Uncle Joe strikes again

So Liverpool has a new Lord Mayor, many congratulations to Frank Prendergast, and good luck for his year as Liverpool's first citizen.

After his instillation on Tuesday, I was invited to nibble some cheese with a few mates living behind the skirting board in the Town Hall ballroom.

So my little ears pricked up when I heard Joe Anderson get up to speak.

Uncle Joe decided to live up to his namesake's reputation for err, "redrafting history".

So says Uncle Joe, our new Lord Mayor was responsible for the development of Liverpool One. But Frank is a shy and retiring man, so he allowed the Lib Dems to take all the credit.

Even to my untrained ear this didn't sound right. So I did a little digging.

It's true that Frank Prendergast had a major influence on Liverpool One. He almost caused the whole thing to collapse!

In his last days as leader of the council Frank did a deal with a certain property developer who has a reputation for not developing the sites he acquired. He sold an option on Chavasse Park

to Bill Davies for a meagre £50,000.

Years later, just as the ink was drying on the Council's agreement with Grosvenor, up popped Bill Davies demanding the right to build a shopping mall on the park or £hundreds of millions in compensation from the council.

At this point most developers would have walked away, but luckily the Lib Dems managed to persuade them to stick around.

According to the Daily Post, it cost the council £2 Million to fight off Bill Davies option. So thanks Frank. As Uncle Joe said, you can really be proud of your contribution.

Will this endear me to Scousers?

Labour's Mr Ed has been taking advice from Luciana on how best to endear himself to the people of Liverpool.

Anyone from the Lib Dem campaign team is reading this? You might want to stick this picture on a leaflet guys.

"AV? Is that a lip gloss?"

One story you may have missed during the AV referendum was an interesting quiz on how Merseyside MPs would vote.

Most presented rational reasons for and against, apart from two Labour MPs.

Rosie Cooper refused to answer! Well it is a secret ballot after all, so you can't expect to be able to find out what your MP thinks on an important matter of state!

Meanwhile, Luciana Airhead MP had been too busy worrying about what to wear at the count, and trying to identify the next rising star in the Labour party to attach herself to. So it was unfair to expect her to have a position on a major constitutional issue.

She was reported to be abstaining, "What is AV anyway, is it a type of lip gloss? I think I recall people talking about it in the commons, but I was reading an interesting article in Heat magazine."

Telling the Tories where to go...

... To their natural home in Labour, obviously.

Joe Anderson continues to swell his ranks with Tories, after welcoming arch Thatcherite Steve Fitzsimmons to his increasingly discontented band.

The ink had hardly dried on Steve's membership form when £1000-a-week Joe announced that the former Tory Leader and parliamentary candidate would be standing for Labour next May.

Well if you can't find any talent on your own benches, poach it from somewhere else!

On being welcomed by Anderson he told reporters that he had, "Nothing but respect and admiration for his friends in the Conservative Party!" So that sweeps away any doubt we might have that this is nothing more than naked opportunism.

If elected, he will join the growing ranks of Labour Tories, including Young Conservative Jobling, former aide to Thatcher's ministers, Windy Millar, and tory landlord and quangocrat Frankle.

Bessie Bradock is spinning in her grave!

Labour dumping in Childwall

One thing about you humans, you love to leave food and other goodies laying around for me and my furry friends. Only the other day someone left an all-you-can-eat-buffet bin bag in my pack passage (oh eh misses!)

You dump rubbish everywhere, you even let your dogs dump on the pavement. No wonder we see so many leaflets from you politicians complaining about dumping and demanding action.

But imagine my surprise when a Childwall Labour leaflet was used to line my cage recently. Such is the public service from those nice Labour people, it appears that they caught this man in the act and decided to name and shame him.

There is really no excuse for dumping on our streets, even though Labour closed the last public toilet in Liverpool.

Good things in small packages

Hi there folks.

If your here looking for a blogging canine then you'll be disappointed. Since the dogs scarpered many of us have had a small hole in our daily internet experience.

It's obvious that this blog is missed, why else would a blog that hadn't been updated this year be receiving almost 2000 visitors last month alone?

Fortunately the previous owners failed to come up with a particularly original password, and tonight I finally cracked it. Honestly I'm surprised nobody tried it before, but I got there first - so consider this blog under new management!

Sally and Dude, thanks for all the fun in the past, but you have let us down and it's time for you to sling your hooks. They say that every dog has his day, and yours has gone.

Fortunately I'm more than up to the job. It helps that I'm small enough to squeeze into to the hidden corners of power - you won't believe some of the political gossip I get to hear.

I've been warned that there may be a cat loose on this blog, although none of us have heard from him. Still I'll need to be on the look out for any fury rivals popping up on here.

Please bare with me while I get used to this, but I'll try and eek out a few small stories to wet your appetite over the next few weeks.

What? You don't believe a simple hamster can perform the same job as a dog? Well just look here!

Who needs dogs? I'm cheaper to run, and you don't need to walk me when it's raining.

Bye for now, Hammy.