By Andreas Whittam Smith

First I was disappointed that the Government didn’t get on and nationalise Northern Rock straight away. Now that they are at last taking it into public ownership as a temporary expedient, I am unhappy again. For Messrs Brown and Darling haven’t recognised what would be a good final objective - to reconstitute Northern Rock as the respected mutual organisation it once was, that is as a building society again.

By Andreas Whittam Smith

Jacques Attali, who had just presented a report to President Sarkozy containing 314 propositions for improving the French economy, gave an astonishing performance on the main TV news in France last night. He had sat opposite the presenter while the most trivial of the recommendations of his Commission - those attacking barriers to entry into such activities as taxi services and hair dressing - were explained with vox pop interviews while the substance was ignored. And while the President had immediately said that he accepted over 300 of the proposals, naturally attention was focussed on the very few exceptions. It was, frankly, just the same sort of superficial coverage that you regularly find on BBC news, patronising in the way it dumbs down to what it considers to be the low intelligence of the average viewer.

By Andreas Whittam Smith

I have consistently argued since the bank run on Northern Rock that it should be nationalised, reorganised and then put back into the private sector, probably as a smaller entity, preferably as a mutual society. So have many other people, not least Vince Cable, the Liberal Democratic shadow chancellor. Now it looks as this will finally happen. Talk about dithering!

By Andreas Whittam Smith

A screening programme for heart and kidney disease, cancer, strokes and diabetes sounds like a good idea. But I doubt whether the Government will prove capable of delivering it. You can tell from the statement itself that incompetence still rules.

First it was extensively leaked beforehand. That shows that political calculation has played at least as large a part in the decision as medical advice. Second, the announcement was made by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, rather than by the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson. This downgrades the role of the Department of Health, which is quite a good way of rendering it less effective. Third, Parliament was left out of the loop so that scrutiny of the proposals was weakened. And fourth, doctors leaders tell us that there was no consultation with the medical profession beforehand.

Each of these deficiencies is a mark of government by gesture. And that is why I believe that the likelihood of the new services ever being made widely available by this dysfunctional government are close to zero. If I am wrong, I will donate a pint of blood to the Health Service rather than eat my hat.

By Andreas Whittam Smith

In reading The Independent’s obituary this week of the German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, I was struck by the account of his teenage years. Born in 1928, by 1944 he was a stretcher bearer in the closing months of World War Two. “Death became something completely relative to me,” the obituary quoted him as saying. He never knew what happened to his father after he left home. His mother was killed because she was a mental patient. Terrible experiences of this nature were likewise undergone by another celebrated German artist, Günter Grass, born a year earlier than Stockhausen, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999.

By Andreas Whittam Smith

In the case of Conrad Black, there are two aspects I don’t like - apart from the central issue, the crime itself. First, even now Black will not agree that he has made mistakes. Generally it is people with limited self confidence who cannot bring themselves to say ‘yes, looking back, I can see I was wrong there.’ But Black has an abundance of self belief.

Second his friends sometimes give the impression they believe that middle class people do not commit crimes. Yes, they do. Only a lot of it goes undetected - fiddling expenses, making false insurance claims, hiding taxable income. I was surprised that the judge didn’t send Black straight off to prison, rather than give him three months to put his affairs in order.