It was announced during the Conservative party's autumn conference that the former Labour transport secretary Andrew Adonis would resign his party's whip to chair the commission, a move that was interpreted as a bid for the centre ground on the part of the chancellor.
The cri de coeur from the 44-year-old, who runs Shine Television, the News Corp-owned maker of programmes such as Masterchef and Merlin, will be interpreted as a bid for power at her father's company – although her friends insisted she had no desire to lead the company her father built, which spans from Fox News in the US to the Sun in Britain.
Monday's submarine stunt in Crimea, however, has been widely interpreted as a bid by Putin to flex his political as well as actual muscles in the wake of Russia's annexation of the southern peninsula last year.
This was widely interpreted as a nervous bid for a friendly home crowd.
Three days later the president, Dilma Rousseff, announced increased welfare payments to 2.5m poor Brazilians in a speech widely interpreted as launching her bid for a second term.
It was interpreted as a blatant bid for backbench women's support, a way of neutralising concerns about his anti-abortion stance which some people thought might influence him in the job.
He went out of his way the other day to make kind remarks about Mr. Ferrer, a move Democrats interpreted as either a bid for Mr. Ferrer's support should Mr. Hevesi make the runoff without Mr. Ferrer, or a signal to Mr. Ferrer that he was prepared to back him.
It was only a concerted effort by Landrieu earlier this week – widely interpreted as a last-minute bid to revive her re-election prospects – that persuaded leaders to hold a vote during the lame-duck session.
When one of them, Andrew Ross Sorkin, was covering Rupert Murdoch's bid for Dow Jones last spring, he reported on Murdoch's strategy and three days later wrote a column that could easily have been interpreted as an endorsement of his offer.
The union stayed neutral in the last election, which many interpreted as a tacit approval of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's bid for a third term.
