On the Dole Because He Didn’t Want to Get Up For 8:00 a.m.

Why Do Leftists Loathe the Shire Hobbits? | David Platt
Tories Have Lost 2015 Election Already | Paul Goodman
New Year Message From Nigel Farage | UKIP
Five-Times-a-Night Farage | Mail
Still Not Cutting Enough | Jeff Randall
French Buyout Bosses Join London Flight | FT
€uro Survives 2012 Despite Predictions | Reuters
Alistair Darling to Step Down? Perhaps Not… | LabourList
PM Urged to Give EU ‘Nuclear’ Options | Guardian
‘One Pound Fish’ Singer Deported | Spectator
Guido’s Column | Daily Star Sunday

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2012

On the Dole Because He Didn’t Want to Get Up For 8:00 a.m.

Listen to this – it is going viral – the remarkable conversation with an unemployed caller to Julia Hartley-Brewer on LBC to discuss whether benefit cards are a good idea becomes a case study for welfare reform that makes the point more eloquently than any politician’s speech about strivers and shirkers. He revealed that he was recently offered a job, but didn’t want to have to get up at 8:00 in the morning…

Review of 2012: Taxi For Tim Yeo

A serious contender for villain of the year has to be Tim Yeo. The conflicted chairman of the Energy and Climate Change select committee has time and time again flown the green flag this year, insisting that it is mere coincidence he makes over £100,000-a-year from his own renewable energy investments. Just because a conflict of interest is declared, it is still a conflict of interest…
Guido took particular interest in Tim Yeo’s taxi trouble over the summer. There was a distinctly whiffy smell lingering around Eco City Vehicles, an environmentally-friendly taxi company chaired by Yeo, and their wheeler deal to conveniently introduce an age limit for London’s taxis. The job earned Yeo some £440-an-hour, but when Number 10 started sniffing around he quickly resigned on the quiet. Guilty conscience?
And it didn’t end there. Perhaps Yeo’s most shameless moment of the year was when he used his position to lobby the government for more flights to China, the very same day that his company TMO Renewables signed a multi-million pound deal in – you guessed it – China. He still rakes tens of thousands from his positions at three renewable energy companies, despite remaining as chairman of the select committee that helps govern them. Don’t Yeo forget it…

Charity Cherie CBE

She does a lot of work for charity and as we all know, charity begins at home. Who can forget the generous charity tour she undertook down under? She was paid £102,000 for her five-city tour of Australia and New Zealand, with one  cancer research charity receiving as much as £6,690, or 8%, of the total funds raised at an £82-a-head dinner which raised £81,270.
Guido doesn’t begrudge her the gong, it will be a laugh to see the avowed republican curtsey to the Queen…