Morning update 12.04.15: That escalated quickly, Tulip is now a ‘PM in waiting’

LAP DANCE DECLARATIONS

IT was interesting, given the prominence and the number of times it was tweeted about, that the Daily Mail’s story about Maajid Nawaz’s stag night in a strip club was not lifted by the other nationals yesterday. The BBC and a couple of others ran it online, but some of the big hitters stayed away. Maajid himself has not followed up on his ‘yes, I can confirm that last summer I went on a stag night’ tweet, i.e. asking us to ask, what’s the big deal. He is not the only local politician to have visited a lap-dancing club. We know others have been, others from the administration of 2002-2006 at least, because Conservative councillor Jonny Bucknell revealed as much in a council meeting. He questioned whether councillors should have to go through the embarrassment of declaring whether they had visited one, should they find themselves on a licensing panel. Jonny said: “A sensitive one, of course, was Spearmint Rhino. While I can declare in all honesty that I have never visited that establishment, I am aware that there are members who have, and if they ever sat on a Licensing Sub-Committee it might be slightly embarrassing for them to have to declare this.” Labour’s Lucy Anderson was the chair of the Licensing Committee at the time, and saw no need to fiddle with the rules, telling the chamber: “I don’t care if it’s embarrassing. It is important to take these responsibilities seriously, so if there is an interest that must be declared then councillors are going to have to go-ahead and declare them.”

THE PRIME MINISTER IN WAITING

A MIXED morning of press for Labour parliamentary candidate Tulip Siddiq. The Mail On Sunday raise the picture of her with Vladimir Putin, as if it has just been discovered. She has we read ‘extraordinary links’ to the Russian President. As the family album revealed here yesterday, he’s not the only world leader she has met in her life as the niece of Bangladesh’s ruler.

Her team may prefer her mention in the Sunday Times where, brace yourself, a source ‘close to Ed Miliband’ briefs the paper that she is ‘a future-PM-in-waiting’. Crikey!

WILL THIS DO?

Conservative by-election candidate Oliver Cooper is struggling to find a lamb to feed in Hampstead Town ward, putting him at odds with the party’s election campaign photo strategy. He is trying though.