Just seen the Cameron Uncovered 8 PM programme on Channel Four in the renowned Dispatches slot. It takes the Daily Novel prize for the worst TV programme on British politics the Daily Novelist can remember. For the following reasons.

1. It was a collection of sound bites extracted by Andrew Rawnsley, an Observer political journalist, and used by him to deliver a powerful message about Cameron. This is based on a notion which used to be fashionable that the attention span of broadcast viewers is about 30 seconds. This notion has been exploded more recently, notably by the BBC in its television and radio news and by Jon Snow on Channel Four News. They give more time in news programmes than Cameron Uncovered gave in its political analysis, for what the interviewees were actually saying.

2.The programme’s credibility was greatly enhanced because the sound  bites came from a wide range of prominent people, going back to one of  his teachers at Oxford, Vernon Bogandor. They included top civil servants, whose sound bites demonstrated that he would have difficulty in cutting public services without reducing the actual provision for the poor and disadvantaged. And one who told us that all Prime Ministers were at risk from their own Chancellor of the Exchequer, which fuelled the Rawnsley line that a Cameron government was going to suffer from feuds between Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne. Other sound bites came from Ed Vaisey, whose suggestion that Mrs Cameron might vote left, was given pre-programme publicity. And, of course, there were the sound bites from the other side, Peter Mandelson, who demonstrated his skill of delivering killer punches, clothed with a velvet glove. There was also Sir Alan Budd, a distinguished economist, projected for a role in the Cameron government, who not only cast doubt on how much public services would have to be cut to reduce the deficit, but also said that Cameron would probably have to RAISE taxes, which will not go down well in the Tory shires.

3. These sound bites were extracted from what were clearly quite long interviews. But what the viewer got was not the arguments of the interviewee, but sound bites presented in a chain of sound bites.

4. The programme was  clearly made over a period of a several months. Many of Rawnsley’s own comments were clearly assuming that Cameron was going to form the next government. Even a few weeks ago, that was the prevailing belief. But the latest opinion polls mostly demonstrate  that the  Cameron lead is dwindling so seriously that, come the day, Brown might even end up forming the next government.

5. While he was making the programme Rawnsley himself adhered to this view. His book, entitled The end of the party’,which has just been published, is based on this belief, which he now doubts.

6. My evidence for this comes from Rawnsley’s own column in The Observer yesterday, in which he admits that this is now a possibility. The last paragraph of his column yesterday, which was not read to viewers of his Channel Four programme, reads as follows:

Most people on both sides of the fence still work on the assumption that David Cameron is going to move into Number 10 on 7 May. But it is no longer completely outlandish to wonder whether the next prime minister might be the tortured, temparamental son of the manse whom everyone, including his own cabinet, had written off. In which case, I can think of an author who would have to adjust the title of his latest book.

Alas, Andrew, it is too late. The book is in the reader’s hands already.

But all credit to you, by reporting faithfully that events have overtaken it.  You have learnt your lesson.

I hope the programme makers have also learnt their lesson. Executive Producer of Cameron Uncovered was Anne Lapping, who has a most distinguished record of producing good TV programmes on politics. Let’s hope that she will produce a few during this election. But if she does she will have to do it much more quickly and with equal rigour.

Tough. But’s that’s the challenge of the world we live.

When journalists are asked for their copy, before they have had a chance to think about it.

The key fact about Lord Ashcroft which makes him different from the other non-dems is that he gave assurances to William Hague , Downing Street, and the Queen, and since the news was made public ten years ago, the British electorate, that he would not only give up his non-dom status, but also that that would mean he would pay millions of pounds more UK tax.

As a result he was made a peer.

In fact, as he has now finally admitted he managed to get himself a deal which meant he carried on NOT paying the UK tax we had all been promised.

This is the kind of blatant  deception which gets politicans a bad name.

Sleaze on a large scale which makes the amounts MPs fiddled on their expenses look like peanuts.

Just when Hague and David Cameron discovered that he was pulling the wool over their eyes, and ours, is not clear. Hague says he found out a few months ago, Cameron, says he did not know until the last few days.

I can imagine their horror when they found out. Whatever they did would have been harmful. But by not coming clean immediately they have made it worse.

If they want to win this election, they should drop Ashcroft now, not after the election.

It will probably mean they will have to borrow money from the banks to fund the election campaign. But if they don’t  do it, the electorate will have cause to doubt their honour, whenever Ashcroft’s name is mentioned.

As his name will be mentioned daily, particularly in those marginal seats which the Ashcroft money is funding.

I am not going to bore you by repeating here the thousands of words written about Michael Foot, who died yesterday aged 96. (Yes, he was born the year before the First World War.) But I  do want to celebrate the life of one of most decent human beings I have known. And what better way to start than with the Foot I, and hundreds of my neighbours, knew. Because, like us, he travelled on the 24 bus, which is much the best most sensible way of travelling from my neck of the woods to Camden Town, Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square and the House of Commons.

And, because, like us, he used to relax by walking on Hampstead Heath. Note, walking mostly with a dog. Not jogging, like that other neighbour, Alastair Campbell, part of the New Labour team under Tony Blair, who got Labour re-elected, which is what Foot did not manage to do, when he was leader of the Labour Party. Joggers can’t stop. Walkers can. But only a minority of walkers, of which Foot was most definitely one, are ready to be engaged in coversation with anyone who stopped him. Or anyone who sat next  to him on the 24 bus.

Note, the ‘engaged in conversation’, but I might have written, ‘chat’. But ‘chat’ is not an accurate description of what Michael Foot did, when people stopped him, be they the educated middle classes or the less well-educated working class, with whom we live cheek and jowl in this part of London.

He talked to all classes  in the same way. And if he ever had become Prime Minister I am absolutly certain the the Queen would have come to a better understanding of the socialists amongst her subjects.

Just as I am absolutely certain he would have snorted ‘bollocks’ if he had read his own obituaries telling him he was too ‘nice’ to be prime minister. Nice suggests sugar and spice. 

Foot knew his English language, as demonstrated in his journalism and his books. He talked the same way to whoever he talked to. On that score he is the polar opposite of those polriticians who trim their sails to appeal to whoever they are talking to.

Of everything I have read about Foot the person whe shows most understanding this aspect of Foot, is Brian Brivati, who was Foot’s book editor, and is now Professor of Contemporary History at Kingston University. Here is a paragraph from what he wrote published in yesterday’s Guardian.

The gifts of how to live that one gets from knowing him are first, how to be, then how to read, and finally, the importance of being yourself. The first way he teaches you how to be yourself is in his political philosophy and attitude to the sanctity of humanity. He is not a pacifist, but he puts humanity first. Giving is his natural way of being and it is infectious as a way to live. The second way is by personal example, by the way in which he has stayed himself.

Had he ever become Prime Minister he would have been an excellent role model for the nation’s youth. Far better than any of the three leaders contesting the 2010 election. Let’s hope that his publishers rush out new versions of his books, so that thoughtful voters are reminded of what he stood for.

Although he would not have wanted the country to be run by the bunch of Old Etonians around David Cameron, currently leading the opinion polls, Foot came from a priviledged upper middle class background. He was educated at two private schools, the second being Leighton Park School in Reading, which has been called the ‘Quaker Eton’. It wass very good at getting its pupils into Oxbridge and Foot went on to do the Oxford PPE at Wadham, a degree which prepares people well for a career in politics (and a career in journalism, at which Foot also excelled).

This blog is not intended to be hagiography so before I end it I must write about what I believe to be Foot’s worst mistake. I was listening on the car radio one Saturday morning when I was taking the family to Wales for our holiday. Normal service was suspended as the BBC took us to the House of Commons, where there was an emergency debate on Thatcher’s decision to rescue the Falkland Islands.

Foot, then leader of the Labour Party, gave her his full support. His Quaker school teachers must have quaked, as I did, when I listened to his speech.

So he had his faults.

But if you read what he wrote, you will see, that, although he was an upper middle class toff, he understood far better than many New Labour ministers and MPs the priorities of the working class and their champions, the trade unions, who politicians of all parties are too ready to dismis as ignorant cart horses.

Dr Johnston (him of the dictionary) said pithily that the misguided honest man was an even bigger pain than the worst scoundrel.

Maybe.

But at tthis time in our history(MP’s expenses)  British politics needs a few honest men.

Like.

Michael Foot.

(Photo: By Graham Turner from The Guardian. Messed by the new technology for which apologies. The original is much better.)

One of the trials of the manic depressive temperament is that in the mainc phase the ideas flow fast and furious. So as well as party ideas my unconscious mind has been popping up ambitious new plans for improving my blog and has been urging me to jump on the iphone bandwagon. So on top of having to relearn Excel in order to keep track of who was coming to the party I saddled myself  quite un-necssarily with having to learn Applespeak.

After a few initial failures to connect to the internet, it is now working like a dream and I love mine almost as much as  Stephen Fry loves  his. I can now read the mobile Guardian and my emails in bed. It is a most beautiful example of the new technology and it has turned me into a fan of Steve Jobs who got up from his death bed a couple of years ago and organised its design and launch.

But it is not perfect. As I found on Wednesday when I felt confident enough to change the keyboard layout to Dvorak. This keyboard, designed by August Dvorak in the late 1920s is far more efficent than QWERTY, as you can discover if you click on Campaign to retire QWERTY at the top of this blog. Apple has been including Dvorak as a standard item on its computers since the pioneering days, many years before Bill Gates made it a standard offer for PCs with the introduction of Windows in the 1990s.

Sadly Jobs has not put it in the iphone. I did manage to find one from a third party developer. It worked fine.

Once.

When I turned off my phone and turned it on again, it had disappeared.

It may just be teething troubles. I willl keep you posted.

Meanwhile I have to postpone the next round in the fight to retire QWERTY and write something about Michael Foot.

The other trigger for my dream last night came from a jest in a thank you letter suggesting we take  the show on tour. The show was the one I put on at Lauderdale House, the former home of Nell Gwyn on Highgate Hill, which is now a favoured location for parties in the Gospel Oak part of London. This party to celebrate my wife’s 70th birthday took me and my daughters two months to organise. Which is one major reason why Daily Novel blogs have been so thin on the ground in 2010.

The emphasis was on singing and dancing rather than speechifying. To get it going required a lot of browbeating of  relatives,  friends and neighbours to stand up and support me in a sing a long to make the guests sing for their supper. It had to include, Leaning on a Lamp, and since I am tone deaf it required the support of James, one of my daughter’s friends on the Brazilian ukelerle, and Michael, the neighbbourhood lumberjack singer.

And, of course, a decent jazz band to provide the sort of music my wife and I, along with many of our neighboursr, have enjoyed for the past ten years at the Humphrey Lyttelton charity concerts organised by the friends of the Royal Free Hosital. The concerts have gone on performed by the jazz men who worked with him. Happily the pianist for our party was Ted Beament who played in most of those concerts and was happy to bash out my very eclectic choice of songs. All of the Tucker Finlayson band, which is a mixture of men who have played with Humph, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, entered into the spirit of the occasion.

So this was one of my manic ideas that actually worked. The dream did not give me quite enough energy to start a new career as an impressario, but it did provide the impetus for a third blog.

In the dream I was invited in by the new City University chaplin, who just happened to be Norwegian, to take the Sunday service on his new Church of the Internet jointly with him. I protested that I was an agnostic who even found much to admire in the works of Richard Dawkins, author of  the God Delusion. That did not matter, he told me, he just wanted me to do whatever I felt like doing in the moment. Much like the Quaker style of encouraging people to speak out when the spirit moved them. That is based on a belief that the voice of God can be found amongst our inner voices.

The dream event was a success. I managed to give a half-way decent sermon, stating my belief that the evidence suggests it is extremely unlikely the world was created by an all-powerful God, but that the great religions of the world  rank amongst the most valuable human inventions. Religious belief, I argued has survival value if it does not become rigid and doctrinaire. It protects human beings from arrogance. It reminds them that the voices within include devilish types who may be urging violence against others or self-destruction. All the great religions have meditation and prayer which, in my view, can be a great help in sorting out personal and polical conflicts and making more, rather than less, rational decisions.

The sermon went down OK. More surprisingly I hammed it  up by singing  a few music hall songs in my off-key voice and the congregation joined me  in the choruses.

So I am due to go back next Sunday. In the dream, of course. City University has not yet brought in a radical Norwegian pastor.

My dream, however, was partly triggered triggerd by what is happening at City. On Tuesday evening the journalism department mounted a great debate to decide whether the 2010 election would be more influenced by new media or the old media’s first ever television debates between Brown, Cameron and Clegg which are expected to win an audience of 10 million or more. The verdict of the audience was 75 to 80 per cent in favour of the old media debates.

But yesterday, the video of that event went out on the City journalism web site and I  spent nearly two hours watching it. And one of the thoughts that struck me before I went to bed last night was that this was itself an indication of how that the media will be a powerful influence on this election. City J has moved on since I rettired two years ago and thanks to the inniatives of Professor George Brock and Professor Ivor Gaber. City J journalists can now ‘preach’ to the  whole world thanks to the wonderful world of the internet.

The old media in the debate were represented by the powerful BBC voices of Nick Robinson, political  editor and Evan Davies, the newish anchor man of the BBC Radio Four Today programme. Powerful because of their eloquence and experience. Powerful because they have behind them the authority of the biggest news oranisation in the world, which has a presence on the web as well as via television, radio, videos, cds, dvds and mobile phones.

In my childhood I had problems in tuning in to the right wavelength to hear the voice of God, but through the head phones of my two valve radio I could get the BBC. That was a sort of miracle that had a tangible reality. To me, and millions of others, the BBC news readers had a God-like authority.

There was another, quite different trigger for my dream last night, which will be the subject of my next blog.

Meanwhile readers might like to watch the much more down to earth City J debate by clicking on the video link above. Or, if they don’t have two hours to spare clicking on this link to the report by Guardian journalist, Kevin Anderson.

So now we know after all these years of speculattion. Lord Ashcroft has not been paying his British taxes, because although because of loopholes in the law he can claim he is a ‘long-term British resident’. Even though he has kept his non-dom status so has been avoiding his British taxes.

What this means, which the Westminster British press corps has not yet realised, is that the money Ashcroft has been pouring into Cameron’s funds, is just part of what he has saved because he has managed to cling on to his non-dom status2

So the British taxpayer has been funding the Conservative Party!

The millions Ashcroft has given the Conservatives is just a part of the taxes he has not paid.

I don’t want a public enquiry, which will report two or three years  hence.

Bt I do think that if Cameron wants to win this election he should fire Ashcroft now.

His conference election speech was based on Obama’s call for Change.

Obama realised before the banking crisis that change was necessary.

Which means governments everywhere taking back power from the financiers like Ashcroft, who are motivated by making as much money for themselves as possible.

They are the people who have created the crisis.

Cameron if he wants to win must show that he is not their pawn.

He is not doing well. As the opinion polls show.

Despite the huge unpopularity of Gordon Brown his poll lead has whittled away.

According to Associated Press the White House physician urged President Obama to continue his smoking cessation efforts in his latest check-up. I beg to differ. I, for one, will sleep safer in my bed knowing that the leader of the free world is having the occasional cigarette when he feels like it. I totally accept the serious effects of smoking on health. But most of the world is denying that nicotine does have some beneficial effects.

Notably it helps you to keep calm when everyone around you is panicing. And it helps manic depressives like me to manage their condition. At 76 I am feeling some of harmful effects. My coughs in the morning can be heard in the house opposite.

But Obama coming up to 40 is a picture of health. It may kill him in the end but not very soon, because he does not smoke many. He does not have to do, because like me he smokes Camels, which is a blend of Virginia and Turkish. Just the right cigarette for a President who is concerned with fostering better relationships with the Muslim world. And dedicated to keeping the peace rather than rushing into wars.

The doc is also worried about his tendonitis, which they think is to do with his regular basket ball playing. Maybe that will give him a heart attack sooner than smoking. But I am not suggesting that he take up something more sedate like golf. But perhaps he might benefit by cutting down on his basket ball and having a fag or two when he feels the urge to leap up to the net.

(*Below is the blog I posted on 23 February. It got lost for technical reasons while I have been making some major behind the scenes changes. Thanks to subsequent events there is much more to say on this subject, which will not go away as we come into the election campaign. More as soon as I have time.)

There was I thinking that all those Toyota accelerator problems, which have suddenly been splashed all over the world’s media and sent the stock market price crashing, could not possibly affect my three-year-old Prius, which has shown no such symtoms, after many thousand miles, including many on bumpy roads. (Camden is full of road humps and pot holes these days)

Until I read the story in The Guardian G2 just now.

Walter Schwarz, one of their most distunguished and reliable reproters, writes about an accident he had last November in his four-year-old Toyota Avensis. The car accelerated itsellf into the back of a van. He thought it was an old man’s lapse (he is even older than me). Now he knows better. He reports that today’s Washington Post says unintended acceleration has caused 800 crashes in Toyotas and 19 deaths since 1999.

Walter now hopes to be allowed to drive the grandchildren again in his Fiat. The Avensis was a write off.

But after reading his article, I have to face the fact that my beloved Prius might have the same disease. I shall have to do some serious research before I let it out on the motorway.

From what I’ve read so far it is probably the electronics, which dictate much of our driving these days on all modern cars.

And not only on Toyotas.

Maybe there are lots more problems with other makes, which the manufacturers and the motoring correspondents have not got round to telling us about yet.