The Daily Novel

Writing this plunged in gloom. Packing cases all around. The walls stripped of pictures. No longer a home but a shell. And there in the middle of the floor the large black leather sofa, a vived reminder of the high cost of moving. The tall thin man and the small squat man from our removers took it around to the flat in Savernake Road yesterday. With many backwards and forwards movements they got it around several landings up to the second floor. But they could not get it through the door to the flat.

With the tall man below bearing the weight and the small man in front devising the strategy they tried with many twists and turns to squeeze it through our new front door. But finally they had to admit failure. There was a slight possibility that they might have been able to get in if they had been able to open the door of the flat opposite. But there was no human response to our knocking on the door, just a mixture in irritable barking and low growling from the dog inside.

So down it had to go. And there it stands now. And I realise that I shall have to let it go. Despite all my efforts to adopt a Buddhist attitude of letting go of material things I don’t want to lose it. It is incredibly comfortable. and takes four adults. It has been the scene many times of of rollicking laughter at something on the television or a joke cracked by one the household. It has served as a spare bed for someone who didn’t want to go home after a party.

Now it stands empty and forlorn. And I have a problem. There is not even time to give it away. And I don’t want to give it away because it cost me an arm and a leg and it still has many years of life in it. So it will go in the van to Dorset tomorrow and I shall endeavour to sell it there.

But I should not complain. At least another calamity was averted, surely because of the intervention and that God whom I don’t believe in. I had told the thin man to take the picture above the mantlepiece in the upstairs sitting room to Savernake. I had made a mistake. My wife met him in the hallway and sent back upstairs to put it back. Which he did but it missed the picture hook and crashed down knocking the vase which had bought for some wedding anniversary into the hearth. Incredibly it bounced. The tall man held it up and spun it round to demonstrate to my wife that there was not a chip or a crack anywhere.

It is about 7 AM. The sun has just emerged above the roofs of the houses behind the house in Roderick Road, Gospel Oak, which tomorrow will no longer be our home. This is the last time I shall see it between the branches of the lime tree. This is the last blog I shall write from Roderick. This is the last time I shall turn, lost for words, and gaze at the garden, hoping for inspiration that will give me the final sentence. This is the final sentence from Roderick Road. My wife is now up urging me to do something useful, like disconnecting the computer ready for the removal men to shove it a box when they arrive in an hour’s time. I am reluctant to stop. I have lit another cigarette. I don’t want to accept it. But this really is the last sentence from Roderick Road. And I have to go and find the marking tape to ensure that the computer ends up in my study in Dorset not in the attic.

……….which was the hit of our last party at Roderick Road. Not quite my original intention. Our parties here have shattered the ear drums of he neighbours with live music. Mostly the neighbours have not minded since we have never done more than two parties a year and the neighbours came unless they were away.

I had hoped we would end with American Pye by the all female group who first sang together before the Spice Girls were out of nappies. It first happened spontaneously when the friends of my daughters were in their late teens. The conductor and lead vocalist was Becca, then living in the street, who was two or three years older and the leader of this particular gang.

Becca has long since moved to Milton Keynes, but she usually manages to come back for our parties. And American Pye became the inevitable finale, with the girls in a line accompanying the music with some exhuberant high kicking. Alas, since our move has been delayed to the end of Julay Becca and all but three of the gang were away on holiday.

I tried to persuade those three to sing it again. Forgetting that in life stuff happens. Forgetting the message of one of the Pye songs.

All roads lead to where I stand.

No matter what I planned.

But we did have some live music, thanks to Mary Taylor, who had got through the trauma of moving from Gospel Oak (across the Highgate Road to Dartmouth Park Hill) more than twenty years ago. Mary was part of a group who revived the Victorian music hall in the neighbourhood. Her favourite number was Champagne Charlie is my name. And she turned up in her trade mark black frock coat with top hat and cane and turned the living room into a stage with Janet bashing out the music on the piano.

It was totally appropriate because this house was built in 1878 when the Victorian music hall was at the peak of its popularity and the local pubs had pianos not giant television screens.

But our party was of course a wake. In quiet corners tears were being shed. And as the party wound to its close I was privelged to be part of an audience of six in the kitchen, when one of the Pye gang, Daisy, suddenly broke into a mournful solo, which I did not know, but which totally fitted the mood of the occasion.

Must end now. My wife has just got up and from the expession on her face it is clear the Daily Novel will have to wait. I have to devote myself to three days of intensive packing.

How do I know that npower is the unacceptable face of capitalism? Because I have dealt with them since early April when I took possession of a rented flat in the next street.  npower were supplying the gas. I arranged for the gas to be paid by direct debit from my wife’s account.

But during May and June I had a succession of messages from npower asking me for money related to the period  before I had taken possession, and asking me the name of the previous occupier and his address. Which I gave them. All at my own expense on their 0800 number.

When I took possession I arranged for a direct debit from my wife’s account to pay their bills, but for some reason they have not taken the money from that. So when they continued to harrass me into July, I agreed on the second of July to pay them over the telephone £66.56, which was the amount they calculated I owed them the time, immeditately from my own account.  But on the understanding that from henceforth the money should be taken from my wife’s account on the direct debit we had set up, which fits the way we are trying to manage our finances in our new life.

But today, when we went round to the flat we are renting we found a demand from npower for £55.52, which was the amount we owed at an eariler date in June. The letter was pleasantly headed, ‘Our right to enter your property and cut off your gas supply.’ Unless I paid the supposedly owed £55.52 in 7 days.

I also found a letter from a supposed debt collection agency, called energydebt. (This lot obviously thinks it is trendy to have names without capital letters.)  That letter told me that if I did not pay up, they would ‘commence debt collection procedures’. Which I took to mean, send round their heavy men to extract the money from me.

I immeditately rang npower. To explain that I had paid more than what they were asking me for. The first person I spoke to said she needed proof. So I opened up my Smile bank account and gave her the date when my £66.56 left my account to the credit of npower. She said she could find no record of npower having received it, and that they had many accounts, and could I tell her which one. Of course, I could not tell her, because I had paid it over the telephone. So she suggested I should contact my bank and ask them to tell me which of the many accounts that npower has I had paid it into. I told her that this would cost money for money and would npower pay my expenses? Of course, she could not agree to that.  So she told me that I would have to call their ‘customer services.’

I write after speaking to four people from npower. They now agree that they have had my £66.56 but they have not even agreed to send me a letter of apology. They have all regurgitated what they have learnt on their training programmes - calm the customer down, etc, etc. The final call tonight was from their ‘customer services adviser’, who only works between the hours of 6 and 8 in the evening. So she is not in a proper job, and knows nothing at all about my particular case, she is just paid for two hours a day to deliver the claptrap she has been taught on her training progromme.

She told me that they now agreed that they had received my £66.56 on the second of July. So I did not owe them anything at all. But, instead of agreeing to write the letter of apology, which I had said I would accept, she said that I needed to give them a reference number which was on my gas meter, before they would even consider that.

To sum up. npower is a totally incompetant company. They have so many bank accounts that they cannot control their own business. Although I had paid them the money they wanted, they did not know that. Because they have confused my payment with my wife’s. So they have taken my money, but they continue to harrass me for money which they see as part of a separate account. But when they found out, far from offering me an apology, they have continued to harass me.

This makes it clear that npower are not a fit company to be allowed to supply gas to the British public, most of whom, do not have the expertise that I have to questiion their inefficient and dictatorial attitudes.

So who are npower? By following the links I find that they are a part of a German company called RWE.

This all happened before dinner. But after dinner i decided that I should ring the debt colection agency to tell them to call off their bulldogs. I got their answerphone, which was npower. In other words, the debt collection agency npower is threatening me with, is owned by them.

I do not think that British Gas or London Electricity or Scottish Power, with whom I had many dealings with over the years, are pure. But none of them has exhibited the behaviour which I have experienced from npower.

This company should not be allowed to screw the British public with its inefficient and unscrpululous practices.

By co-incidence, at tea-time today, my doorbell rang. And there on the doorstep was a perfectly decent young man, who was urging me to switch my gas supplies to npower.

Clearly npower is employing a huge army of people to get them to choose npower for their supplier. But they  are employing no-one at all to listen to what their existing customers have to say.

Unless they change their ways, they should be prevented from operating in the British market.

……before the big move to Dorset and our flat around the corner.

And there is so much still to do that I am beginning to panic. How I am going to find time to write a blog over the next few days I know not. It is not only the moving. It is the logistics of connecting to the web. On my previous visits to Charmouth I was unable to find anywhere to make a wireless connection, so to post from Dorset I have to drive into Lyme Regis to one of the pubs there. And, although BT will connect my telephone next Wednesday it will be at least another two or three days before they connect me to broadband. And past experience leads me to fear that getting it working efficiently may take a little time. Not least the time taken in reconfiguring my computer to an entirely different system.

Meanwhile, although I have only written ten blogs in the whole of July I appear to be getting some new readers. For the last two days the number of unique visits according to 1&1 has topped the thousand mark and it looks as if the average for July will be about 900.

I shall also be spending some of my time trying to help those of my colleagues in the fight to save the swimming pool at City University. But I don’t know how long it will be before I have time to do a blog about the issues around that.

After writing my earlier blog this morning I steeled myself for yet another half hour on the telephone listening to the automated BT messages. This time I decided to make my third attempt at opting for the ring back option, which is one of the offerings after a series of messages telling you how busy BT is today (and every day from my experience!)

To my astonishment I had a call back in ten minutes from a woman who said her name was Tracey and sounded more like a human being than a robot. I gave her my order number, and she gave me the same answer as before. Mine was a VOL number which she could not deal with so she would transfer me to the right department. Desparate to keep this contact with one of the few real people still employed by BT, I said, please, please could she give me the number in case the transfer did not work. I told her the last time this had happened I had had to listen to automated respenses for 40 minutes before I gave. She said she was very sorry but the other number was an iinternal number and she could not give me a number to ring from outside.

This time, unbelievedly, another human being called, Veronica, answered the phone immediately. Verily the Gods are being kind to me today. After giving all my details yet again Veronica actually found the order but before she gave it to me, I had to listen yet again to the standard warning that this was my provisional number and that BT could not guarantee this would definitely be the number I would actually get when I arrive in Dorset on the first of August.

I took it down and read it back to her. Then came the inevitable follow up. Is there anything else I can help you with today. (BT speak for is there anything else we can sell you today.) No, I told her, but she should know that I had spent three hours on the telephone on the telephone to her company to get this simple bit of information. She then rushed through her routine, ‘Thank you for calling BT. Have a nice day.’ I can easily understand her panic because I have listened so often to BT robot telling me that ‘These calls may be recorded for training purposes’. (BT speak telling their employees that if they deviate from what they have been trained to say they are liable for instant dismissal.)

Now I shall end this blog and start sending out our change of address cards. But before I go I must say one thing more, because I don’t want to give readers the impression that I think BT is alone in treating customers this way. After all I was trained not only to report the facts accurately but also to be fair in the angle I put on the story. Not to spin it in the manner of the tabloids or at the behest of some news editor who wanted to an angle which would sell the newspapers on the newstands.

As if on cue, my wife came in to tell me that her walk up to Hampstead Post Office not successful. We had decided over the breakfast table that it might save us some time on the telephone if the redirection of our post was arranged via face to face contact with a human being. So I checked the Royal Mail website for the instructions and my wife went off up the hill armed with my passport and driving licence as well as her own. The human being at the Post Office (who was probably called Sid) said he could not do it without my signature as well.

There is nothing about this on the website. But the website does say when the user pays £35.95 per surname for this wonderful services for twelve months.

Got back from City University at 5 PM yesterday, feeling extremely irritated. My meeting had taken much longer than I had expected and on the way home it had started drizzling with rain. As I was taking off my crash helmet the doorbell went. There was a young man on the doorstep wearing a white t-shirt. He wanted to ask me a few questions on behalf of Transport for London. It would only take a few minutes.

I was reluctant but since I was already too late to make the telephone calls I had planned to arrange services in our new house in Dorset I agreed. I like to think I am public spirited and if university lecturers refuse to help people doing surveys then how they expect their students to do their research, which in my area depends on a willingness of the general public to answer questions.

So I invited him in. He could not come in because that would be invading my privacy. I realised he was thoughtlessly regurgitating his training programme, which clearly did not include the obvious fact that if anyone invites you into their home you could not be invading their privacy. Then he said he did not mind if I got a chair and sat down. Clearly his training programme did not tell him that if you ask a 73-year-old man if he needs to sit down, the implicit message is that he is a doddery old man incapable of standing on his own doorstep for a few minutes.

To explain all this to him would have taken up more time. So I snorted that what I wanted was a cigarette. I went in and fetched my cigarettes, trying to contain my rising irritation and get in the right frame of mind to answer his questions. The questions began with things like did I own a car, a motor bike or a cycle, did I use the buses and the tube. I pointed to my scooter by his side. He then asked if I realised that I could buy an electric scooter. I said yes but I was not going to buy one until there was a model which would do more than twenty-five miles an hour and had a range much greater than forty miles between charges.

Gradually I realised that what he was doing was not a proper survey at all. The next set of questions started with would I like a map of the London buses. I explained I already had one. Oh, but his maps were much better, and he produced a set of them. One for the tube, one for central London buses, one for north-west London buses, one for the North London railway line, even one for the London underground. By this time I was having difficulty containing my rising anger so I told him that I had lived around here for thirty-nine years and could get about quite happily without using any maps at all.

I realised that this was in fact a public relations campaign for Transport for London. And it reminded me of an incident in the morning. My wife had rung the teacher’s pension fund to inform them of our new address which took about two minutes. She was then asked to answer a series of questions about what she thought about the service provided in response to this very simple request, which took at least ten minutes. My wife answered patiently and courteously. But when she put down the phone she snorted with anger. What a waste of time? What fatuous questions?

I was also reminded of my dealings with British Telecomms over the last few days. Left hanging on the telephone, for a total time of well over two hours, with the automated message ringing in my ears, ‘Your call is important to us.’ All I want from BT is my telephone number in Dorset so I can send out my change of address cards. They promised to send it to me in the post but it still has not arrived. I shall have another go today, but I am limiting myself to half an hour of waiting. Otherwise I shall not have time to do all the other things I have to do before we move in just over a week’s time.

The issues underlying this series of anecdotes are deeply serious. Thousands of such ’surveys’ are being done every day. If they are collated they are of no value because they are deeply non-scientific. If they are not then the whole thing is a sham. Either way the number of man-hours wasted in such activities must run into thousands and the amount of money wasted must run into millions. They are an aspect of what I call the new managerialism which is almost universally accepted. Someone at BT (and most other large companies in the land) has worked out that the amount of time employees spend on the telephone costs the company a lot of money. So the number of staff answering telephone calls has been reduced dramatically and the customer who is left gnashing his teeth.

Theoretically this problem should be solved by the free market. The business should go to the company, which perceives the customer’s real needs, and which is prepared to train people to answer queries properly and employ enough of them to cope with demand. In fact, it is difficult to find any company which is prepared to challenge the current conventional wisdom. My current telephone company, Virgin, is not quite as bad as BT in waiting time, but it is pretty bad. And, unlike BT, which at least leaves me in silence during the waiting period, Virgin plays the most awful music which shatters my ear drums.

It should be possible to prove the folly of the over-use of the automated telephone voice by a proper scientific survey, but would be almost impossible to design such a survey. Because of the complexity of the issues involved. The increasing complexity of the lives we live is one of the things that makes decision-making in both the public sector and the private sector so difficult for today’s managers.

I can illustrate this by reporting yet another thing that irritated me yesterday. My meeting was at the Cass Business School, which is near Moorgate tube station. So I decided to park my motor scooter in Finsbury Circus, where I knew there were spaces for around two hundred motor cycles. Obviously the best place to head for, because by the law of averages, someone was likely to move if I kept my cool and rode around the circus. After three circuits I decided that the law of averages was not working to my advantage, but I spotted just one space, where I could squeeze in by moving a 1950s Vespa a few inches to one side.

The plain fact is that the number of motor cycle spaces in central London is way below the number of people who want to use them because of the many advantages of the motor bike in today’s conditions. But the boss of London, Mayor Ken Livingstone, does not like motor bikes, although he is very keen on bicycles. He is able to justify this attitude by data which show that in terms of carbon emissions some motor bikes are worse than cars. Quite true. But it is equally true that motor bikes are almost as good for reducing congestion as bicycles and that the amount of energy consumed in manufacturing the average car is far higher than the average motor cycle.

When faced with issues of complexity decision making needs to be based on a qualitative analysis rather than a quantitive survey. The number of variables is so huge, that however you approach it requires a qualititive decision; otherwise, how do you decide to weight the various factors involved.

By co-incidence my meeting yesterday was chaired by a professor of organisational behaviour, the best discipline for articulating the disadvantages with the prevailing fashion for justifying decisions by reference to quantitive surveys. By yet another co-incidence his Ph D supervisor, was Professor John Morris of the Manchester Business School, a doughty advocate of the qualitative, whom I also knew well.

Morris spent a lot of his time in the last twenty years of his career pushing the advantages of action research, which was fashionable in the 1980s but is now too often dismissed as old hat. The starting point is not pulling the manager out of the work place to spend a month at a business school following a prescribed curriculum. Instead the university professor goes to the work place to experience the reality of manager’s job and to get the manager to articulate the way he sees his job and the problems it involves. Then the two of them sit down to work out a programme, which will involve the manager taking some courses at the business school while at the same time working on his problems back on the shop floor.

This approach requires a lot of man hours of work by the professor and the Ph D students who help the manager in the workplace. Which is one reason it has become unfashionable, because like employing human beings to answer the telephone, it costs a lot of money and it also uses up a lot of professorial time.

In the new managerialism, which is dominating the lives of today’s university teachers, it is not easy to find time for such activities. Because university teachers have to fill in their own questionnaires, justifying the amount of time they spend on different aspects of their work and specifying what their aims and objectives are. They have to get their research papers published in the journals. They have to encourage their Ph D students to do original work, rather than rehash the stuff written in the 1980s.

But surely it is still possible to challenge the conventional wisdom? What I would like to see is a Ph D thesis which investigated how similar the new managerialism is to the management theories which were fashionable in the 1960s, which included ‘management by objectives’.

And, come to think of it, perhaps the finance specialists could get someone to go through the books of Transport for London and find out how many of the millions of taxpayers’ money they spent went into wasteful activities like employing armies of young men in t-shirts to knock on doors in Kentish Town.

Off to Limani, one the Greek restaurants in Primrose Hill, for dinner. Mick and I started with the Retsina, and even before we had finished the first glass, we were deep into nostalgia. I was meeting Mick, because he has just married one of the teachers at the nursery to which my grandchildren go, who is also a close friend of one of our neighbours in Gospel Oak. By one of those coincidences, which seem to happen to me with increasing frequency, he happens to come from my home town, Wolverhampton.

So we started with chat about Billy Wright, Wolverhampton’s most famous son, who grew up in the same area of Wolverhampton as Mick, Claregate. By the time Mick was born, more than twenty years after me, Wright had moved to Arsenal and married one of the Beverley Sisters, the 1950s equivalent of the Spice Girls. It was the most famous showbiz marriage of the time. But it was long before footballers were paid fancy money. Wright earned a pittance compared with Joy Beverley. Contrast David Beckham, who probably earns more than all the Spice Girls put together.

Not that it worried Billy Wright to have a wife who earned more than him. He was totally unspoilt by fame. According to the Wikipedia article he joined Wolverhampton Wanderers as a member of the ground staff in the year that I was born, 1934. Since he was only ten years old at the time, the association was presumably very much part-time! The official Wolves web site reports that he made his debut in the reserves aged 14 and first played in the first division the following year when he was only 15.

That was just after the outbreak of the second world war. By the time Wright turned professional in 1941 the Wolves had suspended matches, because Wolverhampton with many factories vital components for aircraft, tanks and army vehicles, was thought to be a prime Nazi target. So Wright played his first professional games as a guest for Leicester City. Eight years later he scored the first major triumph of his career, by which time he was captain of the Wolves team which beat his old team mates in the Wembley cup final of 1949.

Wolverhampton Wanderers (pause) Three

Leicester City (pause) One.

I can still hear the voice of the BBC announcer reading the football results that Saturday evening. And I can still see the glint of the sun on the cup as it was carried around the Molineux ground at the match the following Saturday.

One thing that Wikipedia got right was his exemplary behaviour on the field. He played 541 games for Wolves and 105 games for England and he was never sent off or even cautioned by the referee. Both Mick and I agreed that today’s football has been tarnished by the vast amounts of money swilling around. But when we started talking about politics we found that we had wandered in opposite directions. Mick is enthusiastic about the United Kingdom Independence Party, which is even further to the right than that other famous Wulfrunian, Enoch Powell. In the battle for mayor of London he is backing Boris Johnson against Ken Livingstone.

I may yet decide to yet to join him in Boris’s camp. At least Johnson is standing up for smokers. And last night I was seething again, when I had to go and stand on the pavement to smoke a cigarette, and carefully put the fag end in my little plastic packet, in case one of the spies of the New Puritans reported me and got me fined for littering the streets. And Livingstone is not in my good books at present because he wants to make motor cyclists pay the congestion charge.

Due to my pre-occupation with moving house I have neglected to blog recently about Britain’s ban on smoking which took effect on the first of July. Not only the laws that have been passed by national government but the activities of all the descendants of Cromwell’s Roundheads, who wanted to ban dancing, drinking and any form of indulgence which human beings used to induce merriment. Who want to stop peoplen letting their hair down and enjoying themselves, without bossy persons telling them that they cannot do what they want to do, because it is morally wrong, or that it causes harm to other people, or that it will harm them. So in the current fashion, although suicide is no longer a criminal offence, smokers are being told that they do not have the freedom to choose their own death sentance.  Local councils are jumping on to the fashionable band wagon to introduce their own laws, fining people for stubbing out cigarettes on the pavement and trying to stop people from eating and smoking in the open air.

Even the most fervent scientific advocate of the anti-smoking laws  would not dare to argue that anyone is at any risk at all from passive smoking in the open air. Yet the anti-smoking fashion has been so totally adopted by the influential classes, that there is no consistent protest, except from the tobacco lobby, funded by the manufacturers. Which I do not want to join up with.

There are still millions of British people, mostly the poor and the uneducated, who get get some pleasure from smoking.  They are being prevented from doing it anywhere, except in their own homes. Not in pubs, not in clubs, not even in the open air if councils get their way. And the zealots want to bring in laws to stop them smoking in their own homes, on the grounds that they are putting their own children at risk via passive smoking.

For young people this might seem a sound argument. Brought up, as they have been, on the ground breaking research by Richard Doll on the adverse effects of smoking. For my generation, on the other hand, the current fashion is a classic example of bad science. It is a plain fact that pretty well everyone in Britain during the war was subject to passive smoking, in all sorts of unventilated environments; the smoke filled pubs, the smoke filled air raid shelters, the smoke filled working class homes. (When all the men smoked but only a few of the women. Today it is the reverse. The macho males who used to figure in the Marlboro ads, have all become addicted to going to the gym, it is their oppressed women folk who are stil smoking.)

But surprise, surprise the children of that generation mostly survived. Even though most of the males, myself included, actually inhaled the evil weed themselves, unlike today’s middle class males, many of whom only inhale tiny fragments of the smoke of others, and only then when they are in very small confined spaces.

The illogicality of the present targeting of nicotine is clear when you compare it to alcohol, which kills and damages a far greater number of people who are not addicted themselves. This is because alcohol releases the agressions and so every day we read in the national and the local newspapers, of people who have been killed or nastily battered by partners, or friends, hyped up by drink. By contrast smoking makes people more content temporarily and less likely to trash the house and its occupants.

I hope Britain will produce a 21st century Richard Doll to prove it, and help governments and councils to get their priorities right. Not to urge the banning of alcohol, but to encourage politicians to be guided by proven facts, rather than the fashions of the  times.

The prohibition legislation against alcohol in the US was one of the worst laws executed by this modern democracy. It was pushed through by a Puritan minority. But it did far more harm than good. It drove moderate smokers into the arms of the mafia. It encouraged the growth of crime, by criminalising something which should never have been criminalised.

So it is with smoking.

This blog was acutally provoked by a small incident in my own personal life. An invitation to dinner, by a friend who happened to be,  like me, a lifelong smoker. As the telephone conversation developed it transpired that this was an invitation to join her at a restaurant. So we had to decide which one. So I said it should be to one where you could smoke.

This produced shouts from my wife and eldest daughter, who told me that there were no restaurants left in the neighbourhood where you could smoke. The debate raged so fiercely that I agreed to call our friend back, after we had resolved this family altercation.

Once we were talking to each other, I was able to make my point. Whereas all restaurants in the land cannot allow smoking indoors, there is a wide choice of restaurants in our neighbourhood, where you can still smoke at tables in the open air, which are entirely suitable for a July evening. But my daughter thinks that smoking had been banned in the open air as well, so that you could not eat anywhere in a restaurant and smoke, even if the tables were in the open air, where the danger from passive smoking was totally non-existent.

None of us was quite sure, whether a law had been passed to this effect, either by the national government, or by Camden Council. So the decision was deferred until we discover the facts.

But I decided to post this blog now. Because the issues of principle are quite clear.

And the vexed issue of smoking is important to my other concerns. If the government of Gordon Brown is going to be different from that of Tony Blair, it will be because Brown likes to think out things for himself, rather than to follow the views of the spin doctors, who urge him to tack to the fashions of the times.

Is Brown going to cowtow to the views of middle England, urged on by The Sun and the Daily Mail? Or is he going to listen to the voices of reason and the results of good science?

Woke up this morning feeling ashamed of myself. Went out to dinner last night. But the roots of the shame are nothing to do with fact that I drank too much. Though I did, starting with the bubbly in the garden, and going on a very decent red at the dinner table. Nor was it anything to do with the fact that I ate too much. Though I did. I consumed more food than an Indian peasant eats in a day on the starters. The taramsolata was really succulent and I splashed it over chunks of pitta bread. When there was no more I switched to the avocado dip which was equally tasty.

By the time I had got on to the soup I realised that I needed to pace myself if I was going to last out this eating marathon. So I tackled the soup, which was a foreign concoction over which Ted, the husband of my hostess had slaved lovingly. I drank all the liquid but left many of the bits floating in it. Particularly the red bits, which I suspected were slivers of radish to which I am supposedly allergic. Good thing too. Because I needed all my digestive powers to tackle the huge chunk of lasagne which then landed on my plate. But, after a short break for a fag in the garden, I had recovered sufficiently to make the most of the summer pudding which was out of this world.

As I am writing this I realise that I should feel guilty about this pretty spectacular indulgence. But what got me out of bed and to the computer was shame at some of the things I said. Particularly some of the cheap jokes I made at the expense of one of our neighbours, the Alastair Campbell who has just published those diaries. I first heard his name when we were on the starters. It was Grant, the Scottish civil servant, who was talking about him. He quickly went on to a sharp denunciation of Gordon Brown, with whom he had been at university. I quipped, “It takes a Scot to know one.’ And then launched another conversation at my end of the table based on how much better I knew Campbell than the journalists who were writing about him in the press.

Now that I am replaying the tape in my head I can hear the music of the conversation. There was I bullshitting about Campbell’s alpha male behaviour. And blending my theme with that of Grant at the other end of the table, who was going on about the short-comings of the new Prime Minister. He was also taking a swipe at Campbell for censoring the criticism of Brown in the published version of the diaries and cashing in private conversations.

Listening now to the whole dinner table symphony, I can see that Grant and myself were two alpha males, making our play for the attention of the ladies by cutting off the balls of the males we were attacking for making a mess of running the country.

At one point my hostess, Patsy, asked shrewdly whether I had actually read the diaries. I flannelled that one by saying that I had read his web site. But now I think about it, most of the things I was saying about Campbell last night came from what I had read by newspaper journalists. I had not even seen the television programmes.

And what strikes me, as I write now, is that much of this journalism is just like our conversation at the dinner table. I doubt whether any of the journalists who have written these articles have actually read the diaries properly. Like Campbell they earn their living by telling stories. And they have to earn it in age of 24/7 breaking news. It would take most people two working days to read the diaries properly. How can that possibly be justified for an article of one thousand words?

So if you really want to understand Alastair Campbell and get the flavour of what happened at the cabinet table when Blair, Brown and Campbell were taking us to war and David Kelly became so consumed with guilt that he killed himself, there is no substitute for buying the book and reading it yourself.

Which I may do, when I have completed the sale of my house, and moved down to my life of tranquillity on the Dorset coast, when I shall have time to write proper blogs based on real information and considered thought.

Meanwhile I will end this blog with yet another anecdote. I shamelessly used Alastair Campbell to help sell my house. My salesman’s patter, delivered without notes, blended several ingrediants, designed to make the buyers hungry for my house. I would mention the government car coming into the street at dawn to pick up the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary and take him to Downing Street, because Alastair was far too self-important to take the 24 bus. Which gave me an opportunity to bring in another famous man of the neighbourhood who always took the 24 bus to get to the House of Commons, Michael Foot, the nearly Prime Minister and champion of old Labour. Foot actually lives half way up the hill, but, what the hell, it gave me the opportunity to stress how good the 24 bus was in getting us to the West End

At other times I would tell the would-be purchasers about Campbell’s habit of jogging on the heath before the start of the working day. Giving me an opportunity of emphasising that the house is one hundred yards from Hampstead Heath and that if you go for a stroll at dawn you can have it to yourself, apart from a few Russian secret servicemen, whose London pad is on the Highgate side. I also told them that Alastair Campbell played the bagpipes at the annual neighbourhood street party and sent his children to the local primary school, painting a picture of a jolly safe neighbourhood.

Most of this is true, except that for all I know Campbell might have regularly used the 24 bus because, to be honest, I never actually saw the Government car come into his street at dawn. I just read about in the papers. So I really should buy the diaries myself and check it out.

Meanwhile here is an extract from Campbell’s blog, which will give you the flavour of his style. He must have started it in a fit of manic enthusiasm but the last entry is dated 6 May 2005. Here it is.

Well thank fuck for that. Tony’s got his historic third term and we’ll all be waiting for MH’s resignation (MH is Michael Howard, the Conservative Party leader) some time soon. Appropriately this clown who’s been blogging on his behalf resigned yesterday.

Spent the night with Tony – thought the acceptance speech I wrote for him was excellent. Pretty downbeat which suited the mood and we didn’t want him to appear too smug. Now it’s over though will have time to start concentrating on other things like running and rugby although I’m sure they’ve not seen the last of me at Westminster.

Oh and one last thing - Happy birthday Mr President!

The Blair Years is published by Hutchinson at £25. You can buy it from Amazon at £12.90.

Journalists mostly enter their trade with a notion that their job is to tell the truth to their readers. The people who own the newspapers do not always share the same imperatives. So it has been with many newspaper proprietors in history, notably Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, whose family still controls the Daily Mail, which Harmsworth founded in 1896.

Conrad Black shared, and still shares, the imperatives of the newspaper proprietors. Like Harmsworth, but also similar to Lord Beaverbrook, who like Black came to make his fortune in England, after a less than brilliant career in his native Canada. He succeeded brilliantly, winning control of the Daily Telegraph, the most consistently rightwing of the British serious newspapers, but one which prided itself on keeping its news columns strictly non-partizan.

Black’s own political views were so far right, that he might have been deemed as mad, in 21^st century Britain. Because he was also a curiously old fashioned figure, trying to be a British gentleman, he did not dictate to his journalists what they should write in the Daily Telegraph. When he differed from the opinions of his editors, whose mortgages he was paying, he did not order them to change their copy. He wrote letters to the editor of his own newspapers expressing his views. Of which the competitors of the Daily Telegraph made much fun.

Today Conrad Black faces the prospect of twenty years in jail. He won’t know until November, which is the kind of torture I would not want to inflict on any man in his sixties, even if he had done even nastier things than Black.

So before I sat down to write this blog, I did my research. Who was it who gave the right wing loony Black what he most coveted, a peerage of the British realm? Was it Margaret Thatcher, whose political views were quite close to those of Black? Was it John Major, who was much more moderate, but still a right of centre conservative? The answer is that it was Tony Blair, the leader of new Labour, who gave it to him in 2001, despite vigorous opposition from the Canadian prime minister.

So this blog, although its main subject is Conrad Black, looks at the central issue of current British politics. Is the government of Gordon Brown going to give us something different? Or is it going to follow slavishly New Labour Blair style. Which was quite prepared to toady up to right wing proprietors like Rupert Murdoch. None of us know yet. So let’s continue with the Conrad Black story.

The man who delivered the Daily Telepraph to Conrad Black was the chief executive of the Telegraph at the time, who I happen to have known since he first entered financial journalism on my old newspaper. Then he was employed by the Lawson family, who had made the Telegraph into the fine newspaper it was in my lifetime. Right-wing, but totally dedicated to separating news from comment, and printing the news at length. Because compression of complexities leads to distortion.

But my old friend, Andrew Knight, realised that the Daily Telepraph was in financial peril, because the number of people prepared to pay for decent news coverage was dwindling year by year. So on his own iniative he used a visit to Canada to persuade Black to buy the Telegraph. Shortly after Black took over, Knight jumped ship, and accepted a job as chief exec of Murdoch UK. Which added a few more millions to his own personal bank account.

That was a few years ago. Now, when I meet him, he says he is a ‘farmer’. Which means that he no longer does either journalism, or managing journalists; he is enjoying the rather handsome proceeds for doing what he learnt to do, and did for a few years. Which he used to buy a ‘farm’.

But what he was doing was not ‘journalism’ in the sense I understand it.

So let’s get back to today. And is Gordon Brown going to make a difference?

The man who was wheeled in tonight by ITV News, to speak about Black was Andrew Neil, one of Knight’s protégées. He argued that Black should indeed be sent to jail, and that it was a warning to all crooked businessmen, that they should follow the ‘rules’, because the present rules supposedly prevent business like Black from making their own millions at the expense of the public. Neil’s line was that Black had betrayed the shareholders.

Which he did.

But what is far more important from my viewpoint is that he betrayed the readers of the Daily Telegraph.

Daily Telegraph readers, like the readers of Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, were relying on Northcliffe to tell them the truth, as they were able to ascertain it.

This is my perspective on Conrad Black.

Read today’s British press and decide for yourselves whether it is worth considering. Here are the links. The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Sun and the Daily Mirror. Are they telling you the ‘truth’? Or am I?