the Al Yamamah arms deal with Saudia Arabia in the 1980s.

There are a few years between them. They each have different styles of presentation. Neither of them has any policies on the economy as far as I’m aware. Erm…

As I’m not allowed to comment on the biggest subject currently enveloping the Liberal Democrat blogosphere, I’ll have to appeal to the Doctor Who blogosphere instead. [Obligatory plug: if you’re a Lib Dem supporter, click here to join the party before the end of the month and get a vote in the leadership election.]

This year’s Children in Need is on November 16th and once again there’s a special Doctor Who scene. This one is called “Time Crash” and is written by Hugo Award winner (twice) Steven Moffat. And it features David Tennant and the return of Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor. Which, if you’re a Doctor Who fan, is pretty exciting.

Here’s the story on the official site.

Another opportunity for me to risk someone pointing out where I’ve managed to do the same on a website I run, but this is too tempting not to blog.

So I was recently for browsing the website of Croydon Central MP Andrew Pelling (who is currently suspended from the Tory party). My favourite part was this:

A week or so later, I’ve popped back, but the section doesn’t appear to have changed. Does no one have a kind word to say about Andrew?

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle down by the bins outside the barn.

Truly it could be said on that October morning, with its sense of collapse, that Urgency was my middle name, rather than Lembit, which was the middle name my parents, God rest their souls, gave me, weeks before my birth, before they knew whether I would be a boy or a girl.

If you haven’t heard about it, I suggest you nip over to the ever-bizarre Hooting Yard to find out whether the Bins Board made the right decision.

One thing GB has inadvertently demonstrated over the last few weeks is the farcical nature of calling general elections by prime ministerial fiat. Local government has fixed terms; the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and London Assemblies have fixed terms; legislatures in other countries have fixed terms. It’s about time we had fixed-term parliaments at Westminster, and that’s the policy the LibDems backed at our conference Brighton in September.

Hurrah, then, for David Howarth MP, our Shadow Solicitor General. When the House of Commons returns from recess tomorrow, David will table a Fixed Term Parliaments Bill.

All of which is a convenient excuse to plug this video, which raises a chuckle every time I watch it:

Gordon Brown isn’t going to call a general election, Nick Robinson is reporting.

Scaredy cat, scaredy cat, sitting on the doormat. Of Number 10. For a few more months at least.

So he’s messed around with Labour’s activists, led electoral officers around the country to make unnecessary preparations, and caused the news agenda to be dominated by election speculation - rather than, say, actual news - for weeks. Well done, Gordon. And all the time you were “getting on with running the country” and not at all strategising with your advisers. Not at all.

And now what have you decided? That you can’t be sure of doing better than the unpopular Tony Blair if you went to the country now. Bit of a damning indictment of your first 100 days in office really.