Friday, November 30, 2007

Is Huhne paying attention to the news?

I have just read this post by Fraser Nelson on the Coffee House where he notes that Chris Huhne has been playing a blinder on "Donorgate" and that it might help him in his leadership challenge for the Lib Dems. I am however a little concerned that Huhne may be paying too little attention to some of the details of the story about Labour's dodgy donation, meanwhile Clegg has just disappeared.

The small detail that Huhne should be paying attention to relates to the law and registering donations for political activity and/or loans, credit card usage etc that might be spent in the process of that political activity. In fact, he was even on Newsnight last night when they were discussing the possible that Harriet Harman had broken rules about registering her lonas, donations etc properly.

I bring this up simply because Chris Huhne has been campaigning now for well over 30 days and neither of them have yet to register a single penny with the Electoral Commission. Sure, getting carried away with kicking the Government is understandable, but you'd think he'd be making sure he wasn't going to find himself in the same situation in a few months time wouldn't you?

N.B. Clegg hasn't registered anything either.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you've got your timing slightly wrong. You get up to 30 days to check whether a donation is valid and then up to a further 30 days to declare the donation - i.e. 60 days at most.

I know a colleague arranged the submission of some declaration forms to the Electoral Commission today (Friday), so expect the first declarations to go public towards the end of next week.

At a guess there will be some more forms submitted next week too.

Anonymous said...

Huhne has registered 5x£5k donations, which are dated 26th November.

Clegg has not declared anything this year, yet.