Farewell to the Enquirer

Earlier this year, I was asked to write a weekly political column for the North-West Enquirer, a new weekly regional newspaper based in Manchester. It was a high quality product with which I am very proud to have been associated over the past six months.

Against the backdrop of long-term decline in the newspaper industry, it was a very brave experiment of founders Nick Jaspan and Bob Waterhouse to launch such a paper at this time. Some would say it was foolhardy, but I for one thought that developing a paper as a niche publication might just work in today's increasingly fragmented market.

Sadly, it didn't, and the paper was placed in administration yesterday afternoon after a refinancing package collapsed. The timing was particularly sad in view of the fact that next week's Labour Party Conference is in Manchester and offered great potential for the kind of serious regional-national coverage to which the paper aspired.

I had already written my column for this week, which both looks ahead to the conference and focuses on what seems to me to be the highly damaging issue for New Labour of proposed hospital closures. You can read it in full on my Companion Blog by clicking HERE.

In defence of Benedict

I hold no brief for the Roman Catholic Church. My general view of it is much the same as the bloke who wrote the script for Godfather III. But I do think Pope Benedict is being very unfairly, if somewhat predictably pilloried for his comments about Islam.

Don't get me wrong. If Benedict was primarily a political figure, a Head of Government or Head of any other State but the Vatican, then I would agree that he was under a duty to be inclusive and non-confrontational in his statements about people who held different religious beliefs. Or no beliefs at all for that matter.

But the role of the Pope is not - or should not be - to be a political leader or Head of State. It is to be the spiritual leader of hundreds of millions of Christians across the world.

And if the leader of the world's biggest Christian denomination cannot speak out against another religious faith which, by its very existence, denies the esssential truths of the Christian gospel, then who on earth can?

I have thought for some time now that we have been headed down a very dangerous road in our society, whereby lampooning Christians and Christianity is virtually de rigeur among the liberal elite but criticising any other faith - and in particular Islam - is almost on a par with racism.

Laws purportedly designed to promote "religious tolerance" are instead promoting a form of religious intolerance, whereby no-one is allowed to say anything about another religion, even if its beliefs are antithetical to one's own.

This will naturally militate against belief systems such as Christianity which make exclusive claims to validity, in favour of a syncretistic, New Age mush that holds that all religions are equally valid - and therefore equally meaningless.

I would not be in the least surprised if, in my lifetime, it became a criminal offence in this country to preach the authentic Christian gospel - that faith in Jesus Christ is the only way to God.

At the conclusion of her piece in today's Guardian, Madeleine Bunting bewails the fact that the Catholic Church is in danger of "failing the great challenge of how we forge new ways of accommodating difference in a crowded, mobile world," speculating that Pope Benedict has "another direction altogether in mind."

Too right he has, Madeleine. He is trying to take a stand against the relativism that is poisoning Western Culture and threatening to snuff out our religious freedoms. And about time too.

A musical interlude

Ever since I first heard them more than 20 years ago, I have been a huge fan of the massively underrated British band Prefab Sprout. Their main man, Paddy McAloon, is in my opinion the greatest songwriter these islands have produced since John Lennon and the relative lack of commercial success achieved by the band in its 1985-1990 heyday remains, to me, bewildering.

The same cannot be said of Massive Attack. They deservedly enjoyed huge commercial and critical success throughout the 90s and most informed observers rate their 1991 single, Unfinished Sympathy, as one of the greatest dance records of all time.

So it was partly in order to win a fresh audience for a forgotten Sprout classic, and partly as a bit of fun, that my friend David Gladwin and myself set about putting together a mash-up that brings together these two great bands.

The result, "Unfinished Jesse James Sympathy" by Massive Sprout can now be heard on the Prefab Sprout fansite by clicking HERE and scrolling down to the bottom of the Miscellaneous section.

The remix is credited to The Party, a musical outfit consisting of Dave and myself that has been dormant since a frenetic burst of activity in the summer of 1990, when we had the bright idea of mixing Bulgarian plainsong with dance beats. A year later, Enigma did the same thing and had a number one album.

I guess most of us have a story about how we were nearly famous. Well, that's mine.

Deputy leadership podcast now live

My latest podcast focuses on the race for Labour's deputy leadership following last week's declarations by Peter Hain and Harriet Harman, with Alan Johnson, Jack Straw and Jon Cruddas also set to throw their hats into the ring.

My conclusion? Well, although I think Johnson is probably the man to beat, in my view it doesn't matter a great deal who wins, since as Denis Healey rightly concluded, the job is not worth a pitcher of warm spit.

"The week’s smartest move may been made by David Miliband, who this week once again confirmed that he will not contest either of the two leadership posts. If I was being cynical, I would say this almost certainly means that the Environment Secretary has concluded he would really be much better off as Mr Brown’s first Chancellor than as his deputy. For as Mr Brown himself has shown, that’s a job worth far more than a pitcher of spit – warm or otherwise."

The podcast can be heard in full by clicking HERE. To subscribe to the podcast, which updates every Monday, cut and paste the following URL into your listening software:

http://content.thisis.co.uk/podcasts/linford/linfords-week-in-politics.rss

That List: My Verdict

Iain Dale has published his long awaited booklet listing the Top 100 Political Blogs. He's ranked me at No 10 so, before I say anything else, thanks Iain for the accolade. At the start of this year, when my blog had only a few hundred visitors a month, I'd have more than settled for a Top Ten placing. And to finish one ahead of Boris Johnson and two ahead of Adam Boulton was particularly satisfying!

Dale describes me as a "Regional Lobby Journalist based in Derbyshire whose writing is like fine wine." Tim Worstall has had a bit of fun at my expense with the "fine wine" bit, but I don't mind that. What I do mind (though only slightly) is being called a regional lobby journalist. I am, of course, ex-lobby.

Anyway, it's a truly Stakhanovite effort from the great man. He not only lists the Top 100 blogs overall, but the Top 100 in the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and non-aligned categories. I am fourth in the non-aligned group behind Guido, Political Betting, and Dr Crippen, aka the NHS Blog Doctor. Can't complain about any of that.

To my mind, however, Iain's complex ranking system has thrown up one or two rather glaring anomalies in the list which I feel it is my duty to point out.

First, he rates the new Lib Dem version of Conservative Home, Liberal Democrat Voice at No 4 in the list, despite the fact that it has only been existence for about a fortnight. Meanwhile Political Betting is placed no higher than No 6.

This is simply silly. PB.com is a Top Four blog by anyone's standards and as high an authority as Guido - who doesn't dish out the compliments readily - once described Mike Smithson as having "more insight than the whole of the Lobby put together."

The most glaring omission however is Labour Watch, which makes only No 89 in the non-aligned list. This is very unfair on Lib Dem blogger Inamicus who, in compiling tales of Labour misdeeds from local and regional papers around the country, is doing something no other blog is currently doing.

Finally, Dale is way too modest about his own standing in the blogosphere. He rates his blog as the 3rd best overall and the 2nd best Tory blog, but most people would rate it No 1 in both categories.

Guido is frequently more amusing and his stories more politically damaging, Conservative Home is more comprehensive in its breadth of coverage of Tory politics, and PB.com generates easily the best online debates, but none is consistently as good as Dale's Diary.

Apparently his career is about to go in a new direction. I wonder what we are going to do without him?

The Johnson-for-PM plot: Where are the mainstream media?

I won't bore you with the technical details. Suffice to say that if you are really interested in how registering domain names works, and how an Alan Johnson 4 Leader website came into being, you can read it all in detail on Dizzy Thinks and Bloggerheads.

But the point is not how they did it, but the fact that it was done at all. And it seems to me that, between them, Dizzy and Tim Ireland have established beyond reasonable doubt that - in Tim's words - before there was an alleged plot by Brownites to depose Blair, there was an actual plot by Blairites to undermine the Chancellor and push Alan Johnson as the next PM!

The key figure in the plot is a character called David Taylor who will already be well known to readers of Tim's blog. He is the absurd loyalist behind the Keeping the Faith website set up to proclaim the Prime Minister's "achievements" in the aftermath of last week's "Brownite coup."

But inquiries have now revealed that prior to that, on 5 September in fact, he registered four new domain names for a Johnson leadership campaign: johnson4leader.org.uk, johnson4leader.co.uk, johnson4leader.org, and johnson4leader.com.

This story has now been on Dizzy's blog since Monday. It has even been on Iain Dale, the blog which not inaccurately boasts that it is read by virtually every political journalist in Westminster. So why hasn't it been in the papers?

Eleven years ago, when I first started out in the Lobby, some friends of Michael Portillo were caught installing some phone lines in a house near Westminster which was to have been used in a leadership campaign. There was an almighty furore and Portillo's leadership chances were sunk, as it turned out, for ever.

The technology may have moved on - but is what Taylor is now doing on behalf of Alan Johnson really any different to this?

Could it possibly be that the papers have ignored the story because they hate the thought of the leadership contest turning into a foregone conclusion, and are themselves desperate to promote Johnson as a credible alternative?