Labour party

Taking a cue from Vogue and other glossy mags, the New Statesman has decided to liven things up attract some publicity by inviting a celebrity to be "Guest Editor" for a forthcoming issue. Their choice? Alastair Campbell. Among his ideas? This: As well as the articles I've already commissioned, one of the pages will be handed over to 'LabourListers' and others to finish the phrase: 'if I could get one sentence into Labour’s manifesto for the next election, it would say this...' I want to do this because, for all that the Tories may be ahead in the polls, and taking that position for granted, I think the battle of policy ideas still has more energy on the left than the right, and I hope this page will reflect that.

There's some really fascinating stuff knocking around today. Rachel Sylvester's column in The Times is really quite extraordinary. She claims that in a conference call with Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls, the Prime Minister could not be persuaded to concentrate on domestic policy and kept returning to the international global crisis. Were there others involved in the call or is one of Balls or Mandelson briefing the Blairite Sylvester (hmm, I wonder)? Pete Hoskin over at Coffee House has suggested that the level of humility in Alistair Darling's interview in today's Telegraph and similar noises from Ed Balls suggest that perhaps Brown will go for a mea culpa of his own in America.

Harriet Harman's proposal for legislation designed to target a single person - Sir Fred Goodwin - who, whatever his other failings, has not yet been charged wth any crime, seem even more extraordinary today than they did yesterday. Daniel Hannan puts the matter into some historical context: Harriet Harman is proposing that a law be introduced aimed at a specific individual, retrospectively to criminalise something that was legal at the time. Such laws were known mediaevally as Acts of Attainder: they declared someone guilty after the event, and with no trial. Attainder Bills were introduced very rarely, usually following a gross abuse of ministerial power or an open insurrection.

I've been teaching the politics specialism at City University's journalism course and I've been pleasantly surprised how much fun it has been. I was warned before I started that my student would be barely literate, apathetic lumps with just a passing knowledge of British politics. I was surprised how few of them regularly read a newspaper, but I have found them, for the most part, well informed and engaged. My job is to provide them with insights into the job of a political reporter, which mainly involved me droning on about my scoops and great victories over the forces of darkness. But from time to time I wheel out a special guest.

Polly Toynbee is always worth reading. Her latest column is no exception. For all that one might disagree with her, indeed even be infuriated by her, there's always something useful to be gleaned from her columns. Still, there's a kind of panicked resignation about this latest one and an implied acceptance that Labour are doomed. The only thing that can save them? Massive increases in spending and government debt apparently. Well it's an idea... I confess that, rather mean-spiritedly, my favourite bit was this: In the dream scenario, Brown ascends the world stage to head a beefed-up IMF, but few imagine the man who wanted it so much can confess he wasn't leadership material after all. A Captain Oates walk to save the party he loves is an unlikely act for a man who admits no mistakes.

Like King Canute, Marie Antoinette is a much-misunderstood and, generally speaking, a much and unfairly maligned figure. Disappointingly, this time the guilty party is my old boss Iain Martin. For shame. Iain hazards that Peter Mandelson's suggestion that everyone try and keep their heads in these turbulent times since there is "no value in creating frenzy" is but the latest "Marie Antoinettish" comment from the noble lord. In the first place, Marie Antoinette probably never said "Let them eat cake". Secondly, if she had she would scarcely have been the first to suggest that the populace switch to brioche in times of shortage.

Brother Bright gives some of his reasons for hoping that Labour will prevail at the next election here. As a good man of the left, one would expect no less from him. And he's right, I think, to suppose that we'd be facing many of the same problems had David Cameron and Georgie Osbourne been running the country these past five years. In that sense, you can undertsand the frustration some of the Prime Minister's supporters must feel. Not all of this is the PM's fault, but he's the only fellow the public can kick. But for those of us who aren't automatically attached to any party the calculation is pretty simple: no-one, except in th direst circumstances, shoul ever be entrusted with four consecutive terms. Thirteen years is enough.

What I am about to do makes me more nervous than any other piece of writing I have embarked on since my first forays into journalism in the late 1980s. During most of my career I have had the luxury of writing for "people like me": the sort of middle-class liberals who read the Guardian or the Observer and carry those publications under their arms as the outward symbols of their right-minded decency. I spent 15 years writing for one or other newspaper. I was deeply honoured during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 to be described as a "liberal eurotrash" on the right-wing Drudge Report website. Until last month I was the political editor of the New Statesman, the iconic magazine of the Fabian left and damn proud to be so.

A friend of mine, once armed with impeccable progressive credentials, recently came out s a Conservative - much to the bemusement of his family and many of his friends. With Neill's permission, here's the explanation he published on his Facebook page. Sure, this is just one person's story, but I wonder how many other people might have come to similar conclusions after 12 years of Labour government. Anyway, I think this a pretty persuasive critique of Labour in power: I grew up in a Tory-hating family in Thatcher's Britain. In those divided times, we were definitely not "one of us" - Mum was a teacher, Dad brought up the kids and we lived in a council house. In fact, the shocked response of my family on this wall has been a relief, because it means they are still speaking to me!

The National Gallery of Scotland needs to raise £50m to prevent the sale of Titian's Diana and Actaeon from being sold. The painting, part of the Bridgewater Collection, has been loaned to the gallery for decades but is now being sold by its owner, the Duke of Sutherland. Well, £50m is quite a lot of money. Then again, it's a pretty nifty painting (though my own tastes run a little later - to Caravaggio and Velazquez in particular). Anyway, it's hard to imagine there being any discussion in France or Italy or Germany of the rights and wrongs of committing public money to the fund-raising effort.

I don't mean to pick on Tom Harris. After all, I think it a very good thing that MPs should have their own blogs. And, as it happens, I have no firm opinion either way on the desirability or not of a third runway at Heathrow airport. But I thought this a telling part of Mr Harris's latest post on the matter: I’M DISAPPOINTED by the announcement that we’ll have to wait until next year to get a decision on a third runway at Heathrow. But I concede that 70,000 submissions to the consultation will have to be considered and that might take a little while. And given that a judicial review - whatever the decision - is inevitable, consideration must be seen to be thorough.

Tom Harris's blog is a very useful creation. Now as it happens I don't think that parliamentary democracy is under threat because Damien Green was arrested, disgraceful though that arrest certainly was. Nonetheless, there's little doubt that this government has, time and time again and to an extent that may be as modern as it is largely unprecedented, ignored ancient parliamentary procedures and consistently demonstrated a contempt for "old-fashioned" concepts of liberty and the rule of law. Thus Mr Harris's latest post is usefully illuminating. He writes: As the right-hand man to Shami Chakrabarti the then Shadow Home Secretary, David “Remember him?