http://www.climatecare.org/projects/ashden/

that he was a principle speaker for the 2006 Ashden award. It shouldn’t be too difficult for Climate Care or Cameron to provide accurate offset figures for his travel:

https://www.climatecare.org/calculators/business/

says “Climate Care’s business CO2 calculator makes it easy for any size of UK based organisation to work out and offset their key CO2 emissions.”

I do hope he hasn’t just used the standard calculator though, because clearly helicopter flights and business jet travel will have a somewhat higher footprint than ordinary scheduled flights. I can’t see this detailled on their site, so we must expect that Mr Cameron has made special arrangements for his eco-auditing.

Chris – as much as I would like to Dave’s travel not to fall within the overseas travel exemption – I somehow feel that it would be difficult to argue in court that private jet travel did not fall within exemption – overseas travel is overseas travel it just that Old Etonians don’t travel with the oiks. Soemhow doubt that we will see Dave on a bicycle in the near future.

One area where the closer scrutiny is needed of the “Ashcroft” expenditure – is whether it is included in the Tories National Campaign Expenditure Totals – the Act is fairly clear that money spent on promoting the Party or its candidates (or attacking an opposing party) in the 12 months prior to a National Elections counts towards the (audited) national totals – and this is the case even when the expenditure is undertaken by accounting units of the national party (i.e Tory consituency associations) – see Section 72 of PPERA. The interesting thing is that we are now in the qualifying period for the next European Parliament elections in June 2008 – so in theory there should be a limit on the current level of “Ashcroft” expenditure. Shouldn’t the Electoral Commission be doing something?

At the time he said:

“I’ve asked the group to be radical in its thinking. I want it to work in an open and transparent way, taking evidence from leading NGOs and academic thinkers, engaging widely with the public. The group’s work, which should take about 18 months, will help us formulate a long-term strategy that will make Britain a better place to live without constraining economic growth….”

“…..That’s the central challenge that the Quality of Life group has been established to address. But its real test will be to take the tough long-term decisions to put aspirations into action. That’s the test that a modern, compassionate Conservative party must pass.”

GUARDIAN DECEMBER 2005

I think you should have a long hard think about who exactly is doing the misleading.