I won't stop watching Strictly Come Dancing now that John Sergeant has pulled out, because I never watched it in the first place, but in a funny sort of way I shall miss opening the newspapers every day to read yet another angle on the story of how the viewing public loves Sergie. I suppose he is lovable, from a distance.
Before he slips out of the news, here is my most vivid recollection of Sergeant in his days as a political journalist, when he was the only person who ever induced a group of Lobby journalists to give Tony Blair an ovation.
Nobody, anywhere seems to have a word to say in defence of Den Dover, the MEP who was expelled from the Conservative Party for using his expensive account to misdirect £500,000 to his family (except for a lone blogger on ConservativeHome who says that he worked for his constituents in North West England.) He does not have a word to say for himself. He has not answered press enquiries, and though his website declares that "I want to keep you up to date with developments in the European Parliament and my work..." You search the site in vain for any information about this latest startling development or how it might affect his work.
Labour's result in Glenrothes is better even than it looks at first glance. It might be tempting to think "so what?" that Labour should hold on to a safe seat, but yesterday's result runs counter to a long and honoured tradition of voters using by-elections to punish the government by what ever means they can.
The last time a Conservative government won any by-election anywhere was in Richmond, Yorkshire, in January 1989, where the Tory candidate - one William Hague - had his bacon saved by the rancorous break up of the old Liberal-SDP Alliance which led to a mutually destructive competition between the Lib Dems and the rump SDP, led by David Owen. In Richmond, the two centre parties between them picked up 28,498 votes to 19,543 for the Conservatives, but since they obligingly split their votes between two candidates, Hague was declared the victor. The Tories did not win another by-election until after May 1997.
You can feel the simmering incomprehension behind the words that the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has written in today's Evening Standard. Economic catastrophes are meant to be bad for governments, good for opposition parties, but as the scale of the global financial crisis impresses itself upon public opinion, the Conservatives' lead over Labour shrinks. So Mr Osborne looks around for reasons why it's all Gordon Brown's fault.
He finds two - that the British have borrowed too much, and that the regulatory system that Gordon Brown created was not adequate to the task. But people did not suddenly start borrowing too much in the 1997.
Peter Mandelson's return is going to start a frantic competition among
investigative journalists to see who can break the story that will
force him to resign from the Cabinet for the third time. The first
honour, you will recall, went to David Hencke and others at The
Guardian, for uncovering the information in December 1998 that
Mandelson had secretly borrowed £370,000 from his fellow minister,
Geoffrey Robinson, who was under investigation by the Department of
Trade and Industry, whose Secretary of State was Peter Mandelson.
There was some dispute, however, as to who actually got there first.
Oh dear! There is David Cameron banging on about education standards, including that chestnut about children who are awarded marks for writing f*** off. "I would have my own two words for people like that, " said Cameron. "I'm not that rude, but one of them begins with F - you're fired."
Actually, Dave, "you're fired" is three words. Try them out on your scriptwriter.
I read on the front of today's issue of PR Week that Derek Draper, recently recalled to work for the Labour Party, is to take charge of "an online rapid rebuttal unit, designed to kill off damaging stories circulating in the blogosphere."
Years ago, Draper became the number one Labour Party hate figure, the person on whom those who liked Old Labour better then New Labour focused their loathing.
When Gordon Brown speaks in Manchester this afternoon, there will be no visible evidence of the simmering tensions at the top end of the Labour Party. The delegates gave Alistair Darling a long standing ovation yesterday, so they will certainly do the same again for Brown, with David Miliband standing and clapping along with the best of them.
Having returned safely form the CERN centre in Switzerland, I find an email awaiting me from a Labour MP, saying "so you've got away from the black hole that wasn't - now for Manchester, and the real black hole." He is referring, of course, to the annual Labour Party Conference which opens in Manchester this weekend, as the plot to remove Gordon Brown gathers momentum.
I'm sending this blog from one of the most surreal locatons on the planet, the massive CERN centre, near Geneva, where scientists and engineers have designed and built the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is below me, deep underground. I would not wish to be down there, because it is so cold that a Geordie would need an overcoat. Along its 27 kilometre tunnel run two tubes, race tracks for protons, inside which it is colder than deep space.
The best way to annoy someone employed by CERN is to ask when they expect a black hole to pop out of their multi-billion pound plaything and swallow the earth.
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