James Forsyth

Kevin Maguire, who is extremely well connected within the Brown circle, has an interesting little item about what Gordon Brown might do once the electorate, or the Labour party, have given him his marching orders: “Academia may not be Brown’s sole destination, whenever he departs No 10. The Talibrown speculate about the Lords. John Major and Tony Blair gave the rest home a miss, avoiding the need to register lucrative interests. But a Lord Brown of Kirkcaldy lecturing on economics for a living would have no huge earners to hide. I note Brown’s never supported a wholly elected upper chamber, voting to retain a fifth of seats for the great and, perhaps, the Gord.

Trevor Kavanagh‘s Sun column yesterday contained this classic quote from Tony Blair about the prospect of becoming President of Europe: "I would rather nail my testicles to a speeding train than be President of the European Union." Given the other likely candidates, I have little problem with Blair as President of Europe. He’s for free trade, the market and an Atlanticist which is not bad going. But if he does end up in the job after having said this, he will have set a new standard for a politician going back on his word. P.S. I should add as a note of caution that a quick cuts search doesn’t turn up the quote, but Kavanagh is reliable so I’d be taken aback if he has got this wrong.

Ed Balls tells The Times today that: “The moment you stop wanting to do the job you are doing and start thinking about the future or next stage is the point when you start to lose a grip with reality.” Now, Balls is saying this as part of his attempt to deny that he wanted to be made Chancellor in the reshuffle. But it does make one think what Balls thought of Gordon Brown’s mental state during his final years at the Treasury when he spent so long agitating to move up to the top job. Indeed, one could make a case that by Balls’ definition, Brown has been losing his grip on reality ever since he made the deal with Blair at Granita in 1994. PS Balls is also not averse to thinking about his own future.

Companies that do business with non-democratic regimes have a moral responsibility not to sell these regimes tools that can be used to aid repression. A story in the Wall Street Journal raises some disturbing questions about the behaviour of Nokia and Siemens and whether they have sold the Iranian government the technology that is being used to block communications inside the country and monitor those who are agitating against the regime: “Deep packet inspection involves inserting equipment into a flow of online data, from emails and Internet phone calls to images and messages on social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Every digitized packet of online data is deconstructed, examined for keywords and reconstructed within milliseconds.