Daily catch-up: serving up penguins, cooking the TV debates goose and steaming the greens

A collection of politics and curios from around the websphere

1. “I can’t believe there’s a whole book telling people how to cook penguins. Shouldn’t be allowed.” Tom Doran.

2. I love it when things go according to plan. I said the TV debates wouldn’t happen, because they are not in David Cameron’s interest. And that he would find ways of preventing them from happening without it being apparent beyond doubt that he had blocked them.

What I could not have predicted, though, was that the broadcasters would handle the negotiations so badly. When the Prime Minister said he wouldn’t take part unless the Green Party were included, the obvious next step for the broadcasters was simply to include Natalie Bennett in the first debate. What did they do yesterday? Added Bennett, Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood (she’s the leader of Plaid Cymru) to the first debate and all three of them plus Nigel Farage to the second.

So we’ve gone from 3-3-3 (three leaders, three debates, as last time), to 4-3-2 (plus Farage, same as last time, then Cameron vs Ed Miliband) and now to 7-7-2.

Mayhem.

Jedi Cameron merely has to keep quiet and watch as the Lib Dems, Democratic Ulster Unionists, George Galloway and anyone else who fancies a go demands to be included and threatens legal action.

3. As for the Green Party, Conor Pope has an excellent post at the New Statesman saying they are a joke and Labour should say so, instead of trying to out-UKIP the UKIP of the left. “Less lovebombing, more bombing.”

Matthew Holehouse at the Telegraph has an excellent run-through what some of the Green Party’s policies actually are. I’m all in favour of no new runways, green taxes, less use of prison, smaller schools and free range meat. Less keen on reversing economic growth.

Steve Van Riel said he finally understood what Neal Lawson meant about “the wrong people voting Labour” when Matthew Oakeshott, the former Lib Dem peer, donated money to a rainbow assortment of Lib Dem, Labour and Green candidates. Van Riel’s tweet was of course in backward-sloping ironic font.

4. Quiz question. Who accused Tony Blair of surrounding himself with a “cabal of Jewish advisers”? Tactfully, he doesn’t say, but it was a fellow Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2003. When challenged, Dalyell responded: “I am not going to be labelled anti-Semitic. My children worked on a kibbutz.”

Better news on the anti-Semitism front: British voters are overwhelmingly indifferent to the prospect of a Jewish prime minister – they care less about it now with Ed Miliband than they did in 2005 with Michael Howard. A YouGov poll for Professor Tim Bale found that 83 per cent said it would make no difference to how they would vote. The survey does raise the question of whether Miliband, an atheist, is any more Jewish than Benjamin Disraeli, who became an Anglican at the age of 12.

5. Thanks to Hannah Fearn for drawing my attention to the existence of Inspirograph, digital spirograph, made by Nathan Friend. Click and drag the inner wheel. Lovely.

6. And finally, thanks to Moose Allain for this:

“The police have brought a philosopher in for questioning … everything.”