The Vegetable Games at the Maidenhall Allotments in Halifax Road have proved really successful. The Town and Bridge project is proving to be coming up with some very innovative ideas and the Community Garden which looked a bit out of place last year now looks like an integral part of the Maidenhall Allotments.

Ben Gummer was also there, doing the MP sort of things. What’s really striking is how many people he knows already. I got mistaken for his brother, twice. Now I have no problem with people thinking that I look like Ben, he volunteered for public life and insults are a new way of life for him. But his poor brother, what did he do to deserve the calumny?

If they do decide to hold this event next year it is a really good idea to go down.

Sorry it’s late but Ben Gummer will be in the Spread Eagle on Fore Street (near St Pancras church) today from 8pm onwards. Ask him awkward questions.

I’d just written an email to James Ball at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism on the Channel 4 story about Ben Gummer and then realise that they were the ones who originally commissioned the piece. Silly me:

Dear Mr Ball,

On your website you say that you want to get emails from any “journalist, campaigner or member of the public with a story you think the Bureau should be investigating”. I have a rather puzzling investigation.

There have been two investigations done on Channel 4 about expense investigations. These have covered six MPs, Zac Goldsmith, Ben Gummer, Gavin Barwell, Dan Byles, Sarah Teather and Phil Woolas. Four of these were Conservative, one Liberal Democrat and one Labour. That’s not that interesting.

What is interesting is the identity of the second party. In Croydon Central, Ipswich, Warwickshire and Brent Central the second party was Labour. In the other two it was Liberal Democrats. It seems very odd that there are no Conservatives in second place. Was Channel 4 and whatever third party outfit they were using biased on this? And how unusual was it?

I did a quick count of all the seats that had a majority of less than 4,092 (185 seats) where the Conservatives were second (75 seats). 4,092 is one more than the highest majority among these six (Zac Goldsmith with 4,091). Now the probability of any one of these seats at random having a Tory runner up would be 40.54%. So getting a non-Tory is a perfectly respectable 59.45% chance. To get two non Tory runners up and no-one else would be a lower but credible 35.22%. Three non-Tory runners up would be 20.7%, four would be 12.2% and five would be 7.15%. This would be very hard to justify as a fair representation. However six non Tory runners up would actually have a probability of 4.175%. Just under a one in twenty four chance.

Perhaps it was only the Conservatives who overspent, but I got an email today from the Sunlight Centre who said that they “have this week begun a new investigation into the election spending of Zac Goldsmith, Chris Huhne and Ed Balls.” In two of these cases the second place candidate was a Tory and in one they were not. Which one did Channel 4 and Anthony Barnett cover?

I must declare an interest on this (on which more later) and I am a constituent of Ben Gummer and I even wore one of the now famous Tee Shirts. I do like Mr Gummer but even his biggest fans would not claim that he was more newsworthy than Chris Huhne and Ed Balls, one of whom is a cabinet minister and one of whom was a cabinet minister in the recent past. Why have they not been covered?

On declaring an interest, I have watched the two broadcasts and read a lot of the articles on this and the main journalist is a Mr Anthony Barnett. It is not made clear that he was a director of the broadly anti-Conservative Charter 88, a writer for the Labour supporting New Statesman and on the editorial board of the Marxist New Left Review. It makes the one in twenty four chance look very odd indeed. I also notice that he has shared a platform with Chris Huhne in his role as the Co-Director of the Convention on Modern Liberty. Perhaps conflicts of interest of this one time soft left campaigner and new born journalist could be investigated?

I understand that the (non-partisan) Sunlight Centre have scooped you on all the major stories on MPs expenses, so perhaps this would be a story where you could scoop them?

Yours,

James Spencer

UPDATE:

Welcome to readers from ITN (the producers of Channel 4 News), the Labour Party and the Channel 4 Corporate division. You may want to see Panscourer’s post on this. He chides me for being mild.

As Ipswich Spy has pointed out Ben Gummer has made his maiden speech. Having been scooped on this I thought I could at least point everyone to the video here of their MP’s speech. It is 19 hours 38 minutes and 40 seconds into the debate, and the text is here. He’s also starting to intervene, as this clever contribution shows.

It’s a far more spiky maiden speech than you would expect, partly because instead of attacking the Labour Party he’s attacking those with reservations about cutting back on short sentences, who are in both the main parties. He says “I hope that those who wish to oppose the reforms that are necessary understand that to do so would be to condemn families, victims, perpetrators and communities to the repeated misery that we now have a golden opportunity to prise ourselves away from.”

I’m not sure that this is the intention of people as far apart as Michael Howard, Ed Balls and David Davis. Prison keeps bad people off the street, something that penal reformers have never really addressed convincingly. When they do they will win the argument easily. And they’ve not been winning the argument.

UPDATE: Conservative Home also have a piece on the maiden speech, with trenchant comments

Ben Gummer’s column for the Evening Star can now be found on his blog. The last four entries were:

Thank you – 21st May
Getting Started – 28th May
Never Give In – 4th June
Honouring the Hospital – 11th June

Ben Gummer writes a weekly column for the Evening Star every Friday. Go on the Evening Star website and you won’t find it. If you search the website you’ll find an article about the one joke Blinky Ben column. But no column.

And Ipswich Spy bemoan the lack of an online presence from Ben, ignoring his weekly offline column. Perhaps they don’t get the Star.

Hopefully the Star is sorting this out. If they aren’t they should. This column is probably more of a public service than the Evening Star’s Weird and Wacky column, although we could all nominate a couple of Labour councillors for that spot/

One of the things that should not be forgotten as we go into the polling booth is that Chris Mole has supported plans to cut the specialist units out of Ipswich Hospital and Ben Gummer has campaigned to attract them here. That’s what Ipswich gets when Labour (or any party) takes it for granted.

Save Ipsiwch Hospital Services

(If you look at the photo closely you’ll see Ben Gummer had a beard at the time. Oh dear.)

Yesterday Andrew Lansley came up to Ipswich Hospital in his battle bus (more like a skirmish van, but anyway) and was met by more than sixty supporters. In this he promised that a Conservative government would give Ipswich Hospital trust status. This will be a real advance.

He’s the only shadow cabinet minister to be guaranteed to get his portfolio should the Conservatives get a majority Let’s get him in and let’s hold him to it.

The NHYes battle bus

Last night I was out with a team of canvassers canvassing Bridge. We bumped into Jim Powell who was typically charming and leafleting on his own.

However we also bumped into Richard Kirby, Labour councillor for Sprites and opponent of doing anything about the Southern Cement ship noise. He had no red rosette and was coming back from Starfish on Wherstead Road (he has better taste in fish and chips than in politics).

“What are you doing here?”

“Canvassing Bridge”

“Why?”

“We only lost it by 13 votes last time.”

“Ha ha ha. You’ll never win Bridge, it’s ours.”

If Labour go back to thinking like that then Bridge will be ignored as much as it was before 2004.

That, and not my charm or Ben Gummer’s good looks, is why you should vote Conservative tomorrow.

(Actually don’t count my charm or Ben’s looks in the equation.)

Kevan Lim the former deputy leader of Labour in Suffolk County Council, after a lifetime of voting Labour has decided to vote for Ben Gummer.

Despite the fact that he comes from a totally different political tradition from me (although I used to be a Labour activist, but years ago) he comes up with a couple of points that I wholeheartedly agree with:

1) Like it or not we are in a big hole with this deficit, and some painful things need to be done now
2) Ben Gummer’s strongest point is not that he’s a Tory but that he’s independent minded and, let’s be honest, more than a bit mouthy
3) Mark Dyson doesn’t understand Ipswich and it’s a mystery as to why the Liberals didn’t choose a local candidate

Kevan Lim firmly remains a man of the left, but he has switched because Ben Gummer will be a stronger voice for Ipswich – not because he’s suddenly fallen in love with the Conservative Party.

Don’t worry Ben, I’ve not cracked yet.

So I have a go at the UKIP candidate for not living in the constituency. And he replies.

So my obsession is sated. For now.

I have no doubt that Chris Streatfield is an honourable, intelligent and well meaning man. And he’s right to worry about Europe – it may have made sense in the 1970s but the present structure has no future for us. He may not win the prize for world’s most charasmatic man, but I think that the treatment at the hustings was appalling. It reminds me of the non-debate on immigration in the 1990s, and we’re reaping that particular harvest today.

However I have to agree with Pan Scourer’s blog. In Ipswich a vote for UKIP is a vote for Mole. And a vote for Mole is a vote for him:

Gordon Brown's candidate