Breathtaking. I've just watched a rather intelligent item on Newsnight about Blair's predecessors as Labour PMs, and the crises they have had to face at the end of their period in office. Intelligent, that is, in all but one respect.

Amongst a range of sensible interviewees, to whom do you think they turned as the voice of the contemporary left; the internal Labour opposition to Blair? One of the trade union awkward squad? An MP such as Alan Simpson or Doug Henderson? Nope. Go on - have a guess.

George Galloway.

I happen to think that the Labour opponents of Blair are profoundly wrong. But they are entitled to their views, and any report on this subject should of course contain them. But not one of them, in the BBC's view, was worthy of a hearing. The only man who was - the only Labour opponent of Tony Blair to be interviewed - was George Galloway, the man who prostrated himself before Saddam and his money, and who is despised by almost the entire Labour Party, right and left, New Labour and Old Labour, lunatic and sensible alike.

To most people, George Galloway is beneath contempt. Not, however, to the BBC, where he is chosen to represent mainstream opinion. And I pay my license fee to fund the wages of such people.

Oliver Kamm answers my challenge to explain what's wrong with a market in terror:

The problem was in relying on financial markets to yield predictions. That's not what markets are for. Their principal function is to enable risk to be managed efficiently by giving it a price (e.g. if a company wants to protect itself from adverse exchange rate movements, it can pay to hedge its currency exposure in the futures markets).

The Pentagon plan was wrong in supposing that a speculative market would be useful in predicting terrorist attacks. Unlike stock and bond markets, which efficiently discount the huge mass of publicly-available information, a market in predictions of terrorism would have little historical information. A liquid market with little information is one where prices are typically highly volatile. A volatile market is much easier for a speculator with reliable information to manipulate (technically, an arbitrageur exploiting the opportunity for riskless profits).

Who would have that reliable information? Obviously the terrorists themselves. Indeed, they'd be the only people with that information (unless their organisations had been penetrated by our intelligence services, in which case our side would be better-informed than the market anyway and so would have no need of it). There would then be every incentive and opportunity for the terrorists to move the market by betting on particular outcomes (the point of futures markets is that it's possible to do so cheaply and quickly, and so this type of market ramping wouldn't be obvious). Not to make a profit (after all, they'd be quite conspicuous if they attempted to claim immediately after a prediction quoted at long odds turned out to be true), but to generate false information and thereby mislead our intelligence services.

That's why a market in predictions of terrorism is a non-starter.

Fair points, and from a man who has forgotten more about such markets than I will ever know. But there's one market I do know about: the betting market. And it seems to me that the betting market goes a long way to answering Oliver's points.

The problem was in relying on financial markets to yield predictions. That's not what markets are for. Their principal function is to enable risk to be managed efficiently by giving it a price. That is, though, exactly what the betting market does. It seeks to predict what will happen. Yes, it also allows for hedging (by other bookmakers). But primarily it is about taking on board a mass of information - often directly contradictory information - and, in the form of a price, predicting what will happen.

I take his point that A volatile market is much easier for a speculator with reliable information to manipulate (technically, an arbitrageur exploiting the opportunity for riskless profits). But that too happens in betting markets - trainers backing (or laying) their runners, for instance. And there are few (if any) more volatile markets. A horse can come in from 10/1 to favourite in a couple of hours, depending on the volume of money.

But in the end the crucial point, surely, is that this would, like any market, be voluntary. No one would have to participate. If they didn't like the framework, leave it alone. And no one suggests that such a market would ever be more than a - perhaps - useful aid in the fight. It would be one small tool, and no more than that.

The real objections are not theoretical. If they were, the market would collapse through the weight of its own internal contradictions (I just had to use that phrase). They are political. As Oliver himself puts it: The vitriolic language used by Congressional Democrats - 'ridiculous and grotesque' - merely emphasises their own paucity of thinking on how to fight terrorism.

I know no one will believe me, given how awful the tips I've put here have been, but I'm back from Goodwood having had the two most successful betting days of my life! I started with a 16/1 winner in the first race of the festival, and followed with winners at 6/1, 11/1, 25/1, 10/1 and then 4/1 over two days.

I am, you might say, flush.

And my father is my alibi. He was an awestruck witness.

Norman Geras, who has contributed to my feedback page, has a new blog.

It's well worth a look.

What have Jean-Pierre Raffarin and BA got in common?

They both cave in when put under pressure from the unions.

I realise that I've recommended Norman Geras' new blog below, but here's a specific piece I urge you to read, on human rights and the left's response to terror. It's a superb posting.

It's not good for my heart. I can barely listen to John Humphrys now without my blood pressure shooting up. He has moved way beyond being simply aggressive for the sake of aggression, and has entered another universe altogether where he defines what is acceptable behaviour.

Interviewing Thomas Friedman this morning he was at it again, the casual, blatant anti-American bias paraded as if it was only reckless rednecks who could possibly disagree.

Friedman is, of course, hardly a Bush lickspittle, but even he seemed taken aback by Humphrys. After one mini anti-Bush rant by the Today programme presenter, Friedman interjected rather meekly: "The American people elected George Bush" - to which Humphrys replied, "Just - or possibly not, as the case may be".

Then this:

"What, Thomas Friedman, could cause the Americans to pull back from this?"

"From what? Iraq?"

"No, this position that 'we are the masters and we can do whatever we want'".

I pay my licence fee to keep this man fed.

Phew. For a moment there I was worried. I can’t make it to this year’s Edinburgh Festival and, even though the Proms have been going for ten days, I still haven’t managed to get to a single concert. The Bath Festival passed me by completely, the Buxton Festival has been and gone and the Hebden Bridge Festival finished weeks ago.

But it’s OK. I will still, if I get my act together, manage something. Perhaps the upcoming Huddersfield Festival. What a tempting programme it offers. As the brochure puts it, plugging this year’s “featured composer”: “Helmut Oehring is considered by some people to be one of the most interesting composers in Germany. His parents were deaf mutes and a lot of his music explores the relationship between music and deaf people.” I can’t wait.

According to the British Federation of Festivals, there are just over three hundred taking place this year. This month alone has seen the Lichfield, Larmertree, Cheltenham, York, Cambridge, Henley, Harrogate, Fishguard, Chester, Ely, Oundle, Dartford and Gwyl Caernarfon festivals.

The truth of the matter is that most of them aren’t so much a waste of time as a waste of money — my money, and yours.

They do, of course, give pleasure to their audiences (although I’m not sure what state one has to be in to enjoy “Folk at the Fish — Fishguard Arms, Haverfordwest. Folk music and song from the landlord himself”, which was part of the Fishguard Festival). But don’t fall for the idea beloved of the arts world that they are just a more professional re-creation of traditional British celebrations of local arts and crafts, institutions which sprung up quite naturally to fill the leisure time granted in the wake of the 1847 Factory Act, which limited the working day to ten hours. They’re not. They are part of one of the fastest growing, most lavishly financed, most exclusive, most iniquitous and most self-satisfied industries in the country: the money pit known as “the arts”.

There are few more grotesque examples of the Robin-Hood-in-reverse principle than the recent explosion in arts festivals and arts funding. The entire racket is run by administrators who glide seamlessly from one job to another, who spend their whole careers using other people’s money — the taxpayer’s — to finance their own minority tastes, and who then take the high moral ground when it is put to them that they are engaged in a form of grand larceny: taking money from those who have no interest in any of their efforts, and using it to fund retrospectives of the paintings of Lucian Freud and “artist in profile” concerts exploring the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

This year’s Arts Council budget is £335 million. By 2005 it will have increased to £410 million. And how satisfying and elevating it is to discover on what that money is being spent. This year there has been a four-fold grant increase to the Luton Carnival, to a total of £124,500; £220,000 is being given to The Drum arts project in Birmingham — a 65 per cent rise on last year; £90,000 is off to Kala Sangam, a multicultural arts project in Bradford — a 150 per cent rise; and £51,000 is being handed over to the “craft organisation”, Shisha.

Next year, the Arts Council boasts, will see an “investment” of £3.5 million in “decibel”, a “one-off initiative to raise the profile of culturally diverse arts in England”. I’m so glad I worked that extra hour last week, knowing that the tax I have to pay is going to such worthwhile causes. Luton wouldn’t be Luton without its carnival.

“Street artists” (“buskers” is, it seems, a derogatory term for these polymaths of the pavement) are also well looked after: “Zap” in Brighton is getting £25,000, something called Circus Space will have had £70,000 by the end of the year, and next year “Circomedia” will be funded for the first time to the tune of £80,000. I was under the impression that buskers — so sorry, “street artists” — got their money from passers by, depending on whether or not they were any good. How stupid of me. It is, of course, much more sensible to take money from taxpayers and hand it over to mime artists to make sure that they are always in pocket. How philistine we would be as a society if the Covent Garden Piazza wasn’t properly staffed with fire eaters.

The real problem is that arts funding is a monster which, once given its head, develops an insatiable appetite, and which spends almost literally for spending’s sake. As the Arts Council’s “Manifesto” puts it (an interesting choice of label, given that the council, being a quango set up to spend money that the public wouldn’t spend left to its own devices, is therefore a body specifically set up to ignore the public’s wishes): “In 2002’s spending round, we achieved a major increase in public investment in the arts. Now we intend to capitalise on that success by backing the country’s artistic talent and winning further support for the arts.”

In other words, if you think we’re whooping it up at your expense at the moment, just you wait.

Almost none of the money ever goes on anything in which the public who supply it has the slightest interest. Nothing better illustrates this than the lottery fiasco. More than £500 million has gone on building new museums and extensions since the first tranche of lottery funding became available in 1995. Instead of using the money to help existing museums, with proven track records of providing services which the public used, it was instead frittered away on a series of vainglorious follies, the upkeep alone of which added another £29 million a year to the running costs of the country’s museums.

Kevin Costner might have become a hero to a generation for believing in Field of Dreams that “if you build it, they will come”, but he was using his own money. The lesson of lottery funding is “if the arts establishment decides to build it, they won’t come”. The Life Force Centre, built beside Bradford Cathedral at a cost £5 million, closed in 2001 after seven months. It was projected to attract 40,000 people a year; in its first week it had 62 paying visitors. The Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff was forecast to have 220,000 visitors in its first year. It managed 47,500 and closed in November 2001, after costing £9 million to build. The £15-million National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield closed after 16 months in 2000. It was supposed to attract 400,000 people a year. Fewer than 90,000 went through its doors.

The annual summer festival season highlights the perversion of the original idea of festivals. The first recorded “festival” was the Workington Festival in Cumberland in 1869, which comprised a band and a choir. During the First World War, evacuees who were at school for only half a day were offered lessons in dance, poetry, painting and music in their spare time, and festivals were created for them to show off their new skills. Today, almost all trace of that genuine community purpose has disappeared and they are merely a further example of the arts establishment spending other people’s money on its own minority tastes.

When the new season begins in a few weeks at the Royal Opera House (with a 14.3 per cent increase in its grant this year), I’ll be there in my seat, subsidised to the tune of some £60 per seat per performance by the rest of you. Thanks. And yes, I’ll be at half a dozen Proms. I might even get to some of the other festivals.

I’m one of that guilty minority who has his pleasure paid for by other people. So yes, I benefit from all this largesse. But every time I set foot inside one of these institutions, with their self-perpetuating bureaucracies, their now mandatory “outreach” programmes (obfuscatory attempts to show how “relevant” they are), and their oh-so-desperate attempts to be “accessible” (a bizarre aim, since the only people who want access to a minority pursuit are the minority who want access to it), I know that I am taking part in a giant scam, in which a cultural elite extorts money from the rest of society so it can better indulge itself.

It’s time the rest of you pulled the rug from underneath my feet.

Could someone please explain to me just what was so objectionable about the Pentagon's plan to make use of the betting market in its fight against terror?

The very purpose of markets is harnessing information and joining it together in the form of a price. When I was first alerted to the idea, earlier this morning, it struck me as awesomely clever, and I pinched myself for not having thought of it myself. Now, it seems, I was being grotesque for even contemplating the merits of the idea.

Why? I mean it. Why?

Does anyone have a single good reason to offer why utilising the most efficient mechanism for the processing of information known to mankind is not a senible thing to do?

And if you want to see markets in action, live, have a look here.

Iain Murray makes a point I hadn't considered about the educational background of British bloggers...

I can't not link to this Washington Times column by Clive Davis which, as well as being rather kind to me, contains some interesting observations on anti-Americanism in the UK media.

I once won a magazine competition for the world's most boring book title with this little stunner: Hospital Purchase Records Containing Grain Price Records in Fifteenth Century Ghent. It was, as the editor described it, the 'nuclear weapon' of the competition.

I've held back until now with an equivalent nuclear weapon against the BBC.

Forget its bias. Forget its arrogance. Forget its profligacy. Forget its corruption.

Here's the most directly practical reason why the license fee is barking mad. I have Sky Plus, and thus watch my TV via a digital receiver. A few weeks ago, the BBC started broadcasting its channels on a different frequency. I know not why. Some viewers, it said, would have to retune their satellite dishes. So I called the engineer to do just that.

To cut a (very) long story short - three visits, three engineers, and lots of wasted money later - they came to the conclusion that I would never again be able to receive BBC TV. I live very close to the Telecom Tower, and the transmitters on the top of the tower wipe out the signal on the BBC's new frequency.

So for the past few weeks I haven't been able to receive a single BBC channel. (I have to say that I don't miss it at all. The only thing I was bothered about was its - pretty limited - horse racing coverage, and I can get that from AtTheRaces.)

But I do, of course, still have to pay the license fee.

Glorious, eh?

The times they are a-changing. At a wedding on Saturday, someone remarked at my table that they never bothered watching the BBC News any more as they found it so distorted, and that they watched Fox for news about Iraq and Sky and ITN for domestic news.

Until recently they?d have been met with looks of blank incomprehension. Instead, there was not a murmur of dissent. Everyone at the table agreed that the BBC was hopelessly biased, just as not a single person dissented from the proposition that it should be either privatised or abolished.

Things are looking up. Maybe the Baghdad Broadcasting Corportation's behaviour during and in the run-up to the war will prove the tipping point. Quite why Tessaa Jowell appears to be backtracking on her earlier remarks that the Charter renewal would be affected by the BBC's behaviour I don't know.

It is surely an unanswerable case that the future status and governance of the organisation - of any organisation - should be determined precisely by how it conducts itself.

Now I know what Jim Callaghan meant. Chaos, what chaos?

I must be the luckiest man in the country. This week I've been to New York and back, on British Airways, and have had my smoothest ever journey.

On Monday my flight was due to leave at 10.25. Terminal 4 was utterly chaotic when I arrived to check in. Although it took almost an hour and a half to check in, so great was the queue, I made it through to the gate by 10am, went straight onto the plane and we took off less than half an hour late. I then found out when we touched down at JFK that Terminal Four had been shut about an hour after my plane had taken off, so dangerous had the chaos become.

My return flight was due in at 6.30 this morning. We arrived early.

Chaos, what choas?

Mind you, I can't agree with my friend Toby Moore
in The Times whilst I was away. It looks like a pretty clear case of 'right' and 'wrong', the strikers being wrong and the managment being right. The strikes were in protest at a switch from manual, self-certifying clocking in, to an auotmated swipe card.

The strikers say they fear that this heralds a move to mandatory 'flexi-time' and will cause them child care problems.

Yeah, right. It's got nothing to do with being forced to account properly for their time supposedly at work, I'm sure.

Can someone please send me the name of Qusay and Uday's plastic surgeon.

If he can do this from this then I think I can use his services.

I'm chuffed to be linked to on the new T-shirt site of Anthony Cox, the creator of the WMD 404 Not Found page.

Buy! Buy! Buy!

I've just taken a flat in Brussels. Read this, and you'll see why I'm so excited...

(Link via samizdata.)

Posting will be light this week as I'm on my travels.

The Proms, which started on Friday, are every bit as good as the hype would have it. By far the most varied and consistently high-class music festival in the world, they are in almost every respect a model of British cultural life.

In almost every respect. There is, however, one big problem with the Proms: the Prommers. Somehow the myth has taken hold that the people who pay £4 to stand in the arena - the area that would normally have stalls seats, which is handed over to the Promenaders for the duration of the Proms - are the greatest audience on the planet.

Nothing would, of course, suit the prevailing ethos of our time - access - better than those Prommers being the ideal mix of decorum, good taste and calm enthusiasm. It is an article of the arts establishment's faith, after all, that it is the people in the cheap seats who are the real fans, showing up the more expensively-seated philistines who snooze through Ein Heldenleben until it is time for a G&T in the interval.

Talk about the wish being father to the thought! There is no other audience quite so noisy, fidgety, intolerant, smelly and plain bloody awful as the Promenaders. I know how bad they are because I used to be one of them. I started when I was a student and for more than a decade I put up with their din, their restless twitching, their inanity, their cliquiness and, perhaps worst of all, their appalling personal hygiene. I did it because of the astonishing value of a £4 entrance fee. And if the Albert Hall audience was so awful, well, that was the price to be paid for obtaining such a fabulous musical education.

As I got older, work commitments meant that I was not getting good enough value from my season ticket and so I decided to buy normal tickets - seats, that is - for the half a dozen or so Proms that I could get to. And guess what? I discovered that it is possible to listen to a Prom without being surrounded by chatter, without having to put up with couples, oblivious to their surroundings, eating each others' cheeks, without having to hear crisp packets being opened during the softest pianissimo, without having to watch your neighbour pick her nose during the slow movement and without having to ration your in-breaths to avoid being asphyxiated by body odour.

The mythology is all wrong. The Prommers may seem a wonderful, romantic ideal of an arts audience. But they are not. It is the Prommers who talk to each other in the middle of the St Matthew Passion, and the boring people in the seats who listen attentively. It is the Prommers who lie flat on the floor and fall asleep and the seated enthusiasts who hang on the orchestra's every note.

The real problem about the Promenaders is that they are not there for the music, but to be part of a rather sad club that meets nightly at 7.30 and is defined by a series of inane rituals. So the highlight of their evening is not Martha Argerich playing Ravel, but the chance to chant "heave" when the piano is shifted onto the stage, or their asinine mock applause when the orchestra leader plays a note on the piano for the orchestra to tune up to.

I have always wondered what they do between October and June when there are no Proms to go to. Stay at home, I hope, for the rest of our sakes.

I have yet to meet a single person in Westminster, other than two of the five BBC employees to whom I have spoken in recent days, who is not clear in their own mind what happened when Andrew Gilligan met David Kelly. Journalists, politicians, officials, advisers et al; they all say the same thing:

As has been pointed out repeatedly, it is inconceivable that Dr Kelly was not the source. The idea that Gilligan met two intelligence officials in central London hotels who had contributed background work work to the dossier is preposterous. Clearly, Dr Kelly was the source.

But. It also seems clear that Dr Kelly did not realise that he was the source, since what Gilligan reported appears not to have been quite the same things that he was told by Dr Kelly. There seems indeed to have been 'sexing up', but by Gilligan rather than Alastair Campbell.

The BBC managers know full well now what happened, and are thus even more determined to tough it out, to cover their own backs in allowing Gilligan to go on air with his false story.

And although Downing Street did, with the hindsight of Dr Kelly's death, make a terrible mistake in putting his name out as the source, the real culprits are Andrew Gilligan and Richard Sambrook for, first, running a false story and then compounding the error by obfuscating and refusing to admit error.

That, as I say, is the view of every single person I have met in recent days in Westminster, including three BBC employees (but exclusing two others).

I write book reviews for the New Statesman. The fact that its editorial line is, in my view, deeply wrong, both about most domestic issues and, more importantly, over Iraq and the Middle East, has not been that much of a problem for me. I don't think one can stop writing for publications simply because one disagrees with some of their editorial lines, and although I've sometimes found it rather weird to appear in the Statesman, alongside the likes of Pilger and other loony tunes, I've rather enjoyed baiting them with my remarks. (I derived a huge thrill from choosing as my book of the year, a while ago, the collected columns of Richard Littlejohn. Sad, maybe, but the thought of the juice bar lefties choking over the carrot and ginger smoothies cheered me up no end.)

But there comes a point when things go too far and you realise that it's not a matter of some political disagreements but a fundamental contempt for the publication, and I think that point has now come.

This week's issue (you can read it here. but only if you pay or read a full-ish report here) argues that:

[T]here appears to be something worryingly adrift in the mind of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, a man who doesn't really know who or what he is. More technically, he is diagnosed as a psychopath capable of reinventing himself with remarkable dexterity, like an actor. What most people call 'spin', the routine lubricant of all political gearboxes, is, in Blair's case, eloquent self-delusion on a heroic scale. Three articles and an editorial push the line that the PM is essentially deranged.

I was sickened this morning when I saw that my review of Mark Steel's book (see post yesterday) appeared alongside these Goebbels-like smears.

It's one thing disagreeing with the PM on Iraq and other issues - we are all entitled to our view. That's something some of us want to fight to protect, of course.

But a concerted campaign to brand him a psychopath is, to my mind, not merely gutter journalism but contemptible.

And how can I carry on writing for a publication I view as contemptible?

The answer is that I can't, and I've written to tell them so.

Jeepers. Postiga (who scored with almost his first touch for Spurs) and Zamora up front, with Keane tucked in behind them.

I can't wait for 23rd August, and our first home fixture of the season.

The always interesting Harry Hatchet on Tony Blair's eloquent exposition of the leftist case for intervention.

Quite. Like Harry, what I find bizarre is that many of those on the left who would broadly back Labour on the domestic front, are reviled by Blair's actions on the international scene.

What a star. What a leader. When Tony Blair began his speech to Congress with the line Thank you, Mr President, for your leadership, he wasn't just saying what he knew would produce a warm response from his audience. He meant it.

Because unlike so many of my fellow countrymen - unlike the 'million morons' who marched to keep Saddam in power, for instance, who should live in shame - he knows that, as he put it, There never has been a time when the power of America has been so necessary and so misunderstood.

He gets it. He knows that we are in a fight against an axis of evil, a fight which we will either win or lose: This isn't fantasy. It is 21st century reality, now. And if we lose, all that we value - our freedom and liberty - will be destroyed. If we win, freedom and liberty will be extended and given to many of those who today live in tyranny.

It beggars belief that there are those on the left who want nothing more than to bring down a leader, Tony Blair, whose career is now defined by that fight for freedom.

But after such a speech as that, who cares!

Don't ever apologise for your values. Tell the world why you are proud of America...Tell them why Americans one and all stand upright and respectful...Being American means being free. That's why they are proud...What you can bequeath to the world is the light of liberty...We are fighting for the inalienable right of human kind to be free.

The Prime Minister ended with the most pertinent remark of all: Destiny put you in this place at this moment in time, and the task is yours to do. Pertinent, because it applies just as much to Mr Blair himself. Thank God we have two leaders, in Blair and Bush, whom destiny has put in place to lead that task.

Mark Steel is one of a wave of comedians who, to be blunt, aren't very funny. Pretty much interchangeable, their acts and columns seem to consist of variations on the theme of "that Blair bloke, he's more Tory than the Tories". This is usually met with sympathetic, knowing laughter from an audience that goes to hear the "comedian" only because they know and share the politics. There are exceptions - Jeremy Hardy, for instance, is as explicitly political as any, but he is also genuinely funny, as is Rory Bremner, whose show masks a clear political agenda behind its light-entertainment production values.

But it is lamentable - and puzzling - that new Labour, a concept which is almost satirical in its own right, should have failed to produce anything much better than the dismal rantings of most of the left-wing comedians. Mark Steel is one of the worst of the genre. I've yet to read a piece by him that was intentionally amusing. The only one that ever made me laugh was an account of his sacking by the Guardian (he now writes a column in the Independent): what was intended to be a devastating and hilarious attack on the newspaper revealed, in its astonishingly leaden prose and conceit, precisely why the then comment editor decided that he could do without Steel's contributions.

So the concept of "a stand-up history of the French revolution" by a writer such as Steel was, even leaving aside the bizarre concept of a "stand-up history" (whatever that might be), hardly one to relish. I am still no nearer knowing what a "stand-up history" is, beyond a history with some jokes thrown in. But what I can report is that Vive la Revolution is a perfectly readable account of the revolution with - quelle surprise - some pretty limp jokes.

Steel appears to have read widely and then assembled a cut-and-paste account from those writers whose politics match up to his own. Why anyone would want to read the verdict of a bad comedian with an agenda, as opposed to the account of a fine historian with an enviable prose style - such as Simon Schama's Citizens - is a mystery. Steel seems well aware of this problem, and thus begins by trying to dismiss him: "Simon Schama in Citizens tells us that Marat 'made an art form of confrontational ugliness' as 'his eyes were not quite aligned'. After all, modern society would be so much fairer if we reverted to those quaint but effective 11th-century methods of judging people as unacceptable if they lack a symmetrical face."

Sorry, but a few weak jokes do not a dismissal make. And on and on it goes, snide references to historians who have actually had something worthwhile to say beyond "I'm a lefty, ha ha ha". It's not a wholly worthless book. Some of the jokes are mildly amusing - the best being his account of the invention of the guillotine: "introduced as a liberal measure and considered to be more humane than the old methods of execution, of which the most common involved strapping the victim to a water wheel until his back broke. So it's almost certain that when the guillotine was introduced, a French Ann Widdecombe will have complained, 'Doesn't this show that the Jacobins are soft on crime? For if the burglar knows that if he is caught he will merely be beheaded instantly without hours of agony on a water wheel, there is no deterrent whatsoever. Proving once again that Mr Robespierre is the burglar's friend.'"

But since I've just given you more or less the funniest part, I'm not sure why anyone would want to bother with Vive la Revolution. If you've got an A-level to sit, have never read anything about the French revolution and have only two hours to go before the exam, then the book might have something to offer, as it's a perfectly reasonable canter through the events. But if you're looking for jokes and you don't crease up at the description of Camille Desmoulins, who stuttered when he wasn't addressing a crowd, as "the Gareth Gates of the French revolution", then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.

The peerless Martin Samuel on the hilarious Leeds chairman, Professor John McKenzie:

These days, a player has to be ridden out of Elland Road on a rail. Out comes an indignant Professor John McKenzie brandishing faxes and e-mails that often seem to prove the point directly opposite to his own. He almost takes pride in the abysmal deal he has struck. In many ways, though, McKenzie is a national treasure. Fans at Luton Town, West Ham United and Arsenal must look at him and think: ?Well, it's bad ? but not that bad.?

The most amusing thing about Leeds chairmen is how ungrateful they are, con- sidering the circumstances. Remember all that energy Peter Ridsdale spent rubbishing Rio Ferdinand? Yet, had he not gone to Manchester United for almost £30 million, the board would be on the game by now.

Leeds initially opened talks with Liverpool about Harry Kewell earlier this year. Yet when the inevitable happened, they wanted to blame him for their own hopeless negotiations, having agreed that huge chunks of the fee should go to a third party.

I imagine the Professor as a particularly disputatious pet-shop owner. He has puppies in the window and a sign advertising their sale for £10. A man buys one and hands McKenzie a tenner. ?I see. So that's all you?re going to give me, then??

?But it says ten pounds.?

?Not much, though, is it??

?But it's what you asked for.?

?And you, you disloyal little toerag. I can?t believe you?re walking out just like that after all I?ve done. Well good riddance. Don?t worry about us. We?ll be all right.?

Man runs out of pet shop with puppy. McKenzie throws £10 into bottomless pit, walks to the window, slashes price to £5 and puts up sign saying EVERYTHING MUST GO.

?There. They won?t take me for a ride like that again.?

I thought this was some kind of British version of The Onion.

It isn't. It's true.

Sometimes you can but wonder why.

Johnny Rotten says the Sex Pistols want to play Baghdad:

If you are going to offer these people democracy, then offer it to them in their fullest extreme so they fully know what they're walking into. Because democracy has a few problems, mate, and the The Sex Pistols know that, but at least we can shout out about it, and that might be of some use to them.

So sweet of him.

Apologies for the lack of posts - computer problems. I hope to be back to normal tomorrow.

I suppose it's Sod's Law: the day after I speak at a gathering of bloggers and assorted internet experts - and get a pretty large number of links reporting the event - the screen on my spanking new computer decides that it should stop working.

I'm back on my old machine, which had become extremely grouchy, so I am at least in touch with the rest of the world. Sort of.

And now I wait to see how efficient Acer's customer services are...

Why does The Observer, an otherwise decent newspaper, still print the anti-semtitic ravings of the odious Richard Ingrams?

I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.

Interesting post on Howard Dean at British Spin, putting a more positive gloss on his candidacy than I, and others, have.

Might I offer a couple of small suggestions to those British citizens who would prefer not to stand trial in military tribunals where the punishment for some crimes can be execution? Don?t join terrorist organisations that fly planes at skyscrapers, and don?t dedicate your life to mass murder.

In all the grotesque campaign of disinformation, special pleading and mischief-making that seems to have gripped the entire chattering classes in recent days, one central fact about the nine British subjects being held in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, appears to have been overlooked. They were captured by US forces seeking out al-Qaeda terrorists whose central purpose is to inflict as much death and carnage as is physically possible. They were not arrested for shoplifting, for fraud, or even for an isolated act of murder. They were held because they were thought to be part of an organisation that, as 9/11 proved, has no concept of morality.

Astonishingly, there are otherwise sane people who have not yet cottoned on that we are at war: a war to defend our very existence. That means that the rules of the game have been changed. Not by President Bush, nor by others who are defending us, but by the terrorists themselves. We did not ask for this fight. Unless we meet it head on, however, we will lose.

That means, as the US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist has put it: ?It is neither desirable, nor is it remotely likely, that civil liberty will occupy as favoured a position in wartime as it does in peacetime.? That is the unavoidable impact of war.

There is, of course, nothing new about the arrangements being proposed for the trials of Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi. And yes, there will be trials; no one has yet been convicted of anything, although to judge from most of the commentariat's response, the men have already been sentenced to death.


The trials will, however, be military trials, as is appropriate for a time of war. Just as when, during the Second World War, President Roosevelt ordered that German spies who entered the US illegally to commit acts of terrorism should be tried in secret by military courts, and just as we too hold some trials in secret when the evidence is too dangerous to be heard in public, so the trials of today's terrorism suspects have to be specially formulated.

Of course, courts in which the judges and lawyers are all soldiers, and in which different rules of evidence apply, should make us uneasy. But they are, by definition, not normal courts. They have a specific and compelling purpose: judicial intervention against terrorism, to protect democracy.

Criticisms from pathologically anti-American politicians and commentators can easily be dismissed. What beggars belief, however, is that at such a pivotal period in the battle against terrorism, when it is crucial that those who are willing to join that fight stand firm, the British Government appears to be picking a fight with the Americans over the clearly sensible trial procedures of two British subjects who are alleged to have been plotting the destruction of the British, American and indeed all Western societies. Or would the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary prefer the two accused to be flown to Britain and be set free by the Crown Prosecution Service because it did not think it could secure a conviction?

Democracy is a fragile construct. Our greatest strength, our freedoms and rights, is also our Achilles? heel when we are confronted by an enemy that refuses to abide by the same rules. Circumstances change, and so must our response. Opponents of the military tribunals are, wittingly or not, al-Qaeda's friends.

For anyone planning on coming to the meeting on Monday about blogging and politics, please note that it's now at 7pm in the Grand Committee Room.

Be there or...watch Coronation Street.

This is perhaps the single most unenticing sentence ever to be written:

Eurosport are showing Wolfsburg against Marek Dupnitsa live this afternoon.

(From today's Racing Post football column.)

This piece by Victor Keegan in The Grauniad has it spot on:

(T)he biggest single factor that would help developing countries would not cost the west anything at all. In fact, developed countries would gain by doing it.

And what is this elixir? It is simple: abolish agricultural subsidies. Not some of them, but all of them, so that there is no scope for wriggling out of it.

Stand by for a paper to be released by the Centre for the New Europe, the think tank for which I work, with some truly devastating statistics on the impact of EU protectionism on Africa. I'll flag it up here.

Good posting on Howard Dean at Harry Hatchet & Friends. I was talking to some Republican strategist friends recently who were salivating at the prospect of a Bush-Dean battle.

They know that the President is deeply vulnerable on domestic issues - especially the economy - and an electable Democrat would pose a real challenge. But Dean? It would be Nixon-McGovern, they said as one.

Bring him on.

So just how incompetent do you have to be for this to happen?

The memorial fund set up in the name of Diana, Princess of Wales, has been forced to freeze its funds. The step, taken because of a costly legal battle with a US souvenir firm, puts 500 jobs at risk and could affect grants to its more than 120 beneficiaries.

The memorial fund, set up to help the causes Princess Diana campaigned for, has now approached other charities in an attempt to keep its projects going.

...In June 2002, the fund lost an attempt to prevent the [Franklin] Mint producing souvenirs, leaving it facing a £4m legal bill.

The fund and estate had argued the Mint's production of a "limited edition commemorative plate" soon after the princess's 1997 death violated their "exclusive rights" to Diana's name and image.

The action was thrown out after being labelled "groundless and unreasonable".

Now the mint is counter-suing, claiming punitive and exemplary damages...The Mint says that in 1998, Diana's estate "decided to run a public relations campaign". It says the estate launched legal action against the mint "on the theory that a high-profile lawsuit must be pursued to send a message to others".

Think about this for a second. When Diana died, the country was in a state of something close to mass hysteria. There could never have been a more propitious launch time for a charitable fund, with goodwill towards Diana which continues (albeit at a lesser level) to this day. That godwill was reflected in an astonishing level of generousity towards the fund.

(The fund reminded me at the time of the Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch about Points of View, with a succession of letters being read out from BBC license payers offering steadily increasing largesse - "I would willingly hand over the title deeds of my house to the BBC" - so great was their gratitude to the BBC for, well, being the BBC.)

Somehow, the trust's board, who were in charge of the money, have managed to pauperize the entire fund through their vexatious litigation.

The fund's chief executive is one Dr Andrew Purkis. Doctor of what, I wonder? Incompetence? Buffoonery?

For those who share my strange interest in all things 'parallel trade', here's an excellent paper by Jacob Arfwedson on the devastating impact of parallel trade in pharmaceuticals on the EU's capacity in that area.

I see that nice Chirac chappie has been having some harmless fun again.

I keep saying how good Oliver Kamm's new blog is, and it keeps getting better. This post on the LibDems' shameless inconsistency is devastating.

I've despised most Liberals ever since I worked for Peter Shore in Tower Hamlets and saw first hand just how grubby, unprincipled and racist they were in their campaigning. The LibDems are a magpie party, with wildly different appeal in different areas: in the East End they are the only real opposition to the Labour Party, and in parts of the South West, for instance, they are the only opposition to the Conservatives. And they make no attempt to reconcile that conflict, tailoring their local appeal to the lowest common denominator in each area.

The national LibDems appear to be free of their local activists' unscrupulousness - clearly, men like Menzies Campbell and Charles Kennedy aren't racist, whatever other defects they may have - but the truth of the matter is that their national platform is built on precisely the activities of those LibDems who shame the activity of politics.

I'm not sure how I've been able to live without these.

The Times reports today that
Foundation hospitals will have to prove that all sections of the local community are represented on their governing boards in order to win greater freedom from Whitehall control...The key new amendment, which places a legal duty on foundation hospitals to ensure that the board is ?grounded in the local community?, will be tabled by the Co-op group of MPs with government backing. The 29 Co-op MPs have tabled a second amendment obliging the new trusts to report annually on steps to ensure that all parts of the community are represented.

...Foundation hospitals will already be subject to another regulator, and will have to involve local communities in their running.

At the recent conference of the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS managers, two leading trusts expressed doubts about the way in which foundation hospitals would be governed. John Charlton, chairman of University Hospital Birmingham Trust, said that he was in favour of foundation status ?essentially to get certain people off our backs?. Health Service Journal reports that he added: ?Yes, let's have autonomy, let's have accountability, but for goodness sake don?t expect us to have a 5,000-strong membership. That would be an absolute nightmare.?

At the same meeting, Peter Dixon, chairman of University College Hospital in London, said that it was impossible to force people to help to form their hospital's policy. ?We will be choosing between the Hampstead Heath Conservation Society and the local Trotskyists,? he said.

What a mess. Foundation Hospitals were orginally conceived with only one purpose - introducing 'entrepreneurialism' into the NHS, and letting successful NHS managers get on with the job of spreading that success. Then Gordon Brown intervened to prevent Foundation Hospitals from borrowing (wihtout approval from a new regulator), the pre-requisite of any entrepreneurialism.

At a stroke the basic point of the idea was destroyed. They then became something altogether different - a virility test of the government's ability to push supposedly 'bold' reforms. Foundation Hospitals are now a proxy for a different, more general, fight over the Blair leadership - the opponents know that the impact of Foundation status will be minimal, but they have become a useful weapon with which to assault the PM and his supposed agenda.

And for Mr Blair, they are a token gesture of radicalism - and all the more important for that. But he too knows they are now waste of space, so he has started tinkering even further with the idea, adding and changing things to buy off the opponents.

Thus today's news of 'community boards'. God almighty! Can't they see the irony here? Foundation status was meant to rid managers of the constraints of the NHS's bureaucracy and tiers of power. Now they are proposing to saddle these hospitals with boards made up of every local Tom Dick and Harry loony activist, union reps, and Old Mother Reilly.

There can be no clearer demonstration of the dogs' dinner the government is making of public sector reform. Worse than useless, Foundation Status may now actually be something to be avoided like the plague.

If any of you need to be kept off the streets for an hour and a half or so next Monday (14th), I'm taking part in a seminar organised by Voxpolitics on blogging and politics. Details here. 5.30 at Portcullis House in Westminster.

Extremely fair piece in The Observer on the state of Iraq.

Here it is. No home is complete without one...

Interesting and thoughtful profile of Margaret Hodge by Leo McKinstry.

He makes an important point:

Of course, as she has admitted, she made some terrible mistakes, but the real blame should be focused on the senior social services managers who not only allowed assaults by their employees to go unchallenged but, disgracefully, misled Margaret Hodge when she asked about the allegations that had been put to her by the London Evening Standard.

I was the head of the personnel committee at the time and I remember how, in private meetings, the top officials from the social work department were contemptuously dismissive of the claims of abuse. It was this kind of bureaucratic arrogance that encouraged Hodge to make her now infamous remark that the Standard was indulging in "gutter journalism".

With hindsight, none of us should have attached such credence to the so-called "professional" judgment of the council's officials. Even so, it is absurd to portray Hodge as the villain, and the senior social work staff as the heroic crusaders for justice.

Quite right. Yes, Mrs Hodge deserves criticism for her mistakes. But let's not forget two things: first, the culture of the time was very different - child abuse was rarely considered a reality; and secondly, the council offers lied repeatedly to her about what was going on. Indeed, there was a police investigation at the time which found no evidence of abuse. Even Liz Davies, the then anonymous source who has now revealed her identity, says this in today's Observer:

'Davies admits it is possible Hodge was not told the details of what she was reporting. I had little direct contact with her. It is possible that no one was telling her what we were telling them.'

As Leo McKinstry says, With hindsight, none of us should have attached such credence to the so-called "professional" judgment of the council's officials. Professional judgement was far more widely and unquestioningly accepted then than it is today. And even in today's less reverential times, the likes of Sir Roy Meadow have still been able to hoodwink other professionals and juries into believing their warped views because of their so-called professional expertise.

Margaret Hodge may have exemplified some of the old 'loony left' madness of Labour in the 1980s but she learned she was wrong long before it became politically expedient to do so in order to rise within the Labour Party. There are many other 'mainstream' New Labour types whose ditching of their so-called principles was strikingly co-incident with the rise of Tony Blair to the leadership. It would be invidious to point out individiuals, so I will: Peter Hain. And as for Valerie Amos - supposedly the newest of New Labour ministers, Baroness Amos was an equal opportunities officer for Camden Council, about as low as you could get at the time in loony Labour pond life.

It was clearly politically bizarre of Tony Blair to give Margaret Hodge her current job. It didn't require a seer to predict what would happen. But if we can put the personal vilification to one side for a moment, might not her past experience, and the shattering lessons, make Mrs Hodge precisely the right person to be Minister for Children?

Not letters this time, but e mails.

Look, I hate tennis. OK, so maybe I'm the one who's missing out, maybe footie is just for morons, maybe only inbreds like horse racing and maybe cricket is played by public school thickies - to cite some of the comments I have received since I started saying how bored I am by watching two people hit a ball back and forward until one of them misses.

I hate it, and I can't even begin to understand why anyone enjoys it. But it's my decision, just as it's yours if you want to watch it. But the fact that we all get to decide what we enjoy doesn't mean we can't think some of the choices made are wrong.

I think people who watch tennis are wrong. Big deal. Live with it, and don't be so sensitive!

Rosemary Righter is spot on writing about Berlusconi:

Yes, he would have done better to keep his cool. Yes, he should have remembered that gibes, particularly barbed-wire ones, sting hardest in translation. Yes, he must have known that telling a German that he would be right for a bit movie part as a Nazi concentration camp ?trusty? was not going to add to the sum of brotherly love.

But there is a sickening hypocrisy about the righteous harrumphing in Berlin, where Gerhard Schröder stooped to the stagey ploy of putting calls from Rome on hold, and about the pompous strutting in Strasbourg of the offended ?dignity? of the European Parliament. Dignity had gone to the dogs, a whole slavering pack of them, well before Berlusconi bit back.

The occasion was a formal one, the presentation that takes place at the outset of each rotating EU presidency. Berlusconi treated it with appropriate seriousness, delivering an accomplished, thoughtful speech. He, and the country he leads, were entitled to the customary courtesy of an adult debate on its substance.

What did he get? Before he even opened his mouth, a raucous claque of Green and left-wing MEPs waved placards plastered with the best insults they could plagiarise (the favourite, ?No Godfather for Europe?, was a lift from Der Spiegel's oh-so-witty cover story). His speech was greeted by a barrage of invective, all of it ad hominem, much of it infantile, some of it contemptible ? the French Communist's calling the Berlusconi Government ?barbaric? or the Belgian MEP's accusing him of laying Italy waste as did Attila the Hun. Martin Schulz, the deservedly obscure German Socialist now enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, was the last in a discreditable line-up of nincompoops who disgraced democracy by their inability to tell the difference between free speech and the political equivalent of a wrecker's demolition ball.

The Parliament's Speaker spinelessly ignored this trashing of protocol, bringing down his gavel only in defence of the last to provoke offence. To demand a formal apology from Berlusconi, after that, reminds me of a gaggle of Nobel peace laureates who once, at Hiroshima, spent three full hours expatiating on the evils of the Bomb without once mentioning that Japan had plunged Asia into war. Parliament owes the Italian Prime Minister an apology of its own.

Right, then. The rowdy Red-Green bunch conspired to drown out Berlusconi's speech because it is not just Citizen Berlusconi the media tycoon whom they fear and detest, but his ambitions to make Europe less bureaucratic, more outward- looking and capable of adult partnership with America. Nor will they forgive his inexcusable presumption in asserting that Italians have as much right as the French or Germans to be heard in Europe's councils....

It was, of course, perfectly fine when Herta Daubler-Gmelin, the German Justice Minister, compared Bush to Hitler.

"My life somehow feels less than complete with Timbo out of Wimbledon." A direct quote from no one, ever (except perhaps Mr and Mrs H).

The biggest post bag I have ever had was when I wrote after Britain had lost to the US in the Davis Cup, 'who cares, it's only tennis'. Vitriolic doesn't even come close.

Well...who cares, it's only tennis.

An American friend sent this to me. It's been attributed to State Representative Mitchell Kaye from GA.

Happy 4th July?

THE NEW US CONSTITUTION

We, the sensible people of the United States, in an attempt to help everyone get along, restore some semblance of justice, avoid any more riots, keep our nation safe, promote positive behavior, and secure the blessings of debt free liberty to ourselves and our great-great-great-grandchildren, hereby try one more time to ordain and establish some common sense guidelines for the terminally whiny, guilt-ridden, delusional and other liberal bed-wetters. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that a whole lot of people are confused by the Bill of Rights and are so dim that they require a Bill of No Rights.

ARTICLE I:
You do not have the right to a new car, big screen TV or any other form of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them, but no one is guaranteeing anything.

ARTICLE II:
You do not have the right to never be offended. This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone -- not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc., but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be ... and like the rest of us you need to simply deal with it.

ARTICLE III:
You do not have the right to be free from harm. If you stick a screwdriver in your eye, learn to be more careful; do not expect the tool manufacturer to make you and all your relatives independently wealthy.

ARTICLE IV:
You do not have the right to free food and housing. Americans are the most charitable people to be found, and will gladly help anyone in need, but we are quickly growing weary of subsidizing generation after generation of professional couch potatoes who achieve nothing more than the creation of another generation of professional couch potatoes.

ARTICLE V:
You do not have the right to free health care. That would be nice, but from the looks of public housing, we're just not interested in public health care.

ARTICLE VI:
You do not have the right to physically harm other people. If you kidnap, rape, intentionally maim, or kill someone, don't be surprised if the rest of us want to see you fry in the electric chair.

ARTICLE VII:
You do not have the right to the possessions of others. If you rob, cheat or coerce away the goods or services of other citizens, don't be surprised if the rest of us get together and lock you away in a place where you still won't have the right to a big screen color TV, pool tables, weight rooms or a life of leisure.

ARTICLE VIII:
You don't have the right to a job. All of us sure want you to have a job, and will gladly help you along in hard times, but we expect you to take advantage of the opportunities of part time jobs, education and vocational training laid before you to make yourself useful.

ARTICLE IX:
You do not have the right to happiness. Being an American means that you have the right to PURSUE happiness --which by the way, is a lot easier if you are unencumbered by an overabundance of idiotic laws created by those of you who were confused by the Bill of Rights.

ARTICLE X:
This is an English speaking country. We don't care where you are from. We welcome you here. English is our language and like the one you left behind, we also have a culture. Learn it or go back to the country and the living conditions you were fleeing.

Gloriously cruel Guardian diary story:

Distressing news of mental cruelty at the online polling firm YouGov. One of the guv'nors is Stephan Shakespeare, campaign chief for Jeffrey Archer's sadly curtailed run for London mayor, and Jeffrey often rings him for chats even now (if he wants to swap his snout for phone cards as his porridge comes to a close, that's his affair). Sadly, the staff at YouGov have a game they play when he does so. Stephan is out of the office, they say, but we'll take a message and get him to call you back. And then they suddenly remember Jeffrey can't be called back, and apologise dementedly. Poor show.

It reminds me of Dame Edna's first question to the Lord on her interview show a while ago:

So, Jeffrey Archer: is there no beginning to your talents?

Masochists amongst you can hear me tonight at 8pm on The Moral Maze on Radio 4, talking about the morality of intervention in Iran and elsewhere.

How can you not love Silvio?

Daniel Pipes on hypocrtical attitudes to Israel:

In an agreement brokered over the weekend by U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Palestinian terrorist groups agreed to a temporary cease-fire on condition that Israel ceases its practice of "targeted killings" (executing would-be terrorists before they have a chance to organize or act). But Israelis reserve the right to use this tactic to protect themselves.
And where does the U.S. government stand on this issue? On both sides, actually. It finds targeted killings "unhelpful" when done by Israeli troops but "very good" when done by Americans. Thus, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher condemned Israel's September 2002 attack on Mohamed Deif: "We are against targeted killings. We are against the use of heavy weaponry in urban areas, even when it comes to people like Mohamed Deif, who have been responsible for the deaths of American citizens. We do think these people need to be brought to justice."

A few weeks after this incident, however, U.S. forces deployed an unmanned plane to drop a bomb on an al Qaeda operative, Ali Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, as he traveled by car in Yemen. A Pentagon official praised this as "a very successful tactical operation" to "keep the pressure on" al Qaeda. No talk here about bringing Harthi to justice.

Another superb Michael Ledeen piece on Iran - as always:

This administration clearly has no stomach for any sort of campaign against the mullahs, at least for the moment. But it can no more avoid the showdown with the mullahs than it can cause Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to surrender; this is a fight for survival, and they will not permit us the luxury of setting the timetable at our convenience.

That means there must be regime change in Tehran. In their hearts, or perhaps at a somewhat lower level, our leaders know that. Even the admittedly limited information in the hands of our intelligence community shows the pattern of Iranian skullduggery, and it is only a matter of time before the mullahs pull off some murderous assault large enough to compel us to act. They still fondly remember their glory days in Lebanon, when they killed hundreds of Americans in a single suicidal stroke, an event incautiously recalled by Bashar Assad in the first days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. That is what undoubtedly awaits our fighting men and women if we do not move first to support the freedom fighters in Iran.

But even if Iraq were peaceful and flourishing and headed towards democracy in the near future, indeed even if there had been no September 11 and thus no war against the terror masters, our refusal to call for regime change in Tehran would still be a disgrace. Blair and Bush have warm words for the demonstrators, but no Western government has called for an end to the Iranian tyranny. Hell, they haven't even called for the release of the thousands of political prisoners or for the release of the many journalists rounded up during the demonstrations of the past two weeks.

July 9 is coming soon. Nothing would encourage the Iranian people more than a clear declaration that the United States is with them, and against their oppressors.

If this Guardian story is correct, then it's surely game, set and match to No 10:

The BBC is willing to offer the government an olive branch by admitting that the source who claimed that No 10 had "sexed up" intelligence information may not have been entirely correct.

But it will do so only if Downing Street accepts that its story was legitimate in the context of general concern about the government's use of intelligence material.

...Some at the BBC believe a compromise is possible. "If they accept we were justified to run the story in the context of general concerns about the use of intelligence, then we might be able to say that our source might not have got absolutely everything right," a knowledgeable insider said.

Eh? The Today programme did not just say: 'Oh, here's a funny thing, some bloke's told us that Ally C sexed up a dossier. Wonder if that's true?'. It reported the story as fact.

And now, it seems, the BBC is trying to worm its way out of a clash it knows it can't win - because it's wrong - by saying our source might not have got absolutely everything right.

Too bloody right. As Mr C keeps saying: was their source on the JIC? Did he know everything? Are he and Andrew Gilligan - the man who reported from Baghdad that the Iraqis were worse off after Saddam had fallen than under his regime - the only ones who are in the right, and the heads of the Security Service, the JIC, the FCO, the MoD, the PM, the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary all wrong, and lying about it?

It's probably too much to hope that the war brings about the end not just of Saddam but also of the BBC, an organisation which extorts money from the public on pain of imprisonment, and uses that money to fund the broadcast of left-liberal propoganda.

But it's possible. With the charter renewal process just beginning, these are hardly the most propitious circumstances for the BBC.

Say after me: yippee!

Here's a geeky but fascinating piece of detective work on the Iraq dossier.

(via Voxpolitics)

So Banksy wants to see whether Roman Abramovich is a fit and proper person to be taking over a club like Chelsea.

So any new owner has to be a tossser?

A drug called nootropil, normally used to help stroke victims, has been heralded as a new wonder cure for hangovers. To tests its claims, and purely in the interests of science, you understand, our correspondent indulged in a night of alcoholic excess at one of Brussels's finest restaurants.

Come to Brussels, my friend said. Eat in the Sea Grill, a two-star Michelin restaurant. Drink whatever takes your fancy from the wine list, and have as much of it as you can manage.
All you have to do in return is take part in a small experiment ? putting to the test a pill that supposedly wards off hangovers. Pop one before you start drinking, then another after drinking, and wake up with a clear head.

It's what is technically known as a no-brainer. I booked my Eurostar ticket as soon as he put down the phone, and at 8 o?clock on Friday was sitting in the restaurant preparing to take part in much the most pleasurable experiment I have come across.

The pill is called Nootropil. It's been around for more than 20 years, and is not some alternative-medicine nonsense, but a genuine, tested, regulated pharmaceutical; just not as a hangover pill.

Nootropil is not, and has never been, claimed by its manufacturers, the Belgian pharmaceutical company USB, as an anti-hangover pill. Rather, it's the most common ?nootropic?, a class of drug designed to stimulate the cerebral cortex and increase the rate of metabolism and hence energy level of brain cells. Clinically, its main use is protecting the brain from damage caused by oxygen starvation, and to help recovery from that. Thus minor stroke victims are often prescribed Nootropil.

It has another widespread use: boosting thinking power. Nootropil is similar in chemical structure to the amino acid pyroglutamate, found in meat, vegetables, fruits and dairy products. When your mother told you that eating such foods would make you brighter, she wasn?t far off.

Nootropil speeds up the flow of messages between the left and right halves of the brain. Students sometimes take it before exams.

It may not have been intended as a hangover pill, but then Viagra wasn?t originally an impotence pill. It was developed to improve the blood supply to the heart of angina sufferers, and its rather useful side-effect was discovered accidentally. But the number of men who suffer from erectile dysfunction is minuscule compared with the number who get a hangover after drinking ? let alone after drinking the copious quantities that I intended to sink.

If Nootropil does what those supposedly in the know claim, then its manufacturers are sitting on a goldmine. The good news is that it is available over the counter; the bad news (except possibly for hardened tequila drinkers) is that this applies only in Mexico. Here, it is available only on prescription, and only for its original purpose, although hard-working and hard-drinking young doctors have been known to avail themselves of its alternative properties.

There cannot be many laboratories described in the Michelin Guide as ?exquisite? and awarded two stars for their ?ambitious? cooking, so as I began my quest on your, and every other drinker's, behalf, the task did not seem too onerous. I decided that it would be a crime to waste the opportunity of exploring as many as possible of the cellar's Languedoc-Roussillon wines, particular favourites of mine. So to accompany the spectacularly good first course ? tuna carpaccio with foie gras and truffle shavings ? I began with a 2002 Vin de Pays d?Oc, Domaine Marie des Fontaines. This was slightly disappointing, I have to confess; rather too cloyingly peachy. Still, I couldn?t let the experiment falter at the outset, and I forced three glasses down.

Things looked up with the next course: veal sweetbreads with a ginger and lemon jus. The 2000 Sieur d?Arques, Toques et Clochers, Limoux (Haut-Vallée), is a sophisticated chardonnay ? a light and elegant, vaguely lemony wine, which was far more like it. Four glasses, and the beginnings of light-headedness.

The herb-crusted red mullet with a fennel mousse and Saint-Emilion sauce was well met by the 1999 Chateau Les Pins, a light but substantial red. Four glasses and, oh, yes, we?re getting there.

Raspberry Mille-Feuilles to finish, with a 1995 Rivesaltes Regis Boucabeille. Three dessert wine glasses and definite merriment.

Years of experience have taught me that nothing guarantees an epic hangover better than port and cigars, so time for a Cuban Cohiba Esplendidos and Taylors 1977. This port is as good as it gets, and I made sure ? on your behalf, remember, to push forward the frontiers of knowledge ? to have as much as I could. I?m sorry, I?m sorry, I?m sorry; but by this stage I had lost track of the exact amount. I might not get a hangover in the morning, but I am only human. And drunk. Let's say three glasses for the sake of argument.

Just to be certain of a hangover I retired to the bar, and did the ultimate no-no: mixed wine and spirits, with a welcoming succession of single malts: Glenmorangie, Laphroaig and Bruichladdich.

And that, I hope you?ll agree, is a pretty good workout, and as good a test for the wonder pill as anyone could manage.

I do not have the fondest memories of excess drinking in Brussels. The worst hangover I have had ? so bad that I still recall its nauseous thumping ? was when, as a student, I had a night with friends on Belgian beer. When I woke up the following morning and realised the full extent of my trauma, I had a realisation that multiplied the pain exponentially: in a few hours I had to be in Ostend to get on a ferry. Here's some advice you don?t need: next time you have a hangover, try thinking about being on a rough ferry-crossing on the North Sea. There. Bet that makes you feel sick even now.

But all of that should, if Nootropil is the pill they say it is, be a thing of the past. So to bed ? and to the morning of judgment.

I woke on Saturday with a clear head and a sense of triumph. It had worked! Never again need days be lost to the after-effects of the night before. The pill was a work of genius, a wonder drug. The world was a better place.

I had booked an early train back to London just to ensure that the pill was given a proper workout. No hangover cure, after all, is worth bothering with if it needs a lie-in to work. So on Saturday morning I was in the departure lounge, a smile on my face as I realised the scale of my triumph over a certain hangover.

As if. Euripides knew what he was talking about: those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. The worst hangovers are the slow burners ? the ones that creep up on you when you think you?ve left the danger behind. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the worst hangover suffered by mankind. The sweating, writhing, barely-conscious lump in coach 9, seat 25, on the 09:56 from Brussels to Waterloo was me. I was barely alive, as one could only reasonably expect after 11 glasses of wine and three each of dessert wine, port and whisky.

Nootropil might work for some people ? indeed, my drinking companions all reported excellent results ? but it didn?t work for me. Benjamin Franklin wasn?t quite right when he said that ?nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes?. He forgot hangovers.

I'm the subject of a Times leader! I'm the subject of a Times leader!