Six of the Best 123

It's a bit late for post-mortems on Oldham East & Saddleworth, but this one comes from Chris Davies MEP who used to be MP for the old Littleborough & Saddleworth seat: "On a number of occasions I delivered pieces of literature that I thought would not persuade a single extra person to vote for us, and sometimes I feared that they might do us actual harm. Voters complained that they were assaulted by the sheer number of leaflets, but a criticism of greater concern is that too much of the paper we distributed said nothing worth saying."

But What Does Richard Kemp Think? He thinks it is time for a Campaign for the Abolition of Parliament, that's what.

The "Edwardian attitudes" towards parental leave that Nick Clegg complains of were still around in the 1970s, says Mary Reid.

Owen Jones on LabourList offers a dispatch from the wilder shores of the Labor left - the annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee.

David MacLean, the Leicester Mercury's political correspondent, has little time for his opposite numbers in television and their attitude to reporting local councils: "TV reporters, mainly because they appear on the gogglebox most evenings and probably get recognised in Waitrose as a result, are usually the worst. 'I’m on a deadline', they tell press officers breathlessly, as if to distinguish themselves from the rest of the media pack who are also working to deadline."

Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service remembers Nat Lofthouse and Susannah York (who played together in the classic Bolton Wanderers forward line of the fifties).