The Welsh and Irish Lions

A good weekend's rugby-watching is practically the only thing that makes this time of the year bearable, so it's great that the Six Nations is still one of the few sporting events available on terrestrial telly.

It's Lions year this year so after each Six Nations round I'll be posting regular updates on what, in my view, is likely to constitute the starting XV in South Africa this summer.

With Wales and Ireland storming to the top of the table, there would seem to be little scope for the inclusion of any English and Scotsmen in the line-up on current form, although I doubt if it will stay that way.

Here's my current selection.

15 Lee Byrne (Wales)
14 Leigh Halfpenny (Wales)
13 Jamie Roberts (Wales)
12 Brian O'Driscoll (Ireland)
11 Shane Williams (Wales)
10 Stephen Jones(Wales)
9 Mike Phillips (Wales)
8 Jamie Heaslip (Ireland)
7 David Wallace (Ireland)
6 Ryan Jones (Wales, Captain)
5 Alun Wyn Jones (Wales)
4 Paul O'Connell (Ireland)
3 John Hayes (Ireland)
2 Jerry Flannery (Ireland)
1 Garin Jenkins (Wales)

Still Ill

No column today, I'm afraid, as this damned viral thing that was bothering me last autumn seems to have flared up again. Sincere apologies all round.

State of politics is snow joke

Has inability to deal with a few inches of snow turned Britain into an international laughing stock? No, but there's plenty of other things which should have done. Here's today's Journal column.

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For those of us of a certain age, it has become an inevitable source of amusement that whenever a few inches of snow falls in Britain these days, the country's entire transport infrastructure invariably appears to grind to a halt.

The country that survived the Blitz and which was once a by-word for phlegm and indomitability now seemingly crumbles at the slightest onset of bad weather.

To some extent it's a reflection of environmental change, and the fact that winter snow has become such an increasing rarity in some parts of the UK that we are less and less prepared for how to deal with it.

It’s also a reflection of trends in modern society - for instance, the tendency of people to live further away from their places of work, and the consequent pressure this places on an already fragile transport system.

Few will ever forget the “wrong kind of snow” excuse trotted out by what was then known as British Rail the last time the country had a “snow event” as serious as this week’s.

Mayor of London Boris Johnson duly paid homage to it this week with another memorable bon mot: “It's the right kind of snow, but unfortunately it's the wrong kind of quantity."

But while it’s fair game to laugh and joke about this sort of thing, we probably ought to keep a sense of perspective.

There is probably a legitimate debate to be had about whether we could have been better prepared for this week’s events, but to argue, as some did, that this makes us the “laughing stock of Europe” is a trifle OTT.

Much of the blame for the failure to grit the roads will, as ever, fall on local councils, but in my experience, if local government is failing to do something, it’s invariably because central government has cut its budget.

Either way, my view for what it’s worth is that while we undoubtedly could have done some things differently, we shouldn’t spend too much time and energy holding a national inquest about it.

The bottom line is that the snowstorms provided most of us with an opportunity for some much needed chilling-out – in more ways than one.

Schoolkids who are being tested and assessed within an inch of their lives got a chance to go out and play – remember that? - while their mums and dads were able to spend some quality time with them for once instead of fretting over computer screens.

In any case, if we want to avoid being an international laughing stock, there are far more pressing things we should be addressing.

Take, for instance, the House of Lords. It is outrageous enough that there is still a part of our legislature which is chosen by patronage, and in a few cases by accident of birth, rather than by election as in most other civilised countries.

But if that were not enough to make us an international joke, four Labour peers were recently tape-recorded suggesting they could help with amending legislation in return for cash.

All four have denied any wrongdoing, but even if the ongoing inquiries result in a traditional British whitewash, it has scarcely improved the image of an already deeply flawed institution.

Inevitably, the allegations have led to renewed calls to ban convicted criminals from membership of the Upper House – but on the subject of international jokes, is it not even slightly laughable that this hasn’t been done already?

It is not just well-known convicts like Lord Jeffrey Archer and Lord Conrad Black whose continued entitlement to sit in the British legislature makes a mockery of our system of government.

One Labour peer, Lord Watson, was convicted by a Scottish court a few years back of wilful fire-raising after deliberately setting a pair of Edinburgh hotel curtains ablaze while drunk.

Since being freed on 23 May, 2006, he has attended the Lords on at least 102 occasions, and claimed £37,538 in attendance allowances.

Then of course there are those who, with monumental hypocrisy, continue to sit in the British Parliament while simultaneously refusing to pay tax to the British Treasury.

Last week, in a debate on reforms to both Houses of Parliament, the government put forward an amendment which would prevent so-called “non-doms” from sitting in the Upper House.

The move would potentially lead to the exclusion of major party donors on both sides of the chamber, including Tory Lord Ashcroft, and Lord Paul, a large funder of the Labour party.

It’s doubtless a welcome sign of the government’s determination to rebuild trust in politics, but once more, why is it even necessary in the first place?

And if the continued existence of the House of Lords isn’t enough cause for international mirth, how about our Prime Minister’s repeated boasts about his handling of the UK economy?

As I pointed out last week, Mr Brown’s claims to have left Britain better prepared for the economic downturn have received a belly-laugh not just from the public, but from the International Monetary Fund itself.

Then there’s the spectacle of seeing a British Foreign Secretary reduced to defending the decision of an American government to threaten refuse to share intelligence with us if allegations that a British resident was tortured were made public.

It is this kind of thing which causes cinema audiences to burst into spontaneous applause when fictional Prime Ministers make speeches about how bad the “special relationship” has become.

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of things we can be proud of in this country –but much of which we should be rightly ashamed as well.

Our inability to deal with a bit of snow, amusing though it may be, is not one of them.

Snowbound

A debt of honour

A few months' back, I ran into a former boss of mine at the Society of Editors' Conference in Bristol. After reminiscing for a few minutes about old times and old colleagues, he offered up the following interesting observation on my career: "You've worked for some pretty nasty people in your time, haven't you?"

He had a point, but thankfully, they've not all been like that, and it was a source of huge pleasure that today, 23 years after he gave me my start in journalism, it fell to me as publisher of HoldtheFrontPage to pen a parting tribute to my first editor, Jeremy Plews.

Jeremy is standing down as editor of the Mansfield Chad later this month after an amazing 36 years in charge. Although I hedged my bets somewhat in the story, I am quite sure he must be the longest-serving editor in the UK and quite possibly the longest-serving since WW2.

He told me with typical generosity that "the best aspect of the job over the years was being able to give a first break to so many youngsters, and the satisfaction gained from seeing many of them go on to success elsewhere." I feel genuinely privileged to have been one of those.

When I was plotting my route into journalism, I never expected to start my career in a place like Mansfield, in the bitter aftermath of the miners' strike and in the midst of the inexorable demise of the Nottinghamshire coal industry. But looking back, I'm bloody glad I did.

Quite apart from all the friends I made in that part of the world - two of whom are now godparents to my son - it was the best damned training I could possibly have wished for on the best damned weekly newspaper in the country. Thanks Jeremy.

A prophecy fulfilled

A month into the new year, the 2008 media narrative of the Second Brown Bounce now seems a very distant memory. Here's today's Journal column.

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Four weeks ago, in my annual preview of the political year ahead, I commented that the art of political forecasting was now becoming a good deal harder than predicting the outcomes of sporting contests.

My point was that the sheer unpredictability of the UK political scene during 2008 – the year of bank nationalisation and the Second Brown Bounce – made sports punditry a doddle by comparison.

But a month into the New Year, I seem to have proved myself wrong. The sporting prediction I made, that Chelsea would regain the premiership title, is already looking pretty threadbare.

By contrast, it seems I was spot on with my political forecasting – that the recession would get much, much worse – and that the political standing of Gordon Brown and Labour would again start to deteriorate.

It didn’t take long, did it? Once again, the Tories are now enjoying the kind of double-digit lead in the opinion polls that would see David Cameron on course for a sizeable Commons majority.

The mood in the country appears to have turned, perhaps decisively. An electorate which a few months back appeared to be impressed with Gordon Brown’s handling of the economic crisis now seems angry and looking around for someone to blame.

I myself noticed the atmosphere change around the back end of November, perhaps at the point at which Woolworths went into administration, to be followed by a series of other High Street names.

Up until then, it had been possible to believe that the crisis really was just about banks refusing to lend to eachother. Over the past two months, though, the impact in the “real economy” has finally been felt – with a vengeance.

Two weeks ago, it was 1,200 jobs lost at Nissan in Sunderland. This week it was 2,500 at steelmaker Corus. Once again the very survival of the UK’s manufacturing base is under threat.

And it’s not just manufacturing of course. It is very obvious to anyone working in a commercial environment that we are facing unprecedentedly difficult times - not least in the newspaper industry.

So the Prime Minister is once again back in a very bad place, and for the Cabinet, as well as for the rest of us, these are anxious days indeed.

As one of the more perceptive Westminster observers wrote this week: “Nerves are beginning to fray. Ministers watch the polls and the economy with equal fascination. The debate about the future of the party and its leadership is under way.”

And if the mood in the country has changed, so has the Prime Minister’s. Once again, the pressure seems to be starting to get to him.

The self-confident, swaggering Gordon of last autumn, when he was busy saving the world from economic catastrophe, has gone, and the old, anxious, workaholic Gordon has returned.

Some say that the possibility of a parliamentary defeat in the vote over the Heathrow third runway this week - a potentially serious blow but hardly terminal, if you’ll excuse the pun - had Mr Brown close to tears.

It seems it was less the issue itself, more the prospect of being seen to be losing his grip that was exercising the Prime Minister.

What has been particularly damaging for Mr Brown over the past month is that, increasingly, independent economic assessments of the UK’s position seem at odds with his own.

Since the start of the crisis, the Prime Minister’s defence has been twofold. Firstly, that it wasn’t my fault, guv. Secondly, that Britain was better placed to weather the coming storm than any other major economy.

The International Monetary Fund begs to differ, however, arguing this week that the slump’s impact will be worse in the coming year in Britain than in the US, Japan, Spain, Italy, France, Canada and Germany.

Even if they turn about to be wrong, it’s a gift to the opposition parties who will no doubt use it repeatedly to undermine the Prime Minister’s boasts about his management of the economy over the past 12 years.

And there is of course one boast in particular will haunt Mr Brown to the end of his days – the claim, repeated as recently as his 2007 Budget Speech, to have abolished “boom and bust.”

The Radio Four presenter Evan Davis gave a fairly good impersonation of his BBC colleague Jeremy Paxman when asking him about it on the Today Programme this week.

Whereas Paxman famously asked Michael Howard 14 times whether he had threatened to overrule the director of the prison service, Davis only managed to ask Brown seven times whether he now accepted that boom had indeed followed bust.

But the effect was the same – a politician pointlessly trying to dodge a journalist’s question when he has already damned himself out of his own, hubristic mouth.

In that New Year column, I made reference to the possibility that Mr Brown may not, in the end, lead his party into the next general election.

This might have seemed like a foolhardy thing to say at the time, given that the dominant 2008 media narrative had been of Mr Brown’s amazing comeback from the ranks of the political walking dead following the election-that-never-was debacle of autumn 2007.

But just as he never succeeded in abolishing boom and bust, I never seriously believed he had succeeded in abolishing the most fundamental law of politics – that governments who preside over economic catastrophe invariably end up facing electoral oblivion.

Now that this fundamental law is starting to reassert itself, it is only a matter of time before the plotting begins again.