Not a great showing by Jeremy Paxman last night as he wrestled with a Welshman* (who seemed to be named after an Icelandic volcano) and lost. And it wasn't even close. Immensely entertaining, therefore. The real fun starts just after the two minute mark: *Plaid Cymru's** economics advisor Eurfyl ap Gwilym. **Typo fixed, Jeremy.
Labour high command will be very satisfied with Brown’s performance on Marr this morning. There was far less of the tetchiness that we usually see from Brown in interviews and by being invited to talk about the ash cloud and the government’s response to it at the beginning, Brown was able to assume some of the aura of his office as Prime Minister. The interview saw the debut of Brown’s latest rewriting of history. Apparently he has always been for bringing in the liberals (exact quote to follow when the BBC release the transcript) and a ‘progressive consensus’. This will come as a shock to anyone who has read Paddy Ashdown’s diaries or talked to those involved in the discussions between the two parties in the mid to late nineties.
Want some more David Cameron? Well, the Tories are happy to oblige. After their party leader's speech yesterday, he is interviewed in the FT and appeared on the Today programme earlier. The FT interview was certainly the more comfortable of the two. In it, Cameron stikes a confident note – saying that his party have "come a long way," and that "people are gagging for change". And he stresses that he thinks – and, apparently, Ken Clarke thinks – that George Osborne is "the right person" to be Chancellor. But Cameron had a tougher time in his Today Programme interview. It started well, with Today highlighting the supportive letter that business leaders have written about the Tories' national insurance cut.
...according to the Beeb just now. And if you watched tonight's Dispatches programme, you'll know exactly why. Nick Robinson comments that the "Labour leadership" will delight in "taking revenge" on three figures who have ruffled Brown's feathers on multiple occasions – so it continues to look like backbiting and politicking will take priority over geniune reform. A grubby Parliament just got considerably grubbier.
The various parties involved in the televised leaders' debate have finally come to an agreement on how they will work. You can read full details here, courtesy of Sky. But the main points are: i) Topics and locations. The first debate will be hosted by ITV's Alastair Stewart, in Manchester, and will cover domestic affairs. The second will be Sky's Adam Boulton, in Bristol, and will cover foreign policy. And the third will be the Beeb's David Dimbleby, in Birmingham, on the economy. ii) Structure. The rather rigid structure of each programme will be as follows: "Each leader will make an opening statement on the theme of the debate lasting for 1 minute. After the three opening statements the moderator will take the first question on the agreed theme.
Apart from the odd terrorist plot and the beginning of an already very nasty election campaign, nothing much has happened in my absence! Yes I had a nice Christmas and New Year, thanks. It certainly made a change from being threatened with a libel action by an Iraqi billionaire as I was last year. And yes, I was not entirely serious when I described the festive break as Winterval in my last post. I even attended a very traditional village nativity play and loved it. The telly was traditionally dreadful. But one of the highlights of my Christmas was watching Matt Smith regenerate as the new Dr Who, which confirmed beyond any doubt the genius of the producers of the cruelly discontinued BBC poiitical drama Party Animals.
It has taken eight years, but Tony Blair has finally leveled with the British public and admitted that the WMD thing didn’t really matter: he wanted to depose Saddam Hussein anyway. That's what he has said in a BBC interview, presumably to pre-empt his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry. His chosen confessor: Fern Britton. His medium: BBC1 on Sunday. It has been trailed to the newspapers, including tomorrow’s Times. As it says: "He said it was the 'threat' that Saddam presented to the region that was uppermost in his mind. The development of weapons of mass destruction was one aspect of that threat. Mr Blair said that there had been 12 years of the United Nations going 'to and fro' on the subject, and he noted that Saddam had used chemical weapons on his own people.
Alistair Darling normally strikes us as an honest man dropped into an impossible situation. But whether he misspoke, or whether he set out to mislead, he told a lie on the Today Programme this morning which needs to be highlighted. So what was it? That non-ringfenced departmental budgets would remain "pretty much flat" rather than receiving significant, if not sufficient, cuts. As Fraser demonstrated yesterday, there were spending cuts hidden in the Budget and we'll see the full extent of those as soon as the IFS processes the numbers later today. Last time around, after April's Budget, they calculated cuts of 7 percent across three years. Thanks to a few more ringfenced budgets here and there, those cuts could even be deeper this time around.
Just watching Newsnight, and the show's economics editor, Paul Mason, has said we can expect several budgets to be ringfenced from spending cuts in tomorrow's PBR – hospitals, schools and perhaps even the social security budget. If so, it's another sign of how political the document is set to be. Ringfenced budgets are the other side of the soak-the-rich coin: sending out the twin message that Labour will batter the "City fat cats," while also "investing" in public services "for the many". Just a shame that it's all insufficient to the scale of the debt crisis.
All hail, Jeremy Hunt, the axe man. Cameron’s first tax cut will be a licence fee cut* – and Hunt is planning to axe some stations to pay for it. Hunt is thinking of axing 1Extra, apparently, with BBC3 and BBC4 already under threat. Also under Hunt’s axe would be the National Lottery’s runnng costs. The Sunday Times apparently has the details tomorrow, but I give Hunt this warning: if he even tiptoes in the direction of Cbebbies then he will have a revolution on his hands. Parents depend on it now, utterly. Personally, I’d pay £100 a year just for it – just for its kid-sedating powers. But it makes you think: digital television does allow a subscription model and the BBC could well spin off many of these channels.
Here are the stand-out findings from today's YouGov poll, conducted after this week's Question Time, for the Telegraph: "The survey found that 22 per cent of voters would 'seriously consider' voting for the BNP in a future local, general or European election. This included four per cent who said they would 'definitely' consider voting for the party, three per cent who would 'probably' consider it, and 15 per cent who said they were 'possible' BNP voters." This just reinforces my qualms about Thursday night's show. Yes, Griffin embarrassed himself in front of a hostile audience and panel, but that may not have mattered. He had already reached out to any potential voters before the cameras were switched on.
Mobs of howling protestors outside the BBC. Police cordons being smashed by anti-fascists. News clips of upended students being dragged across the foyer of the TV Centre shouting, ‘Shame on you for defending fascism.’ It was chaotic, it was emotive, it was anarchic. But, ultimately, it was a marvellously British occasion. Thanks to the BNP, we were given proof tonight of the rag-bag unity of our society. No one is quite sure how Nazi bogeyman Nick Griffin was smuggled into the Shepherds Bush studios for the recording of Question Time. The best evidence is that he stowed away in a lorry driven by an unsuspecting dupe who failed to check the back of his rig. When Griffin entered everyone was amazed that his suit was unsmeared by bunged eggs.
There's only one question that counts now that Question Time has been shown: did it do Nick Griffin and the BNP any good? It's a tough one to answer. To my eyes, at least, Griffin embarrassed himself in front of the cameras - he was given scant opportunity to gloss over his more unsavoury views; he looked terribly uncomfortable whenever the debate ran away from him; and the other panellists scored most of the major points. But we largely expected that anyway. Griffin was always going to come under heavy questioning, and he was never going to have many friends in the audience. Like Fraser, I fear that much of Griffin's job had been done before he appeared in front of the cameras.
First question on the Second World War. Is it fair BNP hijacked Churchill? Straw says in the war Britain defeated a party based on race like the BNP. The BNP defines itself by race - that distinguishes it from every other party. All other parties have a moral compass. Nazism didn't and neither does the BNP. We only won the First and Second World War because we were joined by millions of black and Asian people. Applause. Griffin then counters by saying Churchill would have been in BNP. He described Churchill as Islamaphobic by today's standards. "The government is giving up on British freedom," said Griffin. An audience member says the BNP are an absolute disgrace. For just one minute think of the benefits black people people have brought to the UK. "You are trying to poison politics.
The first results from Question Time are landing. An audience member has just told me that Griffin was "humiliated by the whole panel". All of them "did well", I am told. And Jack straw accused him of being the Dr Strangelove of UK politics: a fantasing conspiracy theorist.
There was a very good piece by my colleague Martin Ivens in last week’s Sunday Times which asked how the BBC had come to estrange politicians of every party, along with most of the country. Ever willing to help, the BBC provided a partial explanation last week with two decisions of particular stupidity and crassness. First it let slip that it was advertising for a newsreader over the age of fifty – a cringeworthy piece of tokenism motivated by a barrage of complaints that the corporation has been guilty of ageism. Such an advert would, of course, be discriminatory itself and would not remotely address the issue of ageism. There would just be one older-than-average newsreader, instead of none.
Andrew Marr asking Gordon Brown if he was on anti-depressants was a real surprise. When I first heard that Marr had put this question to Brown, I thought there was a possibility that Labour aides had let it be known that the Prime Minister would like the chance to shoot down these rumours. But Brown’s reaction, suggests he wasn’t expecting the question. One can see why Marr asked the question: if Brown was on anti-depressants that could affect his judgement then the public has a right to know. It wasn’t in the public interest, as Andrew Marr seemed to acknowledge in his interview with George Osborne, that the BBC sat on the story of Charles Kennedy’s drinking. Also, one can argue that once the rumour is out there it needs to be dealt with.
Unsurprisingly, the BBC wants the government to increase the number of sporting events that have to be shown on "free-to-air" [sic] television. But it's hard to see why there needs to be any list of "protected" sport on terrestial television in the first place, let alone why that list should be expanded. Here's the BBC's argument: The BBC insists the protected list should be retained and its submission argues that "to limit access to those willing and able to subscribe to pay-TV would threaten the fabric of our sporting and cultural nation".
Apparently the BBC is finally going to show The Wire. Hurrah. Previously it's only been available on FX in Britain. Well that's all fine and dandy. But it's not as though the series was a mystery. It debuted in 2002 and has received rave reviews form critics for at least the last three years. And yet no BBC (or Channel 4) executive thought to buy it before now? Strange. Rum too that the corporation should wait for much of its target audience to have already seen the show before deciding to screen it themselves. Just about anyone who has purchased the DVD box sets (all five series currently lie in the top 12 box set chart at Amazon.co.uk) is likely to have lent them to someone else who will in turn have introduced yet more people to the show.
Lord knows, we all blunder from time to time. Still, this is pretty impressive: "Each year, in my last Economic View before Christmas, I try to shed some light on economic events of the previous 12 months by comparing what has actually happened with expectations published here in early January. This year, even more than usual, reading back through January's predictions has been a shock. Almost all have turned out to be wrong". Anatole Kaletsky, The Times, 18/12/06."My last article of every year looks back on the predictions I made in early January to shed some light on the economic and financial events of the previous 12 months. This tends to be a humbling experience, and this year it is even more so than usual." Anatole Kaletsky, The Times, 31/12/07.