The Competition Commission, was of course, one of the bodies that could have ended up examining the bid, just as Hunt was when he was asked to make a “quasi-judicial” judgement on whether it should go ahead.

The CC tells its staff (emphasis mine):

There may be instances where a CC member or staff member has or appears to have prejudged the outcome of an inquiry. Circumstances in which prejudgement might arise would include those in which an article had been written or speech made expressing strong views about a particular merger or market.

Here is what Hunt wrote, with what we think of as the important bits in bold (h/t to the Guardian, which put this on its website):

James Murdoch is pretty furious at Vince’s referral to Ofcom. He doesn’t think he will get a fair hearing from Ofcom. I am privately concerned about this because News Corp are very litigious and we could end up in the wrong place in terms of media policy. Essentially what James Murdoch wants to do is to repeat what his father did with the move to Wapping and create the world’s first multiplatform media operator available from paper to web to TV to iPhone to iPad. Isn’t this what all media companies have to do ultimately? And if so we must be very careful that any attempt to block it is done on plurality grounds and not as a result of lobbying by competitors.

The UK has the chance to lead the way on this as we did in the 80s with the Wapping move but if we block it our media sector will suffer for years. In the end I am sure sensible controls can be put into any merger to ensure there is plurality but I think it would be totally wrong to cave into the Mark Thompson/Channel 4/Guardian line that this represents a substantial change of control given that we all know Sky is controlled by News Corp now anyway.

The PM loves playing “Fruit Ninja” on his iPad, he takes breaks from the working day to watch DVDs in the Number 10 flat and he keeps an arrangement to have a regular “date night” with his wife.

Cameron’s perceived laziness enrages some of his backbenchers and gives Ed Miliband a credible way to attack him. For that reason, the PM felt obliged to deny his relaxed style in a briefing with journalists during the Nato summit in Chicago. He said:

It is an enormous privilege to do this job and it is rightly extremely demanding. It requires a huge dedication at work and I am completely dedicated to that.

But if you think the PM resents being depicted in this way, you would be wrong.

In Westminster there is a very clear divide. There are those who think this would cause mass job insecurity, prompting a decline in consumer sentiment as people decide to save instead of spend. (While thousands of people would be sacked without any just cause by managers who simply don’t like them). Then there are those who believe that companies would hire many more staff if they didn’t have the red tape of having to maintain their services even if business turns bad.

“The quality of the relationship between the two parties could well prove crucial to Labour’s prospects of future power – before or after 2015,” he wrote.

This belies the fact that Labour and the Liberal Democrats are in contact at the highest level, according to senior figures in both camps.

Some Labour strategists are increasingly convinced that the party will have the largest number of seats at the next election but not necessarily enough for an outright majority.

As such they are keen for a rapprochement between the two parties ahead of 2015 in case there is a compelling argument for a new Labour-Lib Dem coalition in the next Parliament. “The lines of communication are now open,” said one senior Labour source.

Two years ago Mr Miliband was one of four Labour politicians negotiating with the Lib Dem leadership as it mulled which way to jump in forming a coalition, but his attitude was seen as hostile.

That tough attitude continued in the early days of his leadership, when he invited disgruntled Lib Dem activists to jump ship. “They seemed to spend the first year of opposition just kicking us,” said one senior Lib Dem aide.

Since then Labour has turned its guns more towards the Tories, the much larger party in the coalition.

A spokeswoman for Mr Cable, the business secretary, said he had met Mr Miliband twice since the general election and they had spoken “four or five times” on the phone. Mr Clegg had met the Labour leader twice and spoken on the phone “a couple of times”.

Mr Cable is seen as the most likely lynchpin between the two parties for the reason that he was a former Labour councillor in his youth.

But a source close to Mr Clegg said the Lib Dem leader said he was “relaxed” about Mr Cable’s conversations because he was “in favour of plural, grown-up politics” where MPs of different parties talked to each other.

Any Lib-Lab discussions were “not about 2015,” he said. Instead they were largely to discuss shared areas of interest such as the reform of party funding and the House of Lords.

A spokeswoman for Mr Cable said the conversations had been about issues including bank reforms. “Like other members of the Liberal Democrats, he has always been willing to talk to other politicians to discuss important areas of public policy,” she said.

Mutual suspicion still remains after Labour refused to help campaign for the

The report is also interesting because of its sections on homelessness, a phenomenon which appears to be on the rise after many years of welcome decline. Rising homelessness was one of the most negative elements of the Thatcher administration in the 1980s; is it making an unwelcome comeback?

Here is the statement from the attorney-general.

“These proceedings were taken to protect public confidence in the administration of justice. They were made necessary by a passage in Mr Hain’s memoirs and by Mr Hain’s refusal until now to reduce the risk to public confidence in the administration of justice arising from that passage. Had Mr Hain responded to the statement issued by the Lord Chief Justice or to our pre-action correspondence in the way that he

Now it seems as if the prime minister is preparing for defeat on the first of those points. Speaking at a reception at the Scotland Office, Cameron reportedly said he was “not fussed” over the timing but wanted a “simple, fair, decisive and legal question”.

Ed Miliband brought up growth, David Cameron countered with low interest rates. Miliband asked about police cuts, Cameron responded with figures about the proportion of back office staff to frontline officers. Miliband asked about nursing cuts, Cameron mentioned Labour’s refusal to guarantee real-terms rises in health spending at the last election.

But two issues caught the eye: the first is the battle over Francois Hollande. The socialist French prime minister’s election poses a risk for both leaders. Hollande’s rhetoric about growth versus austerity has echoed much of what Ed Balls has been saying in this country.

Therefore if the French economy begins to recover, it gives Cameron the headache of having an apparently viable alternative economic model thriving just across the Channel. If however it fails, with growth stagnating and the bond markets starting to punish France, it will give the prime minister the perfect ammunition with which to attack the Balls plan.

The concerns revolve around the parent company, Santander, amid nervousness about the vulnerability of the Spanish economy. One senior MP told us yesterday that the news reminded him somewhat of the early days of Northern Rock, even though the two situations are very different.