Has anyone noticed the alarming similarity between Dmitry Medvedev and Nigel Farage (or should that be Нигел Вараге)? Surely the resemblance is too much to be a coincidence? I think we should be told.

I could be proven wrong here, but I’ve been coming to the conclusion that there is no way Gordon Brown will call a snap poll. What’s more, it has increasingly come to my mind that he might have a rather devious plan up his sleeve.

First of all, he won’t do it for several reasons. Labour’s skint and the unions are being finnicky at the moment. Labour is also lazy - more so than either of their main opponents. They’re activists need more signposting than the competition before they’ll get off their arses. A snap poll is tough to manage in the most ideal of circumstances, and this will not be the most ideal of circumstances.

We should also remember that British Summer Time ends on 28 October after this point, it will be getting dark in late afternoons. That makes campaigning tough and getting the vote out even tougher. Differential turnout will be key, and Tory supporters are notoriously better at coming out than the others.

He could, of course, call it for 25 October which was widely speculated on during the summer. Personally speaking that would be disastrous as it would be on my birthday, but I somehow doubt that Gordon will consider my social calendar to be a factor either way. He is however likely to be wary of calling it a week after the start of the IGC in Lisbon to finalise the EU Reform Treaty. That would mean 4-5 days in which the EU will be in the headlines and a whole weekend in which he’ll be out of circulation at a crucial time. It would be completely unpredictable - it might go well, it might end up a total disaster. It would be a total gamble, and a reckless one at that.

On the other hand, Brown has to neutralise the Treaty issue in such a way that makes it a non-issue for the voters and (preferably for him) seriously distracts the Tories.

If I was in his position, this is what I’d do. I’d come back from Lisbon proclaiming that I’d negotiated a couple more token concessions. I’d reassert that it was for Parliament to ratify the treaty but that in the interests of having a wider nationwide debate I will declare that the ratification won’t happen immediately. Instead, there’ll be a period of reflection of, say 7 months. Promise lots more citizens’ juries.

This will of course send the rightwing media into a tizzy. Cue months and months of them denouncing the treaty and calling for a referendum. This will of course bore the vast majority of the public to tears. The exception will be the hardcore UKIP/Tory supporters who will get extremely agitated. Cameron will come under sustained pressure to do a Hague, something he will resist at all costs but this will disappoint a lot of donors and activists whose support he can ill afford to lose. UKIP by contrast will be on a roll.

Then in April 2008, when most of the public are one Sun front page comparing Jose Manuel Barroso to an unfortunately shaped vegetable away from fetching the rusty razor blades and running a warm bath, Brown will call the election. He will declare at the start that he will seek a mandate to ratify the treaty but other than that will spend the entire time going on about bread and butter issues. Cameron will be torn between pissing off his core support and alienating everyone else. Another disaster for them awaits.

That’s my theory. Anyone want to tell me what I’m missing?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention another reason why I don’t expect him to declare the election this week. On the second day of his Premiership, Gordon Brown announced plans to invest the Royal Prerogative power to declare an election in Parliament. It would be absurd for him to then bypass Parliament completely. Still, on the other hand, I could just be being naive here. We’ll know in 48 hours.

It just doesn’t seem to get any easier for UKIP, with today’s papers revealing that a) the party had already investigated Tom Wise, found problems and then sat on it and that b) one of their NEC members is an associate of BNP leader Nick Griffin - and a donor.

Establishment plot to discredit them it may be, but if you don’t want to be discredited, a good rule of thumb is to not be quite so disreputable.

Meanwhile the story over the Attorney General’s Injunction against the BBC continues. The theory du jour is that the email in question was leaked by Downing Street in an attempt to derail the process.

It’s fair to say that this theory has some merit - it does seem hard to believe that the police would blag this so late on in the investigation - but this is real down the rabbit hole stuff. I can’t quite bring myself to believe that Jonathan Powell, Ruth Turner et al would leak an email which allegedly incriminates themselves, gambling on a mistrial due to a technicality. On the other hand, if they know they’re going down what do they have to lose?

The vast establishment conspiracy against UKIP now includes 3 of their own MEPs and disabled people.

I particularly loved this nice bit of spin:

“The association’s definition of a full candidate is someone who knocks on every door or leaflets every single house.

“Their definition of a paper candidate is someone who can’t do every house because it would put too much pressure on them.”

Nigel Farage is going around telling anyone who’ll listen that there is an (presumably euro-philic) establishment conspiracy to shut down the Electoral CommissionUK Independence Party, based on the ‘trivial’ fact that they have been in receipt of hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal donations.

Far be it for me to gloat. Well, okay, I can’t resist. Because the truth of the matter is that all parties have been sweating cobs on this issue for months now. But for all that, none of the other parties have fallen foul of such an open-and-shut case as this one.

My own feeling on the Michael Brown case, which I said back when it was first raised to the Lib Dem Federal Executive’s attention, was that it would have been eminently avoidable if we had simply refused to accept the donation unless he gave the money as a personal donation and registered to vote in the UK. The fact that he refused to do so should have raised alarm bells (or at least bigger ones). But at the very least it is undeniable, and accepted by the Electoral Commission, that Cowley Street worked hard to ensure that it was legal. If it is eventually declared illegal it will be because the donation languished in a grey area that no-one can claim was obvious. The problem was, at the time and under pressure, there were too many unknown unknowns. So, while I might question the political decision to accept money off the twerp, I’ve never questioned that the party was scrupulous in how it dealt with the cash.

By contrast, the UKIP case suggests that they weren’t taking the most basic steps in confirming that major donations were, in fact, legal. UKIP, of all parties, would be the first to cry foul if a party accepted money from a foreign donor by some backdoor route or, worse, gross negligence. If Alan Bown was such an upstanding British citizen, how come he couldn’t even bring himself to vote for the very party he was bankrolling?

Anyway, here are a few quotes from the UKIP website that might serve to provide Mr Farrago a bit of perspective:

16 April 2006:

Financially the Conservative Party is a mess. Today less than six per cent of the Tory Party’s money comes from subscriptions and they therefore feel the need to bring in the high rollers. Legally donations cannot come from foreigners and have to be public, whereas loans can be anonymous and come from anyone.

However, the names of lenders were given to the Electoral Commission, and we put a public interest inquiry in to reveal those names. Worryingly for Dave it is looking like these loans were on such good rates the lack of interest payments could easily be defined as gifts in kind, numbering up to hundreds of thousands of pounds and thus donations. It was when he was
questioned about our request that he lost his cool. The dodge he and Blair have come up with to excuse their possibly illegal acts is to say, “we cannot be trusted to raise cash legally ourselves, the only answer is that you, the taxpayer, will have to subsidise our activities”. This is wrong. The only benefit for party leaders is it gives them taxpayers’ cash with which to reward cronies and buy silence from internal foes.

23 September 2005:

The Electoral Commission last night confirmed it was conducting an inquiry into whether donations from 5th Avenue Partners had complied with laws banning political parties from taking foreign money.

If they find against the Lib Dems the party will be forced to return the money, triggering a financial crisis.

Michael Brown, the owner of the company, told The Times yesterday that he felt “totally let down” by the party.

He said it had failed to make more than cursory checks before taking his company’s money. “If the people who handled my donation were elected to run the economy, I would not be happy — it would be disastrous.”

In correspondence with party chiefs, copies of which he has given to this newspaper, Mr Brown complains that his company has been subjected to media scrutiny and the donation to the possibility of legal challenge.

“As a donor, I rely on the party to verify that the donation is proper. In the case of the donation made by my company, very little due diligence was undertaken,” he said.

Ner ner ner-ner ner!

He’s back. And he’s even more bonkers than before.

The arch eurosceptic who wants us out of the EU, nevertheless is now insisting that the Commission should prepare legislation to make it illegal to exclude women from mosques and prevent M&S from installing distorted mirrors.

Personally, I stood in front of the radio open mouthed this morning, listening to Kilroy berating a women who he had attempted to co-opt to his cause for not gratefully falling to his knees. I cannot recommend this clip highly enough.

I had assumed that Robert Kilroy-Silk was just going to fade from view after 2004. Clearly I was wrong. UKIP should never be allowed to stop apologising for getting the man elected in their name.

If UKIP are now in favour of “Independence” in the broadest sense is it safe to assume they want independence FROM the UK, along with everything else?

After all, this is going to be a pretty big theme in the 2007 elections, at least if you are in Scotland or Wales (and Northern Ireland for that matter, assuming the elections there actually go ahead). It would be a tad confusing to say “We want to give everyone more independence. Apart from the Scots and the Welsh. Or the English and the Northern Irish now we come to think about it.”

I can’t help but think Farrago is being a bit too clever by half here.

UKIP seem to have got stuck in a one-step-forward, one-step-back grind. No sooner than it has been announced that their Plymouth branch have split asunder and formed their own breakaway faction (who, hilariously, call themselves the New Battle for Britain - you can hear their eyeballs squelching in their sockets as they swivel from here), than they gain two new members of the House of Lords from the Tories.

‘Twas ever thus with parties on the extreme fringes, and all does rather strengthen the case against them being a mainstream party. We may yet see two distinct Eurosceptic fringe parties fight the next European Elections, which paradoxically may see the Cameroonian Conservatives hemorrhage activists yet rally support.