Rough justice

The BBC drama Criminal Justice completed its run last night after having me and around 4.8m other viewers on tenterhooks for most of this week. If this doesn't win Baftas galore next year, I'll be amazed.

Basically the premise behind the programme appeared to be that everyone in the criminal justice system is bent except the defendant, Ben Coulter, and his gorgeous, idealistic 26-year-old barrister Frances Kapoor, played by Vineeta Rishi. I for one find this premise entirely believable.

Some found it too hard to watch in its searing portrayal of prison life and the evil that men are capable of. Watching a prisoner trying to conceal a smuggled mobile phone up his arse during a low squat I could probably have done without, likewise the scene in which heroin is forcibly injected into Ben by the other prisoners.

This was one of the less believable aspects of the production. I'm no expert on smack, but I would have thought that directly injecting it into the veins of a first-time user would more than likely be fatal.

The highlight of the whole thing for me was the performance of that marvellous actor Pete Postlethwaite. His character Hooch was the real hero of the piece, and his ultimate decision to put himself on the line for Ben carried shades of Sydney Carton's "far, far better thing."

Ben's ultimate fate was left hanging in the air. Would he be able to move on with the rest of his life, or would his experiences inside leave him irreparably damaged? This programme was something of a mind-fuck, but it was Ben's mind that was being fucked with as well as ours.

A few lines on Politics Home

As most with a passing interest in political bloggery will know by now, Politics Home launched this week with the aim of creating a "Bloomberg" for politics. The leading personalities involved on the editorial side are Nick Assinder, Andrew Rawnsley and Martin Bright who are all fine journos and good chaps to boot, so I wish them well.

Meanwhile Freddie Sayers from the site has kindly emailed me with the results of their most recent Phi100 panel, an online focus group of cross-party MPs, senior political editors, commentators and campaign strategists.

The panel were asked: "How much do the following issues in the private lives of politicians influence the view voters have on them?" The results are listed below, with the percentage who thought it did have a negative influence on voters' perceptions of them in brackets.

1. Has a problem with alcohol (88.3% believe it has an influence)

2. Claims above average amounts from the taxpayer for meals and travel (77.4%)

3. Talks about green issues but is shown to use air travel much more than average (71.8%)

4. Has left his wife for another woman (55.8%)

5. Sends their children to private schools (51.1%)

6. Used cocaine when they were at university (48.8%)

7. Violates traffic laws (36.1%)

Politics Home is drawing the headline conclusion from this that "Cocaine is near the bottom of the seven deadly political sins." Fair enough - but I wonder if this is an issue on which the Westminster cognoscenti are ever so slightly divorced from the public at large?

For my part - and I'm speaking as a private individual here rather than attempting to second-guess the electorate - I would regard the use of cocaine at any stage of someone's life as leaving a very serious question mark over their fitness for public office.

For one thing, it indicates a lack of respect for the law of the land, which however much we might disagree with it, is something we are called on to follow. For another, it indicates to me a quite staggering degree of emotional immaturity.

Coke is bascially a drug used by social inadequates to maintain a self-confident facade and to make themselves "interesting." Of course most users end up talking complete bollocks but in a roomful of other cokeheads, that is unlikely to be noticed.

So I think the PHI panel are wrong on this one - but that is not to say I don't think Politics Home is potentially a great site.

Openness, but only up to a point

Yesterday I ran a rather light-hearted post on the "Nick Clegg Superstud" revelations and other true stories that should have been April Fools. Judging by the lack of comments this attempt at sardonic humour obviously completely bombed, so it's back to serious today.

As the sage of Shropshire Jonathan Calder has already pointed out, releasing Clegg's GQ interview yesterday was a fiendishly clever piece of news management by the Lib Dems. The fact that it came out on April 1 would have led many people who read the story to assume it was a spoof, thereby lessening its impact.

But spoof it isn't and those Lib Dems of a sensitive disposition now have to get used to the fact that they now have a reformed serial shagger and teenage arsonist for a leader.

In what looks like something of a damage-limitation exercise, some of Clegg's colleagues have today praised his openness in being prepared to talk about such things, but they are missing one very vital point.

For me, the really interesting thing about Clegg is that while he is happy for us to know he was rather promiscuous in his younger days, happy for us to know he was an arsonist, happy for us to know he was a binge-drinker, even happy for us to know that he doesn't believe in God, he is still not prepared to say whether or not he has ever taken illegal drugs.

Once again, it begs the question just what is it about the drugs question that puts the willies up our political leaders, that causes the likes of Clegg to switch instantly from heart-on-the-sleeve mode to we're-entitled-to-a-private-life mode?

David Cameron famously refused to answer the same question after he became his party's leader, but even he owned up in the end, although the revelation that he had enjoyed a few spliffs at uni was a bit of a let-down to those who assumed his initial reticence must have meant the entire family fortune had disappeared up his nose.

If Clegg really does believe in "openness," he should bury this last taboo.

Has House of Cards had a few lines cut?

Great to see House of Cards again on the box (BBC4) this week - but I had an odd feeling watching last night's concluding episode that the Roger O'Neill death scene in a service station toilet off the M27 had been cut.

My memory may be playing tricks on me, but in the original I seem to recall O'Neill staggering about for a while with a rather surprised look on his face after the mixture of coke and rat poison disappeared up his nose. Has good old Auntie decided that such scenes are now unsuitable for adult viewing, even on a digital channel after the 9 o'clock watershed?

Gordon scores

The Tories are predictably fuming about the fact that Gordon Brown has succeeded in re-focusing attention on the issue of politicians' drug-taking pasts, first by pledging to look again at the reclassification of cannabis and then by persuading Home Secretary Jackie Smith to fess up to having a toke at university.

Why do they protest so much? Isn't it a perfectly legitimate tactic for a party leader to seek to put his opposite number on ths spot over an issue - particularly when they have brought the problem on themselves by being less than open about it in the past?

But whatever the low politics of the situation, it's the right move by Gordon. Cannabis is evil shit and I have witnessed at first hand the kind of psychosis it can induce in regular users, in my case in a former landlord. An old newspaper colleague of mine, Huw Lewis, had an experience that was, sadly, even closer to home.

And in case anyone's wondering....yes, I did, once or twice, and all it ever gave me was a bloody headache.