The best John Reid story of the week

Amid all the sound and fury about John Reid and the deportation of foreign prisoners debacle, together with some mischievous speculation about the whereabouts of his PhD thesis, Stalin's Gran lightens the atmosphere with this delightful story about what the Home Secretary saw in his wife. Enjoy!

Guardian poll prediction would mean constitutional crisis

The Guardian leads this morning on an opinion poll which shows support for Labour now down to 34pc with David Cameron's Tories on 38pc and Ming Campbell's Libs on 20pc.

Julian Glover, who seems to have taken over from Alan Travis as the paper's poll-meister, writes that this result "suggests that the next election may well produce a hung Parliament."

That is something of an understatement. Not only would such a result produce a hung Parliament, it would also lead to certain constitutional chaos in that the party that lost the election would still have the largest number of seats in the House of Commons.

To see what I mean, go to the Electoral Calculus site and type in the Guardian's poll predictions. It will give you a result that has Labour on 305 seats, 19 short of a majority, the Tories on 272, and the Lib Dems on 37.

What this means is that the party that would be deemed by public opinion to have "won" the election - the Tories - would not be in a position to form a government even in coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

The Labour Party, by contrast, would probably be able to stitch together enough alliances withe minor parties to stay in power, even though it would be clearly seen to have lost the confidence of the British people.

This is pretty unchartered constitutional territory. Only once before, in 1950, has the party which won the most votes (the Tories) not gained the largest number of seats and consequently not formed the Government. But then it was only by a tiny margin and there was no third party to complicate things.

As the Chinese used to say, we live in interesting times....

Does David Cameron read my column?

Last Thursday, in my new(ish) column in the North West Enquirer, I made the following observation about the changing terms of the political debate.

"Other concerns are slowly coming to the fore.....most fundamentally of all, perhaps, the rise of the so-called “happiness” agenda – the idea that the first duty of governments should be to promote the emotional well-being of their citizens, even if this is at the expense of economic growth."

Yesterday Tory leader David Cameron, who may very well read the Enquirer since he has already featured in a front-page story and interview, said the following in a keynote speech.

"It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general well-being. Improving our society's sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times."

Seriously, I think Cameron's attempt to claim the "happiness agenda" is a potentially incredibly significant development in terms of the political battles of the next few years.

His reference yesterday to there being more to life than the "Protestant Work Ethic" is a direct dig at his likely election opponent Gordon Brown who the Tories see as obsessed with work and regulation whereas they want to be identified with wellbeing and relaxation.

In my Enquirer column, I also made the prediction that, as we enter the twilight of the Blair era, the party which best manages to tap into this changing public agenda will be the one that ultimately emerges as the dominant force of the next decade or so.

Well so far, it's 1-0 to Mr Cameron.