Whither the Lobby?

Guido Fawkes and myself are debating the future of the Lobby System over at the Press Gazette's excellent Discuss Journalism site today.

Basically, Guido thinks it's undemocratic and elitist and should be abolished, while I think that abolishing it would lead to its replacement by something even more elitist and undemocratic. Further contributions, either on this site or the Press Gazette's, are of course very welcome.

Brown to axe Blair's "city regions" project?

A few weeks back, I wrote in the North West Enquirer, Newcastle Journal and elsewhere about Ruth Kelly's plans to roll-out the "London model" of devolution to cities like Manchester and Newcastle as the latest move in the Government's regional agenda.

According to old regional lobby mucker Jon Walker in yesterday's Birmingham Post, however, this will be one of the first things to go once Gordy gets his hands on the levers of power. Interesting.

Fame at last for the world's greatest Lily Allen fan

An old mate of mine from my London days now edits a blog called the Daily Growl which was plugging Lily Allen well before she became a mainstream media babe.

So it was great to see his efforts paying off with a plug in this Sunday's Observer Review section, which featured a full-page piece on the chart-topping singer, described by the NME as "the cool as fuck sound of summer 2006."

Incidentally the name Daily Growl is neither indicative of my friend's disposition nor of the contents of his blog. It comes from the name of the opening track of the 2002 Lambchop album Is a woman.

Prescott tells it like it is

Wny does the media hate John Prescott so? While Alastair Campbell talks his customary load of mendacious bollocks over Tony Blair's departure date, Prezza just tells it like it is.

A few weeks back, in my North West Enquirer column, I predicted that the leadership and deputy leadership issues would need to be settled before the end of Labour's conference in Manchester. It seems Mr Prescott now agrees.

Writing on the BBC website, Nick Assinder goes further, speculating that the conference could be the stage not just for an announcement about the leadership, but for a leadership election.

My latest assessment of the situation as the Parliamentary term drew to a close last week can be found on my latest podcast available via the this is sites or by subscription to iTunes.

Note: This post was supposed to go up yesterday but Blogger appears to be somewhat temperamental at the moment. Given by the unusually small number of new posts on other political blogs yesterday it seems I'm not the only one who had problems.....

Was Dr Kelly murdered?

Lib Dem MP Norman Baker - more use than the rest of the party's frontbench put together - thinks so.

Air travel: why Richard Chartres is right

Unlike Iain Dale and the RAC I agree with the Bishop of London when he says that frequent air travel is not really a responsible option for a Christian.

Indeed, I would say that when mainstream politics is ignoring a particular issue of this nature, the Church has even more of a duty to speak out.

Bishop Chartres (who should have got Canterbury in my view) used the word "sin" which is a word always guaranteed to get the media's goat, but "sin" in this context means no more than mankind falling short of God's ideal.

Given that we are supposed to be responsible stewards of His creation, filling the atmosphere with kerasine fumes seems to me to be falling very far short of it.