Back in business

Apologies to all who have visited this site over the past week hoping to find something new...I've been up in the Lakes with Gill and George trying out our new Vango Diablo 900, nicknamed the Millennium Dome by some camping enthusiasts.

Apparently a few things have been happening in my absence....oh well, can't win 'em all! I'm sure I'll have a chance to catch up with the trials and tribulations of Lord Levy and the ongoing debate over the role of political bloggers over the next few days or so....

Meanwhile, here's a picture of the wonderful NT campsite at Great Langdale where we were staying.

Remembering 7/7

Largely thanks to Iain Dale linking to my Prescott post (below) I had a record number of hits on this blog yesterday, as well as getting interviewed by the Guardian for a piece coming out on Monday on the whole Lobby - Blogosphere interface that the Prezza story has highlighted.

All of which is very exciting and encouraging for me at this time. But today is the anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings, and I don't want you to read my blog today.

I want you to go to Rachel from North London and read the moving words and prayers which the Kings Cross victims will today join together in saying, or to Comment is Free where survivor Holly Finch describes her quest to find goodness admist the suffering.

Above all, I want you to sign the petition for a full public inquiry into these bombings, including the issue of why a bookshop assistant who attempted to tip-off West Yorkshire police about the activities of Mohammad Sidique Khan appears to have been written off as a nutter.

It's not just Tory bloggers who think Prescott should go

The last time I wrote anything about John Prescott was four weeks ago in my Saturday column which appears in the Newcastle Journal, Derby Evening Telegraph and Lincolnshire Echo.

On that occasion I wrote:

"Mr Prescott’s sole case for continuance in office rests on the argument that it would be better for the Labour Party to resolve the leadership and deputy leadership issues at the same time.

"True - but that is not an argument for Mr Prescott to cling on till Mr Blair goes. It is, rather, an argument that they should both go now."

So why the reticence since then? Well, it's not that I've been avoiding the subject. It's just that nothing that has happened in the whole Prescott saga in the meantime has caused me to revise this opinion in any way.

The fact that Mr Prescott received hospitality from a millionaire who wants to open a casino in the Millennium Dome, or that Guido Fawkes has named the third Prescott mistress merely confirms me in my view that Labour needs a clean sweep at the top.

Today the story has taken a different turn with claims that "Tory bloggers" are behind a "dirty tricks campaign" designed to force Mr Prescott out of office.

The series of claims was made via Mr Prescott's biographer and unofficial media spokesman Colin Brown in today's Independent.

"Friends of the Deputy Prime Minister claim he has been the target of a "dirty tricks" campaign by "bloggers" with Tory right-wing links. They are furious at the use of two Westminster internet sites to name a third woman with whom the bloggers allege John Prescott has had an affair, and a woman civil servant in Beijing who is said to have rebuffed his advances.

Mr Prescott's allies have privately urged him to take action to remove the smears or close the sites down. His advisers said he was unlikely to do so, to avoid giving them more prominence.

"It is the black arts," said a Prescott ally. "They are running a dirty tricks campaign and they are being used as a conduit by journalists."

The Labour MP was named by a "gunpowder plot" website called Guido Fawkes. Friends of the blogger said it was run by a libertarian conservative, Paul Staines, a former Tory activist. The website yesterday challenged Mr Prescott to sue. The Prescott camp also accused Iain Dale, a past Tory parliamentary candidate, of using his own personal blogsite to recycle the smears."

The BBC's Nick Robinson has also waded in, attempting to play down the Prescott story and accusing bloggers of "attempting to make the political weather."

Naturally Iain and Guido have given their various responses to these claims and these can be read HERE and HERE.

So what to make of it, in particular Prescott's claim that journalists are using blogger as a conduit? Well, knowing how journalism works, I don't doubt that the odd bit of gossip probably does flow back and forth between the blogosphere and the mainstream media.

In the old days, when newspaper hacks had a story they couldn't quite get past the legals, they would pass it on to Private Eye, or to a diary column where less rigorous legal restrictions applied. Nowadays, they just end up on Guido and Iain Dale.

As an aside, it's a pity they can't be shared around a bit as Iain and Guido don't really need the traffic....but does it really amount to "dirty tricks?" by "politically motivated" bloggers?

Okay, so Iain Dale is a former (and future?) Tory candidate, but then again Nick Robinson is a former chairman of Macclesfield Young Conservatives, and he is taking a much softer line on the story.

But just as it is not just Tory MPs who have expressed concern about Prescott's behaviour, neither is it just "Tory" bloggers who have done so.

In fact, there are plenty of us on the centre-left who can see the damage he and Blair are doing to the progressive cause by remaining in office so long past their sell-by-date.

The latest speculation is that the end result of all this will be that Prescott will resign as Deputy Prime Minister but hold on to his (meaningless) role of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

If so, it can only serve as a temporary device for getting them through to the party conference in Manchester, when the issue will have to be settled.

Italy and Germany show us the way

Last night I watched the best match of the 2006 World Cup. It seems I'm not the only one who thought so.

The quality of the football between Italy and Germany was so demonstrably superior to anything we saw from England in this tournament that afterwards I felt a little less sore about our elimination.

The point is that up until last Saturday, we were told - by Sven Goran Eriksson and by a mainly compliant media desperate to talk up our chances - that we were somehow in the same league as these guys. In truth though we never were.

Do we know how to thread passes together, maintain posesession, or even how to defend like the Germans and the Italians do? No, we don't, although briefly, under Terry Venables and Glenn Hoddle in the 90s, we did aspire to play like that.

It was the right result too. Italy were marginally the better side all night and it was great to see Grosso diplaying a touch of the Tardellis at the end in his goal celebration.

As I said at the start of the World Cup, I will always support the Italians against all other teams apart from England, so I'm with Marcello Lippi's men all the way now.

That said, I won't be too sad if Zidane and Co walk off with the prize for France. It would be one of the great sporting comebacks of all time, and it would be the kind of story that gives hope to old gits everywhere.

Just so long as it isn't Portugal....

Are city regions a runner for Labour?

In my newspaper columns at the weekend I focused on the Government's plans for "city regions" as outlined by Ruth Kelly in a speech last week.

The idea is to use the "London model" of an elected mayor with powers cutting across local authority areas to streamline accountability and galvanise economic development across eight major conurbations.

It's a good idea in theory, but to my mind, it raises different issues for different cities.

Manchester and Birmingham are already city regions and the plan makes a good deal of sense there. I am less sure whether it makes sense for Newcastle, and I am absolutely damned sure it makes no sense for Nottingham. Derby and Leicester, which was ludicrously labelled a potential "city region" by one of Ms Kelly's spokespeople, even though no-one in either city has actually suggested it.

Accordingly, the issue was given different treatment in each of the different columns I wrote about it.

The Newcastle Journal column can be read HEREwhile the North West Enquirer version can be viewed HERE. Unfortunately the other two are not online yet.

England: The inquest

What to say about England's elimination from the World Cup by Portugal in a penalty shoot-out after having their star player sent off? Well, in one sense, you really couldn't make it up, in that if you had done, everyone would have gone: "Nah, that couldn't possibly happen again now, could it?"

But lightning does, it seems, strike twice in the same place, in that what happened on Saturday was precisely what happened against Argentina in 1998 when Beckham was sent-off and then David Batty missed in the shoot-out to condemn England to defeat.

All the national newspaper pundits have had their say, and there's no point me linking out to them all. But for me the best summing-up of the selectorial and tactical mistakes by which Sven-Goran Eriksson blighted England's challenge came from the Observer's Paul Wilson.

"By the time Eriksson had taken a blind leap of faith over Walcott and decided four strikers would be plenty even if two of them were injured, he appeared to be behaving as if distracted...his entire philosophy now seemed to be based on the premise that you might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb, and so the cautious, studied approach disappeared in favour of bizarre selections and a new formation every week. And still England played terribly."

Quite. But I think that, collectively, the national media - and I'm not singling out Paul Wilson or any other individual here - can sometimes be guilty of 20/20 hindsight in relation to such issues.

To me, it was obvious from the start that this squad had been poorly selected, and that as a result of that, the team was performing poorly and Eriksson failing to make the best use of the available talents at his disposal.

Yet the papers, for quite understandable reasons, seem to see it as their patriotic duty to get behind our boys and not question too closely either the validity of the team selections of the effectiveness of the performances, even if these things are staring them in the face.

Take Theo Walcott, for instance. There should have been a press campaign against this crazy selection, ahead of Jermaine Defoe. Instead they simply took it on trust that Eriksson knew what he was doing, and that the untested 17-year-old really could become England's latest World Cup hero. In fact, Eriksson himself didn't even believe in him.

Similarly, the media have been muted in their criticisms of Frank Lampard who was, to put it bluntly, not worth his place in the team in this tournament. He was obviously trying too hard to score and his presence in central midfield inhibited Steven Gerrard, the one player apart from Rooney who could have won the thing for us.

Eriksson's reluctance to drop one of his stars distorted the team formation throughout the campaign, forcing him into playing a negative 4-5-1 when we would have been far better off with Rooney and Crouch up front and Gerrard at the head of a midfield diamond.

World Cups are often about discovering your best formation. That's what happened in Italia '90. If England had not switched to 3-5-2 in that tournament when Bryan Robson went home injured, we'd never have got near the semi finals. And of course we only discovered Geoff Hurst in '66 as a result of an injury to Jimmy Greaves.

For my part, I never believed England could win this World Cup. Yes, we had the players to do it, but not the management capable of getting them to play together as a team. I am far more shocked by the elimination of Argentina, whom I am happy to admit I tipped for glory at the outset and who possessed, in Juan Roman Riquelme, the player of this tournament

At the start of this World Cup, I listed my Top 10 World Cup memories, and reminiscences of Italia '90 inevitably loomed large in that. Sadly, there is nothing from the 2006 tournament that I will be adding to that list.

What was so memorable about the challenge by Bobby Robson's men was that it was so unexpected, in contrast to this over-hyped side and their over-hyped manager who somehow managed to convince a nation that we had a genuine chance of the world's greatest prize.

It's not all doom and gloom. In 2010, Rooney will be in his prime. Robinson, Terry, Gerrard, Hargreaves (a star yesterday), Joe Cole and Aaron Lennon could still be around to form the nucleus of a new team. It's not a bad basis on which to build.

But as for Sven, it really is goodbye...and good riddance.

Update: Throughout the World Cup, I have helped produce a series of podcasts with colleagues on the this is...network of websites. Now England have packed their bags, we're hanging up our mikes, but our final verdict on England's campaign can be heard HERE.