2 November 2007updated 05 Oct 2023 8:35am

Did the Observer do it for Dave?

Why were the results of a poll showing Labour with a 13-point lead not published?

With last Thursday pencilled in as the possible date for a national election, the significance of the day was not missed in the blogosphere.

Over at Politicalbetting, Mike Smithson pondered the implications of the Observer’s decision not to splash with an Ipsos-Mori poll which showed Labour 13 points ahead on the first day of the Conservative party conference.

He concluded: “In years to come political nerds will produce lots of counter-factuals about the November 1st general election that wasn’t. I’m convinced that it was the Observer that did it for Dave.”

One election has, however, been confirmed this week. As Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne go head-to-head for the Lib Dem leadership, bloggers began taking sides. Mark Valladares and Jonathan Calder have both sided with Huhne because of his proposal to scrap Trident missiles, while Huhne may have lost Liberty Alone’s vote due to his favour for bureaucracy.

This Sunday morning Politicalbetting will host a live online hustings with Huhne, with a similar event with Clegg to follow. Other hustings are published on Colin Ross’s blog.

The week also saw King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia come to Britain, which led to a spate of furious blogging. Vince Cable’s decision to shun the visitor, whose regime has been criticised on human rights violations, met with much support from his own party and beyond.

But Dizzy Thinks finds the Lib Dems’ actions hypocritical: “The bizarre part of the argument for me comes in this notion of the rule of law, for it was the rule of law upon which the Lib Dems opposed the overthrow of a totalitarian secretive vicious regime in Iraq. Call me a neocon if you must but how exactly can one oppose a regime in strong moral terms and then equally stand by and say that the same moral argument does not apply to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The positions seem entirely contradictory to me.”

While many on the Left oppose how welcome King Abdullah was made, Luke Akehurst, a former Labour candidate, defends the government’s decision: “Diplomacy sometimes involves sitting down and establishing common interests with people you would otherwise not want to invite to dinner. You have to do it if you have wider strategic interests that need protecting, or you just need to be in dialogue with your ‘enemy’s enemy’. Unfortunately it’s part of being in government – unlike Vince Cable we can’t indulge in gesture politics.”

Over at Spiked there is a book review with a difference. Five authors of banned books on terrorism detail what UK audiences are missing out on thanks to our libel laws. According to Private Eye, the story of the banning of these books has been kept out of the British mainstream media due to the publications’ fear of being taken through the courts themselves.