Awoke just after 7 AM and drew back the curtains. And gasped. The night was still black but there was narrow band of deepest red stretching across the bottom of the horizon. The lights of Portland Bill were just visible but otherwise all blackness.

By the time I had taken my cup of tea to the study, the day had arrived. The rooftops were clearly visible and the sky above now showed a broad band painted with a mix of pinks and light blues and yellows. Clearly, God if he exists is a dab hand with the paint brush.

In came little Dulcie, disturbing my philosophical ramblings. ‘What colour is that?’, I asked. ‘Yellow’, she replied, and when I looked doubtful, she added, ‘And pink’. And then, ‘Have you seen my blanket.’ ‘It’s on that chair’, I said. ‘Don’t be silly. That’s my jumper.’

She went out to look elsewhere. And suddenly the whole sky was awash with colour. Making me frustrated at being a mere scribbler with no talent at all with a paint brush. My video camera is still unpacked. My still camera is back in London. I grabbed my mobile phone, and fumbled with the controls. It was asking me to send a message, resize the picture and do all sorts of other things. Finally I managed to get it to take a picture.

Here it is. Is it worth more than a thousand words?

Liberal Democrats are getting plenty of advice about to how to make themselves electable. Much of it based on the notion that politicians need to learn all about marketing. And much of it written by journalists who themselves have helped to foster a culture of cynicism about politicians. After all, don’t we all know that they will do anything to get elected?

But marketing a political party is not like selling soap powder. The whiter than white soap powder wars were all based on selling the package rather than the product. The competing soap powders, Persil, Daz, etc, were actually all made in the same factory and there was almost nothing to choose between them insofar as getting nasty stains out of clothes. In much the same way the orgy of privatization ushered in by Margaret Thatcher, makes us all prey to utility companies urging us to change our supplier. Though they are all delivering us the same gas and same electricity.

So currently the Lib Dems are being urged to to choose the leader who can make the party electable. Someone who will trim his or her sails to the opinion polls. This advice is based on a reading of history that suggests that Tony Blair made Labour electable again by changing the party’s image and by abandoning principle in favour of cowtowing to popular prejudices. And that David Cameron’s recent surge in the opinion polls arises because of his charisma rather than his policies or principles.

This so-called analysis is simplistic. Roll back to 1997. Tony Blair actually believed in the third way. The Labour Party has always been a broad church. Blair’s personal beliefs were fuelled by those in the party whose egalitarian zeal was based more on the thinking of Jesus Christ rather than Karl Marx. In power, as he grew older, he moved further to the right so that he was more admired by Margaret Thatcher than by Tony Benn.

Brown in the first successful weeks of his premiership won the support of the press and the hearts of the public by showing his convictions, and matching policies to those convictions, particularly by doing something for the poor. He was blown totally off course by David Cameron’s surge in popularity during the Conservative Party conference.

The headlines were grabbed by the shadow chancellor’s pledge to raise inheritance tax to £1 million. But it was not this single proposal which sent the Liberal Democratic vote into meltdown. It is the fact that Cameron is not just an opportunist. He speaks from his own convictions, and those are based on the beliefs the kind of Conservatism exemplified by Harold Macmillan in the twentieth century and Benjamin Disraeli in the nineteenth century. Those Tory voters who deserted to the Lib Dems came flocking back. Whether they will stay will depend on the totality of policies offered by the shadow cabinet, and by the alternatives offered by Labour and the Lib Dems. Brown is already being pressured by the Blairites to change course. The squabbles and bitter hatreds within Labour’s broad church are again beginning to surface.

This is an opportunity for the Lib Dems. To take advantage of it they need a new leader with vision and convictions. One way of reading the success of Blairism is to argue that Blair stole the clothes of the Lib Dems, which was a coalition of the reforming zeal and emphasis on individualism of the Liberal Party with the efforts of Shirley Williams, William Rogers and David Owen to translate Labour ideals into a modern social democratic party, with a Britain as part of Europe rather than a poodle for American power.

The next leader needs to be someone who understands that government in the twentieth century means dealing with vast companies who have more power over our lives than most governments and who are responsible only to their shareholders. How to deal with them effectively no political leader has got right yet.

The two leading contenders are likely to be Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. I shall be following what they have to say, to see which one of them is up to the challenge I have outlined above. And I shall be looking out to see whether there is a budding Shirley Williams amongst the LibDem faithful, who can show half the electorate that women can succeed without trying to be male than the men.

LibDems: Orange not whiter than white

Liberal Democrats are getting plenty of advice about to how to make themselves electable. Much of it based on the notion that politicians need to learn all about marketing. And much of it written by journalists who themselves have helped to foster a culture of cynicism about politicians. After all, don’t we all know that they will do anything to get elected?

But marketing a political party is not like selling soap powder. The whiter than white soap powder wars were all based on selling the package rather than the product. The competing soap powders, Persil, Daz, etc, were actually all made in the same factory and there was almost nothing to choose between them insofar as getting nasty stains out of clothes. In much the same way the orgy of privatization ushered in by Margaret Thatcher, makes us all prey to utility companies urging us to change our supplier. Though they are all delivering us the same gas and same electricity.

So currently the Lib Dems are being urged to to choose the leader who can make the party electable. Someone who will trim his or her sails to the opinion polls. This advice is based on a reading of history that suggests that Tony Blair made Labour electable again by changing the party’s image and by abandoning principle in favour of cowtowing to popular prejudices. And that David Cameron’s recent surge in the opinion polls arises because of his charisma rather than his policies or principles.

This so-called analysis is simplistic. Roll back to 1997. Tony Blair actually believed in the third way. The Labour Party has always been a broad church. Blair’s personal beliefs were fuelled by those in the party whose egalitarian zeal was based more on the thinking of Jesus Christ rather than Karl Marx. In power, as he grew older, he moved further to the right so that he was more admired by Margaret Thatcher than by Tony Benn.

Brown in the first successful weeks of his premiership won the support of the press and the hearts of the public by showing his convictions, and matching policies to those convictions, particularly by doing something for the poor. He was blown totally off course by David Cameron’s surge in popularity during the Conservative Party conference.

The headlines were grabbed by the shadow chancellor’s pledge to raise inheritance tax to £1 million. But it was not this single proposal which sent the Liberal Democratic vote into meltdown. It is the fact that Cameron is not just an opportunist. He speaks from his own convictions, and those are based on the beliefs the kind of Conservatism exemplified by Harold Macmillan in the twentieth century and Benjamin Disraeli in the nineteenth century. Those Tory voters who deserted to the Lib Dems came flocking back. Whether they will stay will depend on the totality of policies offered by the shadow cabinet, and by the alternatives offered by Labour and the Lib Dems. Brown is already being pressured by the Blairites to change course. The squabbles and bitter hatreds within Labour’s broad church are again beginning to surface.

This is an opportunity for the Lib Dems. To take advantage of it they need a new leader with vision and convictions. One way of reading the success of Blairism is to argue that Blair stole the clothes of the Lib Dems, which was a coalition of the reforming zeal and emphasis on individualism of the Liberal Party with the efforts of Shirley Williams, William Rogers and David Owen to translate Labour ideals into a modern social democratic party, with a Britain as part of Europe rather than a poodle for American power.

The next leader needs to be someone who understands that government in the twentieth century means dealing with vast companies who have more power over our lives than most governments and who are responsible only to their shareholders. How to deal with them effectively no political leader has got right yet.

The two leading contenders are likely to be Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. I shall be following what they have to say, to see which one of them is up to the challenge I have outlined above. And I shall be looking out to see whether there is a budding Shirley Williams amongst the LibDem faithful, who can show half the electorate that women can succeed without trying to be male than the men.

When I finished my last blog I accessed my email.

This is a copy of the message from npower.

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. 

Normally we provide an immediate response to our valued customers who contact us by email. Please accept our apologies for any delay in responding to you and rest assured that all efforts are being made to improve our response time. 

You can be confident that your enquiry is important to us and that we will reply as soon as possible.

 Their notion of 'immediate response' is to send an automated email. Instead of accessing their records about my complaints going back to May.

They are driving their 'valued customers' mad.

They should be told.

The BT story gets more unbelievable every day. Not content with connecting my London telephone to a number owned by someone else for 16 years without telling him or me, they have sent a letter to my London address demanding payment for October for connecting my old London number, which I had had for 39 years.

They have got the right number on the bill, but, according to my wife who just arrived back in London, the line is dead.

Which is a step backwards. Because since we moved on August 1st, the line has had a dialling tone, but when you attempted to dial, it told you that you had dialled an incorrect number. And when you rang it from outside, it told you either that, or that the number had not been recognised.

Two months of treatment like this makes me think that if I were not already a certified manic depressive, I would have been driven mad by all this.

So how much are companies like BT and npower adding to the bills of the National Health Service? They must be driving thousands of normal people quite mad. The repeated message, delivered by the automated responses, and the written responses when they finally come, is that we, the customers, are making the mistakes.
And why are journalists not paying attention to this?

Is it all the result of the Thatcherite determination to privatise pubic utililities? It might be.

Not having a telephone landline is an inconvenience. But I had to deal with a rather more serious matter as well. My Dorset electricity is delivered by overhead powerlines, which are surrounded by the prolific apple tree in my garden. Which might be brougt down when we have a serious storm, which in the last few days I thought might be imminent.

This is an emergency. But I had to spend an hour ringing five telephone numbers. Because Southern Electric, who collects my money, does not own the telephone line. That is a body called SWEB, which is nothing less than the new version of the old South Western Electricity Board, which used to supply power before Thatcher went mad for privatisation.

They have told me they will deal with it in two working days. Which are nearly up.

And nothing has happened.

npower (fashionably lower case. And E. E. Cummings thought he was just writing a poem! Little did he know that his efforts would be plagiarised by capitalism. Perhaps his estate should be asking npower for royalties.) is part of the vast German-owned RWE Group. And it clearly has no power at all.

Today I got a reply from a second ‘correspondence advisor’,  one Mark Brown, who repeats the mistakes of his colleague, Scott Collin. The anonymous manager has decided! And passed his decision on to the team of ‘correspondence advisors’ I wonder how many they employ. And how much that costs the shareholders.

But far worse than them are the managers who are employed to manage.

So I have to go to the top.

So please read my previous post and email the chief exec. He ought to be told that this manager who has not addressed this increasingly irate customer is wasting pots of money for the shareholders. And that what he must address is the way his company is organised which perpetuates such idiocies.

npower, unlike BT, has had the decency to apologise to me, and offer to pay me for my mobile phone bills, as long as I submit them. Which I cannot go because I use pay as you go. Since I cannot supply the bills they have decreed that the ‘correct’ compensation for me is £10.

Which I think, and I have told them, is grossly inadequate. Since my saga with npower has been going on far longer than my saga with BT, and is easily veriable by them as well as by me.

But npower tells me that they have so many accounts that they cannot trace my payments to them, unless I give them all the bank references!

So npower has threatened three times to cut off my gas supply and sent in the debt collectors hoping to break down my door. Despite the fact that they were collecting my money by direct debit!!!

So it is obvious that I cannot rely on customer services. I have to send my complaints to the boss.

So who is the boss of npower?

npower is a company which emerged from the Thatcher zeal for privatising everything. The main root company was the privatised Midlands Electricity Board, which, as it happens supplied my electricity in Wolverhampton when I was studying for my A-levels, and never once threatened to cut off our supply, because my parents paid their bills. As do I.

But in 2001 npower was acquired by RWE, which is a German coal mining company, which has ‘diversified’ into all sorts of power, including nuclear, gas, electricity, oil, etc. npower is a tiny part of this vast empire. So if it takes npower over four months to find the money I have been paying them to what they say is their ‘many accounts’ how can I convince RWE, that their subsidiary has been harrassing me for money which I had already paid.

Difficult. But since the RWE web site tells me how socially responsible they are I shall go to the top. The President and chief executive of RWE Group. He is Jurgen Grossman and his web address is: http://www.rwe.com/generator.aspx/konzern/executive-board/juergen-grossmann/language=en/id=498692/juergen-grossmann-page.html

This is what he looks like. And he has clearly done all the ‘right things’ career wise. But does he know what npower is doing for him in Britain?

Dr.-Ing. Dr. E.h. Jürgen Großmann

President and CEO

Biography

Probably not. So please tell him.

From my experience his underlings at npower show that RWE stands for Really the Worst European  gas company in Britain.

RWE clearly has its finger in a vast number of pies in many countries.

But in supplying gas to London NW3 they are the pits.

(This blog is subtitled ‘BT: Rake’s progress, update five)

The telephone number which BT imposed on me on Monday of last week, and which I have resolutely refused to use, turns out to be a number belonging to someone else! Not only that the man concerned, who is a lifelong resident of Gospel Oak, has had this number for 16 years and it is his business number. So for the past week his business has suffered while he toiled through all those automated options to get BT to correct their dreadful mistake. So today he is getting his calls. But my line in Savernake Road is once again dead, as it has been for more than two months.

I think it is about time that Sir Michael Rake, the new chairman of BT, got to grips with these problems.

Here is the latest scorecard.

Number of Days BT has failed to connect my telephone as agreed: 70

Number of Days BT has failed to reply to my complaints and give me any explanation for this delay: 69

Money spent on mobile phone trying to contact a BT human being: £50 plus

Time spent on the telephone and internet complaints: Hours and hours.

Apologies from BT: Nil

The Chairman of BT is now Sir Michael Rake, an accountant with a record quite as distinguished in that field as Sir Christopher Bland was in his. Can he be happy with the way the company he now chairs is behaving? Does he even know how they are behaving?

Maybe not, so if you meet him, tell him. This is what he looks like.

Sir Michael Rake was appointed to the Board as Chairman on 26 September 2007.

He was Chairman of KPMG International from 2002 until September 2007. Prior to his appointment as Chairman of KPMG International he was Chairman of KPMG in Europe and Senior Partner of KPMG in the UK.

Stephen from BT called back with bad news. My old number was given to someone else on Monday! He did say he was sorry. But was totally unable to provide an explanation. And no, he could not pass my complaint to his manager. I had to send in another complaint. For which I shall be given yet another reference number.

Must close now while I go out and scream.

(Wonder of wonders. Three messages from BT in one afternoon.  An email saying my order had been completed! Second an automated response to my immediate reply of complaint. Third, another human being (Steve) who acually listened to what I had to say.  And told me that I would get my old number back. Snag is he could not tell me when. But another person will ring me and let me know.)

 Number of Days BT has failed to connect my telephone as agreed: 64

Number of Days BT has failed to reply to my complaints and give me any explanation for this delay: 63

Money spent on mobile phone trying to contact a BT human being: £50 plus

Time spent on the telephone and internet complaints: Hours and hours.

Apologies from BT: Nil

The Chairman of BT is now Sir Michael Rake, an accountant with a record quite as distinguished in that field as Sir Christopher Bland was in his. Can he be happy with the way the company he now chairs is behaving? Does he even know how they are behaving?

Maybe not, so if you meet him, tell him. This is what he looks like.

Sir Michael Rake was appointed to the Board as Chairman on 26 September 2007.

He was Chairman of KPMG International from 2002 until September 2007. Prior to his appointment as Chairman of KPMG International he was Chairman of KPMG in Europe and Senior Partner of KPMG in the UK.

This is a message from the heart to any human being at BT who knows what is happening to my telephone. It is now over two months since we moved and I want to send out the change of address cards! You can post a comment here, or email me at bob@thedailynovel.com, or walk round to my London flat and give me a detailed explanation of this sorry saga.