I've almost started to feel sorry for Gordon Brown. The poor man just doesn't get it. He was being interviewed by Nicky Campbell this morning on Five Live (amazing - he didn't run away!) and it sounded, as John Piennar put it afterwards, as if the presenter was having an argument with a tuba.
For his first question, Campbell asked Brown what his first thought was when he woke up today. How's my son? I need a coffee? Nope. The Prime Minister launched into an interminable drone about housing policy with his usual machine gun-like delivery.
In the run-up to his becoming PM, I wrote that not only was he not up to the job - I have long though he is the most over-rated political figure in living memory - he was also unelectable. When his poll ratings went through the roof, I was pilloried by someblogs for my stupidity. (This from Matthew Turner makes me smile.)
As we might discover on Friday, not only is he unelectable - so too is anyone tainted with the label Labur while he is PM.
To adapt Lord Desai's words: he was put on the earth to make John Major look good.
UPDATE: Doh - as a correspondent points out, it was Mrs T about Kinnock.
UPDATE: The all-knowing Oliver Kamm points out I am now wrong twice. Originally it was said to Denis Healey:
PMQ, 19 April 1983.
Mr. Healey
Cut and run.
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election, is he? Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Could not take it? Cannot stand it? If I were going to cut and run, I should have gone after the Falklands. Frightened! Right now inflation is lower than it has been for 13 years—a record which the right hon. Gentleman could not begin to touch.
Next week 7 million Londoners may wake to discover Boris Johnson is their mayor. Some time before the summer of 2010 60 million UK citizens may discover that David Cameron is their prime minister. If you live in London as I do that means living under a double yoke of old Etonians.
That's the problem with elections, Mr Jack. You get who you - or someone else - voted for.
I'm sick of reading about how awful it is that old Etonians are involved in politics. So what? Why is it worse than having alumni of Bog Standard Comprehensive in Inner City Wasteland? Doesn't the calibre of the man or woman. and what they are offering, count?
Then again, Jack asks the right question but in the blinkered, stupid way of so many of his ilk fails to grasp the obvious answer:
The front bench and Cameron's private office are stacked with old Eton boys. Journalists write about it continually, but with remarkably little sense of shock, as though the grammar school years of Heath, Thatcher and Major had never existed and the old routes to power (a school, a club, a good marriage, a trust fund) were just the inescapable, unalterable facts in the web of English life.
Why do you think it is that "the grammar school years" are over? Difficult one, eh? Might it not be because they were abolished? Doh. Is it any wonder that the alumni of schools providing a great education to those who can afford it have risen to the top of politics because those who can't afford a great education have been condemned to dross?
Sometime you have to wonder if our supposed intellectual glitterati have any brains at all.
Keegan insists he is in charge and confirms Modric interest Keegan is certainly interested in Modric, the 22-year-old Dinamo Zagreb playmaker, but he wants to take a closer look before any deal is struck. He said: "If you are looking at a young midfield player who has got a fantastic future ahead of him, Modric is one of them. But then every other club in the league, from Arsenal and Manchester United, would like Modric."
Er, you're a bit slow off the mark, matey, as this announcement on the Spurs website makes clear:
The Club is delighted to announce that it has reached agreement with Dinamo Zagreb for the transfer of Croatian midfielder, Luka Modric.
Personal terms have been agreed with the player and he will now undertake a medical and apply for a work permit.
Mind you, if there's one form of journalism that makes racing tipsters look well informed, it's football reporting. The past couple of days have been full of stories about how Modric was on the point of signing for Newcastle, with a possible late bid from Liverpool. Barely anyone even mentioned Spurs.
Hah!
(Apparently there's some sort of game going at Stamford Bridge today. I don't know what it's all about. I'm off to see Spurs play Bolton. And I'll be comiserating with my Gooner friends over supporting a team which just can't win a trophy. Poor things!)
Did you see Question Times last night? (It'shere, if you'd like to watch it.) Iain Dale is in despair over the quality of debate. I'd certainly agree that it's not even close to the level of US primary debates, but I thought last night's was one of the more useful and informative hustings. Not because it was an elevated discussion of policy - policy was barely present - but because it was hugely instructive about the candidates themselves.
For one thing, I realised that Brian Paddick is a truly awful man. He came across as the worst kind of ego-maniac - the sort who thinks he is humble and a cut above the rest of his peers when in reality he is boorish, snide, ignorant and self-important. At least Ken and Boris know they have high opinions of themselves and don't pretend to be otherwise. And Paddick was also keen to attack Boris not on policy, not even on the fact of his affairs, but purely on his relations with his own family, which to any neutral observer was pretty vile. Let he who is without sin, Mr Paddick, cast the first stone. I don't recall any other candidate referring to the fact that the openly gay Brian Paddick was once married. Or does being married to someone while you are gay not count as deception in Mr Paddick's mind?
Livingstone seemed a shadow of himself (this has already been observed by others in other meetings), almost as if he could no longer be bothered to engage. There was the odd bit of attack, but he seemed as if he was resigned to defeat.
And Boris was good. Ish. He got - as ever - flustered over details, but he seemed to me to be keen to talk about the issues and to attck Livingstone where he needed to be attacked.
I've made clear on this site that I'm voting against Ken rather than for Boris, but I think Boris' performance last night might have made putting an x by his name seem a fair bit more palatable.
The UK politician George Galloway wrote in The Glasgow Record last month that the Gaza Strip is "the most densely populated piece of earth on the planet." Galloway wrote that 1.5 million Palestinians live there.
Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist currently teaching at Princeton, wrote March 26 that Gaza is "one of the most densely populated places on earth, with 3,823 people per square kilometre." Kuttab's figure is in line with recent Gaza population estimates of 1.4 million.
If Galloway's estimate of 1.5 million Gaza population is correct, this is almost 4,200 people per square kilometer. The Central Intelligence Agency projects that the Gaza population will reach 1,537,269 in July. This would bring the density to 4,270 people per square kilometer.
But this isn't even as crowded as Tel Aviv. Gaza had plenty of problems. But they are nothing - nothing - to do with population density:
Both Singapore and Hong Kong have more than 6,000 people per square kilometer. Tel Aviv has more than 7,000 people per square kilometer. If you count the suburbs of Tel Aviv, the metropolitan area with its population of 2.3 million has a density of more than 5,000 people per square kilometer, which is considerably more crowded than the Gaza Strip as reckoned by Galloway or Kuttab or the CIA.
A friend who has been working on the Boris campaign tells me this story from the Back Boris Call Centre in Holborn other night, which was apparently manned by "a shoestring number of Tory boys fromn CCHQ and random - very random - volunteers.
At one point, a Boris caller was heard heckling a 90-something invalid old lady about the need to register for a proxy vote by (yesterday) 23rd of April. Not recognising the names of any of the candidates the caller read out to her, the sparky old dear mentioned she was plumping for the dashing candidate with the "floppy white hair".
The Boris worker flicked on speaker phone to his fellow workers who were in tears of laughter in time for the dear lady to chide: "He's gorgeous, and I'd like to see more of him..."
This (from Comment Central) is too good to be true, but it is!
The UK Office of Government Commerce is:
Responsible for improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement
And they've - as it the way of such bodies - spent a small fortune on a branding excercise. They've come up with the letters OGC. Genius.And even more so when you turn the font they have used ninety degrees:
No sniggering.
I rather like Dave Hill's stuff. But this video blog at CiF has to be one of the most stupid things I've ever seen: Er, no. We like a strong pound against a weak dollar if we want to import things from the US. And that's it. Anti-American? Makes us feel superior? Only if you're an idiot. The exchange rate is a price. That's all. That's why it's called a rate of exchange.
