I’m aware that other news stories have rather dominated the agenda this morning; so you may have missed the news that:
- government CIO John Suffolk has resigned, although so far he has neglected to mention it on either his blog or Twitter account, neither of which has been updated since 30 July (when he declared it was ‘good to be back online after the election break’). Quite a turnaround since August, when he told Computer Weekly he had no such intention. I had assumed this would happen a lot sooner, to be honest. Kable has a rather bland statement from him.
- David Cameron’s ‘vanity staffers’, Andrew Parsons and Nicky Woodhouse are switching payrolls, from the civil service to Conservative central office (according to the Standard). It’s unfortunate timing for Tom Watson, whose letter to Gus O’Donnell had just received confirmation that the positions were not advertised because they were ‘short term appointments of up to two years to meet short term needs’. Crown copyright was to have applied to any photos taken by Mr Parsons; what happens now, I wonder? Can/should government use party-funded publicity material? You’d have to say ‘no’, surely.