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.

The Top 10 April Fools That Weren't

We learn courtesy of this morning's Guardian that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has not only shagged up to 30 women but that he once set fire to a greenhouse full of cacti while pissed out of his brain. Unfortunately for Lib Dem supporters, it wasn't an April Fool, and neither was John "greed is good" Hutton being named the best-performing Labour minister in March, albeit on a Tory-supporting blog.

Here's ten other true stories from the past year or so that really should have been April Fools...Feel free to add your own nominations in the comments.

Northern Rock boss gets £760,000 pay-off

Health inequality widens under Labour

Gordon Brown invites Thatcher to tea

Anglican archbishop calls for Sharia Law

Catherine Tate becomes Dr Who's assistant

Balshaw returns as England full-back

Harriet Harman elected deputy Labour leader

Andrew Porter appointed Telegraph Political Editor

China awarded the 2008 Olympics

Mugabe wins the Zimbabwean election

The bleeding obvious

Duke "did not order Diana death" reads the headline on the BBC's superdooper new website. And in other hot news, Gordon Brown "did not think much of Tony Blair," Rupert Murdoch "makes exceedingly large amounts of money," and Pope Benedict XVI "is Catholic."

Barnett finally on the way out

There now seems to be fairly compelling evidence that the skids are finally under the Barnett Formula and unsurprisingly this forms the subject of my weekly column in the Newcastle Journal published today.

Donald Dewar and Ron Davies always said that devolution was a "process, not an event" and so it is proving. The growing demands for greater financial autonomy for Scotland are clearly incompatible with the continuance of a funding system which makes the country financially dependent on England and this has created an unexpected window of opportunity for the government to look again at the whole vexed issue.

Well done Beeb

Credit to the BBC for joining in with the rest of us and having a laugh about Charlotte Green's giggling fit on the Today Programme this morning. I have to say I was in stitches myself as I listened to this in my car while driving to work, but it was coupled with a terrible fear, happily unfounded, that poor Charlotte was at that very moment being told to clear her desk by po-faced BBC bosses.

Anyone who has not already heard it can do so HERE.

Top marks also for Ashes to Ashes which ended its run last night with the dramatic revelation of...well, I won't spoil it for the benefit of those who want to watch it on i-player.

Suffice to say that, for me, the best bits of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes have always been the dovetailing of the plot with musical references, and the use of Supertramp's 1979 classic Take the Long Way Home to emphasise that Keeley Hawes' Dr Alex Drake would not be getting back to 2008 in this series at least was inspired.

The egos have landed

Readers of this blog from way back will already be aware of my obsession with The Apprentice which returned to our screens last night.

First to be fired was toffee-nosed barrister Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, who appears to have changed his name from plain Nick Brown, although personally I think he was rather hard done-by.

More deserving candidates for the chop might have included hard-faced Irishwoman Jennifer Maguire, who informed us in complete seriousness that she was "probably the best saleswoman in Europe," baby-faced Kevin, who reckoned that fish have breasts, and whichever pillock it was who tried to cut up a fish-head with the knife the wrong way round.

It promises to be compulsive viewing as ever....

Freedom of conscience is not the real issue

I am of course against the creation of animal-human hybrid embroys and against making it easier for children to grow up without fathers, but I am not kidding myself that yesterday's concession by Gordon Brown allowing Labour MPs a free vote on key sections of the Frankenstein Bill will change anything in the longer-run.

Once again, the Tories have been playing gesture politics here. They have focused on the procedural issue of whether MPs would get a free vote, hoping it would simultaneously embarrass Gordon and portray them as more sympathetic to the views of the Bill's opponents.

But the truth is that David Cameron knows perfectly well that most of his MPs will ultimately back this measure, as will most of Gordon Brown's. The fact that there is now to be a free vote will make no difference whatever to the outcome.

Result: a terrible Bill which further undermines both the sanctity of human life and the role of the family will become law, and the de-Christianisation of Britain will continue apace.

White Easter

This Easter will certainly stick in the memory. I got up at 5.30am on Easter Sunday morning to drive to the Sunrise Service in the middle of a raging blizzard. At 8am my son was out in the garden building a snowman. It was the first White Easter I can remember in my lifetime and not something I really expect to see again.

But although it was memorable in its own way, there will no doubt be plenty of debate in workplaces up and down the land this morning as to whether we really want a four-day Bank Holiday weekend this early in the year. The wintry weather was not exactly conducive either to family days out, gardening or DIY (although I did manage to get a new basement window installed in between snow and rain breaks.)

Some will no doubt advocate decoupling the holiday from the Christian festivals, as the schools have already done. But for me the logical answer would be for the churches to take the initiative and fix Easter on the first Sunday in April - rather than the current formula which puts it on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (March 20 or 21).

As well as reducing the likelihood of wintry weather, this would mean Easter would always fall within the school holidays. Furthermore because Whitsun (Pentecost) falls seven weeks after Easter, it would mean Whitsunday would always fall on the fourth Sunday in May, thus restoring the lost link between the Christian festival of Whitsun and the Spring Bank Holiday.

Five go adventuring again

Yes, they're back....but presumably without the lashings of ginger beer, farmers' wives who rustle up a whole picnic in five seconds' flat without expecting payment, scary black faces staring in at the window, and horrible smelly gipsies who haven't had a bath for weeks.

Haselhurst is our top choice too

Many aeons ago before the world's financial system went into near-meltdown we were all busy obsessing about whether Michael Martin would carry on as Speaker and who his successor might be, which puts the nature of the political news cycle in perspective somewhat.

Nevertheless, I was sufficiently engaged by this fascinating political conundrum to carry out a poll, the results of which can be viewed HERE.

Before launching this poll I noted that Sir Alan Haselhurst had topped a similar poll on Iain Dale's Diary and said it would be interesting if my own poll produced the same result, given this blog's different readership.

Although my sample is much smaller than Iain's, the results as can be seen below are indeed remarkably similar, with Sir Alan topping my poll with almost exactly the same percentage as he achieved on Iain's - surely an indication of the respect in which he is held across the political spectrum.

For the record, I voted for Ken Clarke. With no disrespect to Sir Alan, I think the reputation of Parliament is now suffiently damaged it needs a big figure in every sense to help restore it to its former standing.

Iain's poll

Sir Alan Haselhurst 22.6%
Sir George Young 18.8%
Sir Menzies Campbell 12%
Frank Field 11.3%
Vince Cable 9.5%
Kenneth Clarke 9%
Alan Beith 4.1%
Michael Ancram 3.5%
Sir Patrick Cormack 3.4%
John Bercow 2.5%
Sylvia Heal 2.2%
Sir Michael Lord 1.1%

My poll

Sir Alan Haselhurst 22%
Sir Menzies Campbell 17%
Kenneth Clarke 16%
Sir George Young 15%
Margaret Beckett 8%
Sylvia Heal 6%
Alan Beith 5%
Michael Ancram 3%
Sir Patrick Cormack 1%
None of these 6%

Belper's most famous export?

Actually this was nails, hence the name of the local football club (Belper Nailers) and the occasional use of "nailheads" as a term of abuse for the natives. But in terms of recent political history, the town where I now live is perhaps best known for being the constituency of George Brown, legendary piss artist and Labour Deputy Leader of the 1960s, who dramatically resigned from the job of Foreign Secretary (allegedly while drunk) forty years ago this week.

I always thought it was Tony Crosland who said that "George Brown drunk was a better man than Harold Wilson sober" but apparently this phrase was actually first penned by William Rees Mogg in a Times editorial. What Crosland said, a propos of the 1963 leadership contest between the two men, was that the party faced "a choice between a crook and a drunk."

For my part, I have always regarded Brown as a much-maligned chap. The oft-repeated story about him going up to the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima while under the influence and asking him for a dance is almost certainly an invention, for instance.

Possibly the most fair-minded assessment I have read on Brown's career appears on a Derbyshire wiki project with which I am currently involved called You and Yesterday. You can read it HERE.

At our best when we are boring

My initial verdict on last Wednesday's Budget - written in a hurry between finishing work and picking my wife up from a hospital appointment - was intentionally rather tongue-in-cheek. A more considered verdict appeared on Saturday's Newcastle Journal and can be read in full HERE.

Milburn: Next election up for grabs

Northern Decision Makers - Alan Milburn part one
Uploaded by broadbandtvchannel

I am pleased to be able to carry on this blog an interview with the former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn conducted by Graham Robb, an old friend from my days as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal.

Together with Labour supporter Nick Wallis, former Tory election candidate Graham hosts a programme called "Northern Decision Makers" which features on his new broadband TV channel.

In the interview, which is in two parts, Mr Milburn says the next general election will be the closest since 1974 and argues that it is currently "up for grabs."

While he concedes that Gordon Brown could lose, he also predicts that so long as Labour gets the over-arching narrative right and presents a message of hope, the party will win an unprecedented fourth term.

The interview also contains some further interesting thoughts from Mr Milburn on the social moblity agenda which he has continued to champion during his time outside government.

It is well worth watching, and provides further proof in my view that a place should be found for the Darlington MP back at Labour's top table.

Northern Decision Makers - Alan Milburn part two
Uploaded by broadbandtvchannel

Battle of the bloggers

Tonight's Question Time Extra on News 24 will see Tory blogfather Iain Dale going head to head with Labour Home's Alex Hilton, the man who once claimed that the raison d'etre of the Conservative Party was "lining up the entire British working class and buggering them one by one."

Should be compulsive viewing.

Mrs and Mr Balls

I have always maintained that if there was a future Prime Minister in the Balls household, it was Yvette rather than Ed - most recently in this post published on Monday.

Today, with Ed Balls in hot water after apparently saying "So what?" to a claim that UK taxes are now the highest in history, I wonder whether the wider political commentariat might now start to realise this.

While Ed was making a fool of himself in the Chamber, and providing an open goal for David Cameron as he sought to dismantle the Budget, Yvette was doing the rounds of College Green and the TV studios presenting the Government's case in her usual cool, calm, quietly persuasive manner.

Mike Smithson goes so far as to speculate today that Balls' antics might have cost Labour the next election. I would certainly agree that the more the public sees of Balls, the less they will be inclined to vote for the party.

Balls was already deeply implicated in last autumn's election debacle, shooting his mouth off on the radio about whether "the gamble" lay in holding the election or delaying - with the clear implication that the riskier course was delay.

I believe that was the moment when the public began to turn against Brown, the moment it became clear that the decision over whether to hold the election was being very clearly determined not by the national interest but by narrow party advantage.

Gordon should have learned his lesson from that and put Balls firmly back in his box before now, but old loyalties notwithstanding, perhaps it's time he echoed the words of Clem Attlee to Harold Laski - and I use the full quote here advisedly.

"I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome."

Boring...but not bad

I had thought of doing a blog-boycott of this year's Budget, so narcoleptic was the content, but on reflection...there are some positives to be taken from Mr Darling's package from a progressive/green point of view.

As the driver of a Vauxhall Zafira who likes the odd drop of Scotch, I am probably going to be among the people worst hit by today's announcements, but I'm entirely content that it should be so.

The 55p a bottle increase in whisky duty will in fact cost me the princely sum of around £3.20 a year, which seems a small price to pay to help curb the binge-drinking culture and do my bit towards lifting 250,000 children out of poverty.

And although I only drive a people carrier out of necessity in order for me to be able to take my growing family away for weekends along with all their assorted clobber, I think it's only right that people like me should pay more to alleviate the effects of our environmental pollution.

That said, it was undoubtedly the most politically unexciting Budget since 1997, and some papers may well not even lead on it tomorrow. Maybe that's the government's intention though.

I liked James Forsyth's take on it at Spectator Coffee House. "I suspect that the government will be quite pleased if this Budget is nothing more than a one day story.....Darling must be hoping that by hopping on the Mail’s ban the bag bandwagon, he has guaranteed himself favourable coverage in at least one paper."

I have some sympathy for Mr Darling in that Gordon Brown really "stole" this Budget last year, by pre-announcing the 2p cut in income tax.

That said, had Brown not announced this a year ago, it is a fairly moot point whether it would have happened at all, as it's hardly now the time for big tax reductions amid all the "global financial turbulence."

Short memories

According to a poll carried out on Iain Dales' Diary, Gordon Brown is the worst Labour Chancellor ever, with 44pc of the vote compared to just 13pc for Jim Callaghan, who devalued the pound in 1967. Even allowing for the fact that many readers of Iain's blog wouldn't have been born then, some historical perspective is called for, methinks.

Norman Lamont, meanwhile, rates as the worst Tory holder of the post, with 38pc compared to 23pc for Anthony Barber. It is unclear how many people voted for David Derrick Heathcoat-Amory.

Iain also asked his readers who should be Chancellor in the "next Conservative Government." Without necessarily conceding that this is anything more than a purely hypothetical question, I voted for Vincent Cable, as he is head and shoulders over anyone else David Cameron could choose.

What price loyalty?

Iain Dale reports that the former Lib Dem candidate for Hull East in 2005 has joined the Tories, bringing the total number of such defections since the last election to seven.

People are entitled to change their minds, of course, but what I find hard to believe is that political parties so regularly display such lamentable judgement in selecting parliamentary candidates whose loyalty to their cause is so evidently skin-deep. That the Lib Dems managed to be hoodwinked seven times in this way when selecting its 2005 slate speaks volumes.

There are thousands of loyal footsoldiers out there who support the same party for decades and never even get asked to stand for their local school governing body, yet these shallow, opportunistic shysters manage to get themselves selected to stand for Parliament even though their only loyalty is to their own careers.

Am I the only person who feels this way when I read of these tales of treachery?

Prophetic witness

At a time when one wing of the Church of England spends most of its time banging on about homosexuality while the other advocates the introduction of Sharia Law in the UK, I was pleased to discover that Lambeth Palace has launched a campaign to help people avoid excessive levels of personal debt and to emphasise that the Christian faith encourages a philosophy of "enough is enough", rather than seeking ever-increasing wealth.

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear from the Church in response to those who claim that the teachings of Jesus no longer have any relevance to modern life.

As Dr John Preston, the Church of England’s Resources and Stewardship Officer, and co-author of Matter of Life and Debt resources, said: “It is right for the Church of England to speak out on the issue of consumer debt, as money, wealth and possessions are mentioned in the Bible more than 2,400 times."

He might have added (so I will) that that is about 100 times more often than homosexuality.

Talking Balls

One of the most entertaining blog threads I have read over the past day or two arose from this post on Political Betting in which Mike Smithson posits the idea of Ed Balls as the next leader of the Labour Party. By the time it came to my attention, there were already 200-odd comments on the thread, so I thought I would give my thoughts here instead.

Part of what makes PB.com one of the few truly great UK blogs is Mike's habit of posing questions about unlikely political outcomes. Recent examples have included: What would happen if John McCain died before the Republican Convention, and could Al Gore yet emerge as the Democratic candidate if their August convention is deadlocked.

Although these are the kind of long-odds scenarios which fascinate betting types, they are not serious political questions. For the Democrats to turn to a loser like Gore when it has two potential winners in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would be a bit like the FA being unable to decide between Capello and Mourinho for England manager, and turning to Kevin Keegan instead.

The idea of Ed Balls as Prime Minister almost falls into the same category. To my mind, and that of many other observers both inside and outside the Labour Party, it is a manifest absurdity. But it is nevertheless apparent - not least from this Sunday Telegraph piece, that it is an idea to which some very influential people are giving serious consideration.

The theory is predicated on Gordon Brown winning the next election, promoting Balls to Chancellor, and building him up as the natural and obvious successor before handing over at some point in the next Parliament. The Telegraph piece suggests the current "obvious successor," David Miliband, does not really want the job, although I don't think that can necessarily be deduced from his failure to challenge Gordon last year.

Why, then, do I take the view that Balls is inconceivable as Labour leader and Prime Minister? Well, it's certainly nothing personal. Whenever I dealt with Ed Balls in my Lobby days - usually when he was doing the post-Budget briefing from the Press Gallery - he was no less courteous or helpful to me than any other lobby hack.

It's more an issue that I - and others - have with his extremely aggressive personal style. While this was a useful if occasionally counter-productive trait for a spin doctor seeking to ensure his master's key message got across, it always struck me as ill-befitting a frontline political role, and it does not surprise me in the least that Balls's TV appearances have invariably been so catastrophic.

The fact that Balls is being seriously spoken of as a potential Prime Minister is probably indicative of the lack of real talent in the much-vaunted younger generation of Cabinet ministers. They are all either too geeky (the Milibands), too lightweight (Purnell, Burnham) or, in the case of Balls and Douglas Alexander, much better cast as backroom boys.

The one exception, and the one current member of the Cabinet who, in my view, has both the intellect and the emotional intelligence to be a successful political leader in the 21st century is Balls' wife, Yvette Cooper, although I also think there are two more outside the current Cabinet in Jon Cruddas and Alan Milburn.

So far as Cooper is concerned, the question to my mind is not whether she could do the job, but whether her overweeningly arrogant and ambitious other half will let her.

Justice for Scarlett

I was pleased to read this morning that the Goa Police now appear to have accepted that their original finding that 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling died from drowning despite having no water in her lungs was wrong and that she was in fact brutally raped and murdered - although it remains to be seen whether they have yet got their man.

I never met Scarlett, but her father, uncles and grandmother lived in the house next door to us when I was growing up and although it is many years since I have seen any of them, the family is very much in my thoughts at the moment.

Europe debate not played out yet

In my Preview of 2008 at the end of December, the three things I confidently predicted would not happen this year were that there would not be a general election, that the Lib Dems would not changed their leader again, and that there would not be a referendum on the EU Treaty.

And indeed there will not be. Even if the Lib Dems had joined the Tories in the voting lobbies on Wednesday night, it still would not have been enough to force the government to hold a national vote on the issue without a much larger Labour rebellion.

But while that particular issue now seems to be done and dusted, there are other circumstances which could see the question of Britain's relationship with Europe back in the domestic political spotlight - as I argue in today's Journal column.

The first is if Tony Blair takes the EU presidency and every subsequent clash between Britain and Brussels becomes viewed through the prism of the Blair-Brown feud. It would be pure political soap opera, and the press would have an absolute field day with it.

More seriously, though, if concern about economic migration to Britain from within the EU continues to rise, it could conceivably create the conditions where withdrawal from the Union once again becomes a politically viable option.

My own view on this - though it goes against the grain of my views on both Europe and immigration generally - is that the conflict between continued unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe and our finite spatial resources will not easily be reconciled.

How did it feel?

Today is the 25th anniversary of the release of arguably the most influential record of all time, New Order's Blue Monday - known to Factory Records afiocionados simply as FAC73.

How did it feel for me when I first heard this, while sat in the 2nd floor student union bar at UCL in the spring of '83 while its pulsating bass and barely comprehensible lyrics rang out in the disco area next door? The honest answer is, absolutely terrified.

This was a record so unbearably trendy, so absolutely rooted in the dance culture that had at that time been colonised by the college's fashionable people, that it seemed to me to denote a world I could never enter. It took me a while before I overcame this instinctive aversion and added it to my record collection.

Feel free to add your own memories of the first time you heard Blue Monday in the comments. You might even care to speculate on whether the lyrics are about the death of Ian Curtis, the after-effects of cocaine, or the Falklands War, as this is something I've still not managed to work out.

Small earthquake, no-one injured

For me, the famous newspaper headline about sums up the state of the Lib Dems today following last night's rebellion over Europe. An awful lot of nonsense is being talked about Nick Clegg following the loss of three of his shadow spokesmen over the issue, but to my mind, it will do him no lasting damage and could even be seen as having strengthened the party's frontbench line-up.

I say "loss" of three spokesmen, but they are really no great loss to be honest. Justice spokesman David Heath, the most senior of the trio, is well-liked in the party, and has been a good servant to successive Lib Dem leaders, but he has hardly been setting the Thames on fire of late and giving his job to Chris Huhne has allowed Clegg to beef-up the portfolio of one of his party's few proven operators - an astute piece of political management if you ask me.

The resignations have also allowed Clegg to cut the size of his bloated Shadow Cabinet - the only reason it was the size it was being the fact that he inherited so much deadwood from Ming. This should really have been done three months ago when Clegg took over but better late than never.

The Tories, and some Lib Dem bloggers, are trying to turn this into some sort of leadership crisis for Clegg, with Huhne seemingly poised to take over the top job at last, but the idea that the party would change its leader a third time in as many years is so utterly fanciful as to be utter bollocks. Here's what I have written on Iain Dale.

At long last....

Just when you thought that the Brown Government was going to do absolutely nothing to address the English Question...up pops today's Telegraph with the revelation that that Prime Minister has ordered a review of the infamous Barnett Formula.

The figures on how the formula awards Scotland an extra £1,500 per head in public spending per year speak for themselves, but a good practical example of how this operates was recently uncovered by the Newcastle Journal which revealed that the £16bn Crossrail project would automatically mean an additional £1.6bn for Scotland - irrespective of whether it needed it.

I have to confess I had given up hope of anything being done about it this side of the general election. In a Journal Column last November, I argued that Labour's real opportunity to reform the formula came in 1999/2000 when the party was riding high politically and public expenditure as a whole was rising so sharply that the adjustment could effectively have been concealed. Now, the politics of the situation have changed utterly, with the SNP now very much in the ascendant, while public spending is no longer rising anything like as fast.

I can only imagine that Mr Brown has either become convinced that the formula is wrong in principle - a view that would be hard to reconcile with his treatment of the issue while at the Treasury - or that he has concluded that the rising level of English discontent over the issue outweighs the obvious political risks from north of the border.

March 6 update: There appears to be some doubt over whether the Telegraph story is actually true, but if so I wouldn't blame the newspaper for that. The Government has been speaking with a forked tongue over this issue for at least a decade. My hunch, for what it's worth, is that while there may be no changes planned to the BF as yet, something is rumbling in the Whitehall undergrowth.

Seven good things in life

I love being tagged by the meme, and Kate - her of the Home Blog fame - has ensnared me with this one, so here goes:

Blogging. Well, obviously.

My family, and any time I get to spend with them.

Saturday evenings spent in the kitchen, concocting a curry or a Chinese over a glass of wine.

Sunday afternoons spent in the garden, planting things and lighting bonfires.

Jack and Sarah, Gavin and Stacey, and all sweet love stories.

Prefab Sprout.

Political idealism - an increasingly rare and precious commodity.

I'm going to tag some of the best up-and-coming new(ish) blogs to be found on my blogroll, namely:

Barnacle Bill, Unenlightened Commentary, Party Political Animal, A blog from the backroom, and Letters from a Tory

Family trees

Readers may recall that a couple of weeks back I published a post calling for February 29 to be made a public holiday, in response to an initiative by the Big Green Switch website to encourage people to use the day to "do something green."

My employers, who also publish the BGS, kindly agreed to support that initiative and gave everyone in the office a couple of hours off on Friday afternoon to carry out a series of green pledges ranging from switching to low-energy lightbulbs to planting trees.

It gave me an opportunity to plant out two trees in our new garden - the old one, which was basically a paved area, didn't really allow for this - both of which have a special significance for me.

The first is a willow tree originally purchased on Good Friday, 2006. We had gone to our local garden centre that day to stock up on new plants, intending to spend a leisurely Easter Weekend in the garden. Things didn't turn out that way though, and ever since I have wanted to plant the tree as a memorial.

The second tree, pictured above, is a horse chestnut grown accidentally from a conker in the compost heap in the back garden of my old family home in the 1990s. Some of my happiest times were spent there gardening with my mum before the garden got too much for her, and it's nice to have the tree as a reminder of those days.

Many other people took up the Big Green Switch challenge, and the results can be seen here. You'll find me in that slideshow somewhere....

Cameron and Clegg v the system

My Saturday column in today's Newcastle Journal takes as its theme the current controversy over MPs expenses and the conduct of House of Commons business generally and the way in which both David Cameron and Nick Clegg have both sought to exploit that.

As the more perceptive observers of Tory politics have already noted, Mr Cameron is clearly seeking to position himself in the vanguard of a growing public desire for the modernisation of our political institutions. So, too, in his different way, is Mr Clegg.

In this sense they are both "running against Westminster" in the same way that Barack Obama and to a lesser extent John McCain are running against their own party establishments.

It's not good news for Gordon Brown, who fluffed the opportunity to seize the reform mantle last summer by bringing forward a rather timid constitutional reform package, long before the "dodgy donations" affair put paid to his ambitions to restore trust in British politics.

Woss a waste of money

I frequently find Jonathan Ross's Friday night chatshow required viewing, but as a BBC licence-payer who presumably contributes to Wossie's huge £18m salary, last night's dreadful interview with Ashes to Ashes star Keeley Hawes left me feeling distinctly shortchanged.

Hawes is one of the most talented young actresses this country posesses yet Ross chose to treat her with utter disdain. I don't blame Ross for the fact that he clearly fancies the arse off her - so do half the men in Britain between the ages of 30 and 45 as far I can work out - but as a professional interviewer, he perhaps could have made it a little less obvious.

The sum total of his interview was basically as follows: Do you and Philip Glenister end up getting it on in Ashes to Ashes, what was that "lesbo thing" you were in a few years ago (it was Tipping the Velvet), and do you feel any differently about enacting lesbian sex scenes as straight sex scenes - a crass question since Hawes is on the record as saying she is bisexual.

"We learned absolutely nothing about her," was my wife's comment afterwards. What we did learn was that Jonathan Ross, apart from being an overpaid oaf, clearly gets off a bit on the girl-on-girl stuff.

Harry leaves with his head held high

I have always been ambivalent about the war in Afghanistan, but I have nothing but respect for Prince Harry following his tour of duty there and I am glad he was able to pursue his wish to serve his country in this way even for so short a period.

As for the person who saw fit to release this story and put British soldiers' lives at risk - as well as destroying a young man's dream - I have little more to add to what I have already said here.

The Next Speaker

Earlier this week I argued that while Michael Martin should certainly not be forced out of office in a way that would undermine the independence of the Speakership, he should start to make plans to leave his post before rather than after the next General Election. Realistically, this means within the next 12 months, as it is still quite feasible that Gordon will decide to go to the country in May next year.

A poll carried out on Iain Dale earlier this week showed long-serving (long-suffering?) deputy Sir Alan Haselhurst as the most popular choice to replace him. It will be interesting to see if my own poll produces a similar result, given this blog's more liberal-left readership.

Portillo finds his niche

Like Iain Dale I thought last night's BBC4 documentary by Michael Portillo on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher was a riveting watch. The degree of self-awareness displayed by Portillo, Michael Howard and William Hague in particular as they picked over the bones of the Tories' wilderness years was fascinating.

Portillo seemed to have been very affected by the fact that his defeat in Enfield Southgate was voted the 3rd most popular TV moment ever. Was this, I wonder, when he began to lose his appetite for leadership, and ultimately for politics in general? If so I can't really blame him - we all want to be loved after all - and he's clearly more at home in front of the cameras.

Hague once again admitted that he should not have contested the leadership in 1997 and waited until 2001 instead, something that was pointed out to him at the time by yours truly along with a number of others. It was a great tragedy for the Tories that Ken Clarke was not leader in that Parliament. He would have taken the shine off Tony Blair in no time.

Howard's admission that he knew the party had to modernise, but that he knew he was the wrong person to modernise it, was the most intriguing of all. Howard is a smart guy, but surely he would have had the self-knowledge to realise BEFORE 2003 that he was personally ill-equipped for the task of modernisation - in which case you wonder why he took on the leadership at all?

The point of the programme was to examine the continuing legacy of Margaret Thatcher to the Tories. In crude terms, it was to help destroy the premiership of John Major, then ensure that the party elected the wrong leaders in both 1997 and 2001, thereby condemning them to their two heaviest defeats in recent history.

Despite all she achieved for her party as Prime Minister, this baleful contribution after leaving office always has to be weighed in the balance.

I want John, you want Barack

Just occasionally, I disagree with my own readers. The US presidential race is one such instance.

I'm with McCain. You voted:

Barack Obama 42%
John McCain 25%
Hillary Clinton 20%
Mitt Romney 3%
Mike Huckabee 2%
None of these 8%

Why Gorbals Mick must stay - for now

I last wrote about Mr Speaker Martin on this blog in November 2006, after he had blocked David Cameron from asking pointless questions about who Tony Blair would be endorsing in the Labour leadership election.

On that occasion, I wrote that while I sympathised with Martin as a victim of the snobocracy which seeks to belittle anyone from a working-class background who rises above his station, the media hostility towards him was entirely explicable in view of his legendary acts of pettiness towards our profession in the past.

Furthermore, the cirumstances of his election in 2000 showed the Labour Party at its very worst and, like much else that happened in the party between 1994 and 2007, was a direct consequence of the Blair-Brown feud.

Blair stumbled into it by appearing to support the election of a Lib Dem speaker - his favoured candidate was in fact Ming Campbell. It provoked a backlash from backbench Labour MPs which was then gleefully stoked-up by the Brownites in order to deliver a bloody nose to Mr Tony.

One MP, a very close ally of the then Chancellor, said to me afterwards: "It was a chance for us working-class boys to put one over on the public schooboys." That was basically code for: "It was a chance for Brown to put one over on Blair."

Had No 10 not made the mistake of seeking to involve itself in an election that has always been a jealously-guarded prerogative of MPs, it is doubtful in my view that Martin would ever have been elected.

However, while I don't think the election of Mr Speaker Martin was exactly the best days' work the House of Commons ever did, the important thing about it was that it was a House of Commons decision, rather than one imposed by the executive.

And that is what is troubling me about the current wave of demands for the Speaker to go - that if he were to accede to them, it would set an extraordinarily bad precedent over one of the few offices in our constitution which is genuinely independent of the government.

If such a precedent were to be established, a future government could use that precedent to get rid of a Speaker it didn't like. That in turn would remove one of the last bastions of House of Commons independence.

For this reason, and this reason alone, I support Michael Martin's right to retire at a time of his own choosing. Although I also happen to think he should choose to go, as Betty Boothroyd did in 2000, before rather than after the next general election.

Not Black Wednesday yet

This weekend's column in the Newcastle Journal naturally focuses on the political fallout thus far from the Northern Rock nationalisation, announced a week ago today.

The full version is on Behind the Lines as usual but the digested read is:

Labour did the right thing nationalising the bank, although, driven by an irrational fear of the n-word, they took slightly too long to get there.

The Tories' response to the crisis has been confused from the start, as a result of which the party has failed to articulate a credible alternative.

The public's reaction thus far demonstrates that this has not been Labour's Black Wednesday, although there remain unanswered questions over Granite.

All in all, the whole episode ought to mark the end of our love affair with financial deregulation.

The Chairmen's Pint

Good to see some old lobby traditions have survived despite the demise of the old Press Bar. And congratulations to the two new chairmen Colin Brown and Ben Brogan - a formidable duo if ever there was one.

The QT review

Last night's Question Time from Newcastle was understandably devoted to Northern Rock. Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of it was the reaction of the audience. Even allowing for the fact that this is a Labour-supporting area, there was no great outpouring of anger against the Government, confirming me in my view that this is not currently being seen by the public as "Labour's Black Wednesday."

This week has been Vince Cable's moment of triumph after advocating nationalisation from the start, but he was surprisingly understated last night. Maybe this is what makes him such an effective operator. He also told it like it is, risking the wrath of the North-East audience saying "it is very clear that the Bank has to be shrunk."

By contrast, Derek Simpson, general secretary of Unite, played to the gallery and spoke up for the workers. It was significant, though, that he got the biggest cheers of the evening not for lambasting the government, but for saying that he "has trouble understanding Conservative policies."

That was not necessarily the fault of Tory panellist Alan Duncan, the shadow minister for Tyneside, but like David Cameron and George Osborne earlier in the week, he failed to articulate a plausible alternative policy, nor explain which of the six different policies espoused by the Tories since last autumn was curently in favour.

Spectator Political Editor Fraser Nelson made the point that Gordon Brown's regulatory framework had been at fault for allowing the situation at NR to get out of control in the first place, but without pointing out that the Tories have previously favoured even lighter regulation. I rate Fraser pretty highly as an operator but I thought this was a rather careless omission.

Ruth Kelly, for the government, was impressive in a quietly authoritative sort of way. Apart from one brief foray into Ed Balls-style spouting of economic bullet-points (someone should tell Labour that the political dividend from Bank of England independence has long since been used up) she seemed to be on her home ground talking about economic matters. Could she yet be the first female Chancellor?

Should you ever go back?

The list of prominent Tory casualties at the 1997 general election has become the stuff of political legend, culminating of course in the shock defeat of leader-in-waiting Michael Portillo which irrevocably changed the course of Conservative politics.

One of the less well-known Tory MPs to lose their seats, however, was Phillip Oppenheim, who served as a minister in the department of trade and industry and was also one of Chancellor Ken Clarke's closest parliamentary allies.

Phillip and I go back a fairly long way. From 1983-97 he was MP for the Derbyshire seat of Amber Valley where I live, and our paths crossed several times when I was a reporter on the Derby Evening Telegraph in the late 80s and early 90s.

Later, after I "went into the Lobby" we met up again and he invited me to a couple of legendary summer parties at his basement flat in Westminster. It was a nice gesture as by then I was working for the South Wales Echo and could not have been of any conceivable use to him in his career.

Since Phillip lost his seat and went off to run a Cuban cocktail bar, I have often wondered whether he would return to politics. This post, on his new blog, Party Political Animal seems to give a pretty unequivocal answer.

The post, published in response to the Derek Conway affair, questions what "1997 retreads" such as Conway and Andrew Mitchell achieved by going back into Parliament and earned him this characteristically charming rebuke from Mitchell.

On the point at issue, I happen to think Phillip is wrong. The likes of Conway, Mitchell and Greg Knight were all in their mid-to-late 40s when they lost their seats in '97, which is a bit young in my view to be thinking of abandoning your political career.

He is right to point out that the "retreads" have achieved little since returning in 2001 - but it is scarcely their fault that their party rendered itself so unelectable that it was unable to get back into power.

As far as his own case is concerned, Oppenheim was certainly young enough to have come back and made a big contrubution and, as one of the more socially liberal Tories, I think he probably would have been more comfortable on today's Tory frontbench than the one of ten years ago.

That said, such is the intensity of life at Westminster that, once you've been away, you do tend to get a bit of a feeling of "been there and done that" about the place. Indeed, I feel much the same way about the Lobby.

Make February 29 a public holiday

Various campaigns have recently drawn my attention to the fact that every four years, the British workforce do an extra day's work without pay. It's called February 29.

To its great credit, the National Trust is viewing this as an opportunity to raise awareness of environmental issues, and has given all its employees the day off on Friday week to do something green.

The excellent Big Green Switch website, which seeks to encourage people to find simple, practical ways to reduce their carbon footprint, is also backing the move, and lists a number of things which people can do to help ranging from cancelling their junk mail to planting a tree.

Obviously part of the logic of the NT's move is to save on the carbon emissions generated by people driving into work, which if replicated across the UK workforce, would be considerable.

I agree wholeheartedly with all this both as a means of helping the environment and because there are currently far too few public holidays in this country. A holiday devoted to tackling climate change - even it is one only every four years - would help on both counts.

Regular blog readers will know I have already called for St George's Day to be made a national holiday, along with January 2 (the Scots get this already) and the Queen's Official Birthday.

It's not because I'm a workshy slacker, it's because I think we live life at such a pace and intensity in this country now that we occasionally need to take a step back, and additional public holidays would provide an opportunity to do this.

It would also constitute a belated recognition by the government and the "business lobby" that we are all working much harder and longer hours as a nation, and against the backdrop of much greater job insecurity, than we did 20 or 30 years ago.

Was Neil Hamilton hard done by?

Following on from the previous post...a number of posters on Iain Dale's Diary today have posed the question whether the former Tory minister Neil Hamilton got a raw deal when the jury in the libel case arising from the cash-for-questions affair believed Mohammed al-Fayed's version of events rather than his.

Quite possibly so, in the sense that I doubt whether any jury would believe al-Fayed now. But if public preconceptions of the key protagonists did a play a part in deciding the original trial, Hamilton has only himself to blame.

For all I know, his experiences since 1997 may have made him a humbler man now, but throughout his time in the political frontline Hamilton appeared to revel in portraying himself as the sort of smug, arrogant, unpleasant Tory git who personified the "nasty party" during the Thatcher-Major years.

I had some experience of this during the early 1990s when I was a reporter on the South Wales Echo and attended the Welsh Press Awards. Hamilton, then a trade and industry minister, was the guest of honour, and began his after-dinner speech with some mildly amusing recollections of fighting election campaigns in the early 70s in various hopeless, Labour-dominated Valleys seats.

This was received with good humour, until Hamilton came to his punchline: "But we got our revenge on them later when we closed all their pits!" This bon mot, delivered to a Welsh audience at a time when Tower Colliery was threatened with closure, was predictably greeted by a stunned silence, followed by cries of "Shame!"
"Disgraceful!" and "Resign!"

I don't of course claim that this story proves Hamilton was necessarily guilty of all the charges which al-Fayed and the Guardian threw at him. But it does go part of the way to explaining why his fall, when it came, was so little lamented by the wider public.

But where the fuggin' hell was Gordon?

So The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles, Tony Blair, Robin Cook, Lady Sarah MacCorquodale, Sir Robert Fellowes, Paul Burrell, Sir Paul Condon, Sir John Stevens, Lord Mishcon, Rosa Monckton, Henri Paul, Trevor Rees and the two doctors at the Paris hospital who treated her were all involved in either the plot to kill Princess Diana or the subsequent cover-up.

Or so says Mohammed al-Fayed, who - let's try and be charitable - is clearly a man who is still in a deep state of grieving for his dead son.

But what struck me as interesting about al Fugger's long list of suspects is that he didn't include Gordon Brown among them.

Could it be that this is another one of Blair's many crimes that El Gordo successfully managed to extricate himself from? And more to the point, why isn't the entire Tory blogosphere demanding to know why the man they call "Macavity" wasn't there?

The least worst option

Not surprisingly, the Tories are trying to have it both ways over Northern Rock today. One the one hand, they criticise the nationalisation of the Rock as a "disaster for the taxpayer." On the other, they criticise Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling for spending six months arriving at that decision. The two don't actually add up.

The whole reason the Government has spent the last six months exploring every other conceivable option for the future of the stricken bank was precisely because they were desperate not to have to nationalise it. For this reason, I am inclined to believe Alistair Darling when he says that the deal represents the best value for the taxpayer. Because if it didn't, they sure as hell wouldn't have done it for any other reason.

Let's also dispose of the idea - championed by Guido Fawkes here and here - that this is primarily about saving North-East jobs. If that was the case, the government would presumably have nationalised Siemens and Fujitsu when they crashed with significant impact on the regional labour market in the late 1990s.

The reason they didn't, of course, was because Siemens and Fujitsu, although large regional employers, were not banks, and there was no risk that their collapse would cause instability to spread throughout the country's entire financial system, which is the reason Messrs Brown and Darling have acted as they have done in relation to Northern Rock.

In fact, after ploughing through half a dozen Tory blogs claiming this is a worse political catastrophe than Black Wednesday, the death of Dr Kelly, and cash-for-honours rolled into one, I was somewhat relieved this afternoon to come across a "counter-intuitive" post from Hopi Sen in which he makes the following prediciton:

Northern Rock will end up making the Government money and be sold off at a significant profit (or have made a net contribution to public sector finances) before the next election.

The point is, there is actually just as much chance of this being right as the Tories' prophecies of doom. The answer is, we don't know, and we probably won't know for several years yet.

The Tories will doubtless go on claiming that this shows Labour has lost its reputation for economic competence, that Brown is a dud, that Darling should be sacked and so on. It may mean all of that, but it could also turn out to be the most brilliant piece of financial management in recent political history.

Darling's U-turns show Labour's lack of self-belief

It's been open season on Alistair Darling at Westminster this week and my Saturday Column published today duly focuses on the Chancellor's performance.

Like Polly Toynbee, I am dismayed by the U-turns on capital gains tax and the taxation of non-domiciles, which provide further proof as it it were needed that this government is adrift without a philosophical anchor.

"As things stand, the Tories will be going into the next election pledged to tax “non-doms” at five times the rate now proposed by Labour – although there has to be a question mark over whether their plans are any more workable than Mr Darling’s.

"Once again, it poses the question whether voters of a leftish inclination are now better off supporting a right-wing party that leans to the left over a centrist one that leans increasingly to the right....what this week’s moves by Mr Darling really demonstrate is a catastrophic loss of confidence by the government in their own values of social justice and fairness."

The quintessence of Englishness

The Guardian had an interesting piece today in which it asked a series of musicians to name the songs that, for them, define Englishness. It struck a chord with me as a lot of my own favourite songs and bands are what I would describe as quintessentially English - indeed it is one of the main reasons I like them.

There are some bands - The Smiths, Everything but the Girl, Gabriel-era Genesis - whose entire output to me evokes these shores. Going further back, you could say the same about much of what the Beatles did during their mid-60s psychedelic phase, as well as almost everything that the Kinks or The Who ever released.

Then there are some bands who are distinctively regional English. New Order, Joy Division and Pulp are clearly the sound of the industrial north, St Etienne will always remind me of Brighton, for some reason, and The Jam will forever be the sound of suburban London.

Here, then, are my Top 30 English Tunes that really couldn't have come from anywhere else. The list contains album tracks as well as singles and I've deliberately restricted myself to one per artist as Morrissey and Marr and Hook and Sumner would rather dominate the list otherwise. I'd be particularly interested to hear in the comments from anyone who also loves numbers 14 and 17, forgotten classics both.

1 Waterloo Sunset Kinks
2 Who Do You Think You Are St Etienne
3 Can't Be Sure The Sundays
4 English Rose The Jam
5 Solsbury Hill Peter Gabriel
6 William It Was Really Nothing The Smiths
7 Blood on the Rooftops Genesis
8 Subculture New Order
9 Oxford Street Everything But The Girl
10 Strawberry Fields Forever Beatles

11 A New England Kirsty McColl
12 The Day I See You Again Dubstar
13 Slimcea Girl Mono
14 Number Four St James' Square Mr Martini
15 When the Cows Come Home Prefab Sprout
16 My Name is Jack Manfred Mann
17 Bloomsbury Blue Ruby Blue
18 Staying Out for the Summer Dodgy
19 See Emily Play Pink Floyd
20 The Mayor of Simpleton XTC

21 Louise Human League
22 Razzmatazz Pulp
23 West End Girls Pet Shop Boys
24 I Can See for Miles The Who
25 Wuthering Heights Kate Bush
26 Have Fun The Beautiful South
27 Crazy Man Michael Fairport Convention
28 Don't Look Back in Anger Oasis
29 Castles in the Air Colourfield
30 Fool's Overture Supertramp

Should China have been given the Olympics?

-----Question Time Review----

Steven Spielberg certainly seems to have concentrated minds. My wife and I have long been expressing our incredulity that China could have been awarded the Olympic Games, but until now it has seemed like we were talking only to eachother. Tonight's BBC Question Time demonstrated otherwise.

The programme was dominated by Melanie Phillips - scarcely surprising as she was the biggest brain as well as the biggest mouth on view. It's a sign of age, I suppose, but I find myself agreeing with her on more and more issues these days, not least on her view that awarding the Games to Beijing was a disgrace, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury is not fit for office. The government representative, Housing Minister Caroline Flint may be better-looking than Phillips, but her leaden asnwers to most of the questions showed she's an intellectual pygmy by comparison. In fact the opposition spokesman, Baroness Warsi, made a far better fist of the "constructive engagement" argument in relation to the Chinese, though she seemed to have little to say for the remainder of the programme.

Of the other panellists, Clive James was amusing in a desultory sort of way, though it was scarcely the cutting-edge humour we might have expected from him a decade ago, and Stephen Lowe, Bishop of Hulme, was clearly there only to put the case for Dr Williams - not the most straghtforward of tasks.

Having given it a fair amount of thought, I just don't buy Williams' argument that he has been misrepresented by the media. As Phillips rightly pointed out, his original comments amounted, in terms, to the advocacy of a parallel system of law to which Moslems could choose to give their loyalty. I have long believed Rowan Williams to be too politically naive to lead the Church of England effectively, but this was not mere naivety, it was wrongheadedness. It's time to bring on Sentamu.

Boulton's Babes and Linford's Lovelies

Pleased to see that Sky Pol Ed Adam Boulton has once again ignored the PC brigade and published his list of the top ten most fanciable MPs for the second Valentine's Day running.

With due deference to the poster who described last year's list as "sexist claptrap" which this blog should be "above," I shall do likewise (2007 figures in brackets.)

1 Julia Goldsworthy (3)
2 Caroline Flint (2)*
3 Yvette Cooper (1)
4 Justine Greening (7)
5 Alison Seabeck (8)
6 Celia Barlow (4)
7 Claire Ward (5)
8 Helen Southworth (6)
9 Lynne Featherstone (9)
10 Blunkett's Dog (New Entry)

* Judge for yourself on Question Time tonight.

Was entering WW1 the biggest mistake in British history?

Last week The Times invited readers to nominate the biggest mistakes in history. Henry VIII's decision to break with Rome, Margaret Thatcher's signing of the Single European Act, and entering WW1 all figured quite prominently.

But was WW1 quite the mistake it often seems? Here's what I wrote in response to a similar point on the ever-thought-provoking Kate's Home Blog.

Let's just look at what would have happened had the conflict still taken place but with Britain standing on the sidelines. The war would effectively then have been between Imperial Germany/Austria-Hungary on the one side and Russia/France on the other.

In all likelihood, Imperial Germany would have won, which would have meant it controlled virtually the whole of continental Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Arals. With Russia defeated, there would probably still have been a Russian revolution, but the resulting Russian republic would have been very much a client state of the dominant European superpower, Germany.

The really intriguing counterfactual point about a German victory in WW1 is that the Hohenzollern dynasty would have continued, and Adolf Hitler would in all likelihood have remained an impoverished painter.

So by entering the war, winning it, and giving the Germans a thirst for revenge, we ended up with Hitler. By not entering, we would have ended up with a German superpower controlling the whole of Europe. Take your pick...

I think what this demonstrates is that quantifying whether something is a "mistake" or not is very hard. History tends to have a Yin and Yang about it, and sometimes apparently "bad" things have unexpectedly "good" consequences.

A Christian would say that God ultimately redeems everything, or in the words of an old worship song "he turns our weaknesses into his opportunities."

It's not in fact very Christian, but I would probably have to say that the biggest mistake in recent history was the Clinton administration's failure to take out Osama bin Laden when they had the chance in the mid-90s. Sadly, they were distracted by Kenneth Starr and the Lewinsky scandal.

Closer to home, here are half a dozen things which I wish recent British governments had done differently, the consequences of which have been pretty baleful for all concerned, and which continue to be felt today.

1. Introduced the Barnett Formula (Labour, 1978)

2. Paved the way for Robert Mugabe to take over Zimbabwe (Tories, 1980)

3. Allowed Rupert Murdoch to buy The Times and the Sunday Times (Tories, 1981)

4. Privatised the railways (Tories, 1996)

5. Chosen Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury ahead of Michael Nazir-Ali (Labour, 2002)*

6. Joined the invasion of Iraq (Labour, 2003)

* For the benefit of those who have asked me for my take on the Archbish.

Curse of Petsy strikes Charles Clarke

Petronella Wyatt is well-known in political journalism circles for an ability to put the black spot on the careers of interviewees. She seems to have an uncanny ability to get people to say or do things which are totallty indiscreet - a valuable quality for a journalist, but a dangerous one for politicians.

Perhaps the most famous example was Janet Anderson, a rising New Labour star until she unwisely agreed to be interviwed by Wyatt shortly before the 1997 election. During the course of the interview, Anderson revealed that there would be "more sex under a Labour Government," and of course her career never quite recovered.

Now Charles Clarke has become the latest victim of the Curse of Petsy with a spectacularly ill-judged interview in the Daily Mail which has only served to provide plenty more ammunition about Gordon Brown for Labour's opponents, with Iain Dale suggesting CCHQ should thank Clarke "for doing our dirty work for us."

I can only imagine this outpouring of bile was occasioned by Gordon's failure to restore Clarke to the Cabinet in the enforced reshuffle following Peter Hain's resignation. As the Sunday Tel's Paddy Hennessy reveals here, he certainly won't be coming back now.