Gridlock and Road Rage

This is the title of a TV programme at 21.00 tonight on Channel 4. Apparently it's all about people spending half their lives stuck in traffic jams, and "the absurdity of our small island and its 33 million vehicles".

The Radio Times has this interesting quote:

One expert hits the nail on the head when he observes that, given a blank sheet of paper, you'd never come up with the car as a rational solution to personal transport -- "an individually owned, very expensive box, easily damaged, kills people, pollutes the environment, and they crash into each other".

Hear hear to that. I hope the programme will make it clear that there are practical public-transport alternatives to quite a lot of car journeys -- to a greater degree than many motorists realise, in my experience.

The Czech Restaurant

Dinner last night at what is said to be London's only Czech restaurant. It's in West Hampstead and it's called, er, The Czech Restaurant.

We had wild boar. Good filling nosh and good value. Good red wine fairly cheap.

The dining room has its original 1946 decor and the whole place feels completely unfashionable -- not a foodie in sight -- just what I like.

74 West End Lane, NW6. Tel. (020) 7372 1193.

Why do people write such crap?

When the London mayoral results were announced, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson both made notably gracious speeches. Johnson was widely commended for being so magnanimous in victory, praising Livingstone as "a very considerable public servant and a distinguished leader of this city".

Not so, however, some of Johnson's supporters. Last week Iain Dale, in his highly-regarded blog -- well, it is very highly regarded by Iain Dale -- delivered himself of the following astonishing assertion:

[Transport for London] have failed in virtually everything they have set out to do.

In reality, Transport for London under the chairmanship of Ken Livingstone has been extremely successful, not from a Labour or socialist point of view but in the eyes of independent transport experts and non-party professionals everywhere. For instance:

-- Uniquely in the world, a significant modal shift has been achieved from private car to public transport. This is the holy grail for sustainable cities throughout the world, and had widely been thought impossible.

-- The congestion charge, a brave pioneering move, has made the whole concept of road charging respectable. Tories used to oppose it, despite the fact that it is merely the application of market forces to a finite resource (road capacity) for which demand exceeds supply. They have now given up opposing it.

-- Bus services have improved out of all recognition. London is one of very few places in Britain where bus ridership has risen significantly.

-- Cycling in London has gone up by 43%.

-- The Oyster card has proved to be a rare win-win innovation, bringing numerous real benefits both for passengers and for operators. London was not the first city to adopt such "touch and go" smartcards for public transport -- I had one in Kuala Lumpur several years ago, and Hong Kong had them even earlier -- but it had nowhere been introduced on this massive scale, and all with barely a technical hitch.

-- The transfer of the North and West London Lines from Silverlink/Network Rail to TfL and their relaunch as the London Overground represents another big quality improvement for passengers.

As if his preposterous, pig-ignorant comments about TfL were not enough, Iain Dale goes on to mount a nasty personal attack on Dave Wetzel, outgoing TfL Vice-Chair. In the 1980s, Wetzel was Transport Chair at the GLC. In that earlier incarnation, he oversaw the introduction of the zonal fares system, "Fares Fair" and the Travelcard, all huge improvements at the time, and first steps towards a more integrated transport system. He should be a hero to anyone who really knows and cares about London.

Dale seems to think Wetzel is "Dave Spart" of Private Eye. In fact, so far from being a crazed Trot, he is a serious, widely respected and highly experienced transport policy expert, who addresses academic conferences on the subject and has a lot of letters after his name, as you can see if you take the trouble to Google him.

The only thing more depressingly unfair than Dale's post is some of the 73 mostly idiotic comments that other people have made below it. Truly breathtaking nonsense, for the most part. What a lot of ill-informed, childish, spiteful, pathetic rubbish there is in the blogosphere.

8 reasons why the govt must go

Each one can be expressed in two words:

1. IRAQ WAR.
2. FAT CATS.
3. 42 DAYS.
4. AIRPORT EXPANSION.
5. TRIDENT MISSILES.
6. CONSTITUTIONAL NON-REFORM.
7. DATABASE SOCIETY.
8. BUILDING ROADS.

When we were all pissed off with the Blair regime, it was put about that everything would be different once Gordon Brown took over.

As it turns out, this was a complete lie. Give or take the odd supercasino, all the same disastrous policies remain in force.

All the heart-searching and breast-beating now going on over Brown's hopelessness as leader rather misses the point, as far as I am concerned. Just changing the leader is not going to make Labour suddenly acceptable. There will have to be drastic changes of policy if I am ever to vote Labour again at national level.

How to run your car on water

http://www.runyourcarwithwater.com/

Ha ha ha! If it was this easy, wouldn't we have heard a lot more about it before now?

Train of the day

The boyf and I spent a few days in Nice. The south of France is always very agreeable.

We went on a TGV Duplex (above) from Paris to Nice in 5 and a half hours, which is amazing when you look at the distance on the map (about 600 miles).

It was our first time on a double-deck TGV. We were on the upper deck. Surprisingly it did not seem cramped at all - you hardly notice that you are in only the upper half of the train.

Why can't we have such wonderful railway services in the UK?

Those results in full

Much nonsense is being written about the London election results.

From most of this morning's media coverage, you would suppose that the voters had deserted Ken Livingstone in droves. Here are the actual share-of-the-vote figures compared with last time, for the first preferences, from the official London Elects website:

Tories: Up from 28.24% to 42.48%

Labour: Up from 35.70% to 36.38%

Lib Dems: Down from 14.91% to 9.63%

UKIP: Down from 6.02% to 0.91%.

Note the following:

1. Ken Livingstone's share of the vote was actually fractionally up!

2. The big losers were the Lib Dems and UKIP. Most of the big increase in the Tory share of the vote must have come from them.

3. Brian Paddick has been a disaster for the Lib Dems. Even on his home patch in the Lambeth-plus-Southwark constituency, he scraped only 12%. Across London, he got less than 10% compared with Simon Hughes' almost 15% four years ago.

Roughly the same can be said of the votes for the London Assembly. UKIP lost both its seats. The Lib Dems are down from 5 seats to 3. For all the talk about Labour meltdown in the country as a whole, in London Labour actually gained a seat - up from 7 seats to 8.

The Greens with 8.29% kept their existing 2 seats. And yet their mayoral candidate, Sian Berry, whom I had thought quite impressive, secured only 3% of first preferences. I think maybe she would have done better if more people had realised that they could give her their first preference without wasting their vote, as long as they put Ken second. My hunch is that many people did not fully understand how the voting system worked.

Labour did a bit better in London, and the Tories and Lib Dems much worse, than in Thursday's council elections in England and Wales -- here are the share-of-the-vote figures for the London-wide party lists, compared with BBC estimates for E + W:

Tories: 34% (outside London: 44%)
Labour: 27% (outside London: 24%)
Lib Dems: 11% (outside London: 25%)

Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson both scored a lot better than their respective parties; Brian Paddick scored even worse than his.

Finally, we should not get too panicked about the BNP gaining one seat. They only just scraped through the 5% threshold, having only just failed to do so last time round. Meanwhile, their mayoral candidate's share of the vote was actually down on 2004 (from 3.04% to 2.84%).

Livingstone "extraordinarily successful Mayor"

A very fair analysis this morning from the Indie's Steve Richards:

(...) many elections present difficult choices. Today's contest in London is not one of them. Livingstone has been an extraordinarily successful Mayor under difficult circumstances. Presumably some voters have complacently forgotten what the city was like before he got the job, queuing for tickets to go on a hopeless underground service, waiting for buses that never came, no hope of a new Crossrail linking parts of this unwieldy capital.

Now travellers whiz through the ticket machines with their oyster cards, the rate of increase in cars entering the city has stalled and buses run around the clock. Recently I met on holiday a non-Labour voter who lived in Bristol, despairing of her local authority that had failed to seize the initiative on every front. "I wish we had someone like Ken Livingstone", she added.

Richards continues:

Presumably those striding to the polling stations seething with misjudged fury at Livingstone, and hailing Johnson as a decent chap, have decided that it is a coincidence that their teenage kids are now able to get around the city relatively smoothly on the buses. Perhaps those over 60 who travel for nothing believe that their free access is a gift from God. (...) so sheltered in their disconnected, atomised lives that they assume things happen around them without reason, no buses one year, lots the next, cheaper houses one year and none the next.

They have failed on a second count too. They have fallen for the relentless anti-Livingstone propaganda in the Evening Standard, spiced by the spineless imbeciles at Channel Four who echoed the orthodoxy by making a one-sided anti-Livingstone film. Would it not be a triumph for democracy if the voters of London showed that they are bright enough not to be brainwashed by an unelected newspaper?

Unfortunately, most of the people who can still make a difference today probably don't read the Independent.

Stop Boris - says Peregrine Worsthorne

Not that it's likely to make much difference at this late stage in the game, but today's Grauniad has a big collection of comments from a wide range of people on why a Boris Johnson mayoralty would be a disaster.

Believe it or not, one of those taking this view is the arch-High Tory, Peregrine Worsthorne, sometime editor of the very right-wing Sunday Telegraph:

If Boris loses, that will be bad news for David Cameron. But if he wins it will be much worse news, because the Boris campaign has shown that without the jokes there is nothing there. He just can't do seriousness and responsibility. So with two years to go before the next election, Boris will have had more than enough time to demonstrate his lack of bottom; a demonstration which will call into question the whole Cameron -- a horse from the same lightweight stable -- enterprise.

This is encouraging because it gives us hope that there might be significant numbers of similarly-minded Tories who, though unlikely to vote for Ken, will not bother to turn out to vote for Boris.

Irritating men

To fend off any accusations of mysogyny as a result of my post Irritating women, I list below some extremely irritating men:

1. Jeremy Clarkson.
2. John Humphrys.
3. Richard Littlejohn.
4. That fat populist slob on talk radio whose name escapes me. (Update: John Gaunt)
5. Chris Moyles.
6. Norman Tebbit.
7. Kelvin Mackenzie.
8. Piers Morgan.
9. Peter Mandelson.
10. Charles Moore.
11. Christopher Booker.
12. John Redwood.
13. Dennis Skinner.
14. Alan Titchmarsh.
15. Andrew Gilligan.

Irritating women

Iain Dale says on Twitter: "Mariella Frostrup is perhaps the most irritating woman on the planet".

Nonsense! Without a doubt, the top 15 most irritating women on the planet are, in descending order:

1. Esther Rantzen.
2. Margaret Thatcher.
3. Anne Coulter.
4. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
5. Melanie Phillips.
6. Caroline Flint.
7. Hazel Blears.
8. Janet Street-Porter.
9. Harriet Harman.
10. Patricia Hewitt.
11. Hillary Clinton.
12. Germaine Greer.
13. Tessa Jowell.
14. Anne Robinson.
15. Anne Widdecombe.

Boris Routemaster plan is a non-starter, say experts

Transit magazine reveals that transport industry professionals are saying that Boris Johnson's proposal to resurrect the Routemaster bus is a complete non-starter:

A senior executive with a UK bus builder said a new Routemaster could not be certified, and would be too expensive. "It's not been thought through," he told Transit.

Other experts also cast doubt on the plan. Sandy Glennie, the former managing director of Volvo Bus UK, said that having an open rear platform on a new bus was a "non starter".

Andrew Braddock, the former head of access and mobility at Transport for London, estimated that the vehicles would cost the mayor more than £250,000 each, much more expensive than a conventional double decker or an artic.

And yet this was originally supposed to be the centrepiece of Johnson's mayoral campaign.

Is there any reason to think that any of his other proposals are likely to be any more soundly based?

"Stop Boris" campaign song and video

If you can't follow all the lyrics, go here and click "More info".

Thanks to The Tory Troll.

More "green" support for Ken Livingstone

Geoffrey Lean is a noted environmental campaigner. In an article called The real green candidate is Ken in today's Sindie, he tells us that he doesn't like Ken Livingstone, the man.

He realises, though, that the issues transcend the personalities. Ken, he says, is "one of the world's greenest leaders":

It's not just the congestion charge. As Mayor, Mr Livingstone has introduced the world's most detailed and thought-out range of policies, including tackling vehicle emissions, boosting renewable energy, offering Londoners cut-price insulation, and persuading companies to green their offices. And, amazingly, he has reversed the universal trend to greater car use, achieving an unprecedented shift to public transport, walking and cycling.

In contrast, Boris Johnson "spent those years denouncing 'eco-moralists' for spouting 'mumbo-jumbo', and applauding Mr Bush for trying to kill the Kyoto Protocol".

The benefits of Livingstone's approach go far beyond London itself, Lean notes:

Jonathon Porritt says a Johnson victory would be "a massive setback". He's right – and not just here. For Mr Livingstone established a remarkable alliance of many of the world's cities to act on global warming, which looks to him for leadership.

Geoffrey Lean's conclusion:

Eight years is usually long enough at the top. But, such is the nature of the Mayor's green measures, they need another term to be embedded. Like him or not, London – and the world – needs him to win.

Paddick concedes defeat

People I speak to are shocked by Brian Paddick's descent into vulgar abuse against Ken Livingstone. Paddick called Livingstone "a really nasty little man ... very unpleasant".

This may or may not be what he actually thinks, but to say it publicly smacks of desperation. Presumably he thought he was trying to woo Tory voters who already hate Ken but think Boris is an idiot. But it is an inadvertent admission of defeat - a recognition by Paddick that he is not going to be running Livingstone or Johnson close.

Suppose these 3 candidates were getting roughly equal scores of about 30% of first preferences each. One might then see the following scenario, with the three only narrowly separated:

1. Johnson
2. Paddick
3. Livingstone

In that event, Paddick would need Livingstone's second preferences in order to beat Johnson in the second count. He is hardly likely to get many of them by being gratuitously abusive towards those voters' first preference. Paddick surely cannot be so deluded as to think he is going to win outright on first preferences, so he must have concluded that his campaign is failing to lift his score anywhere near towards the other two.

It looks so far as if, despite his heavy emphasis on the crime issue (which the polls keep telling us is people's number one concern and which is a subject he is uniquely qualified to address), he is not managing to expand much beyond the core Lib Dem support of 15% first preferences that Simon Hughes got in 2004.

Meanwhile, presumably Paddick's comments will have the effect, if any, of deterring his existing core supporters from putting Ken Livingstone as their second preference. So the net outcome of all this is simply to make it more likely that Boris Johnson will win. It's all rather depressing.

Dancing Korean Traffic Cops of the day

Toiling for Ken's re-election

Hard pounding on the streets and council estates of Lambeth and Southwark. I have the aching leg muscles to prove it. So far, I've encountered little open hostility to Ken Livingstone, and no open support at all for Boris Johnson. One or two people even asked for window posters for Ken. Of course, this is natural Labour territory, in so far as such a thing still exists. Probably most of these people have better things to do than read the Evening Standard.

But overall, I think the main enemy is apathy, and people's feeling that all of this has no relevance to their lives. "Getting the vote out" is going to be absolutely crucial.

Boris Johnson backtracks on buses

An interview with Boris Johnson in Time Out this week is worth reading. On bendy buses, he has changed his tune, and now concedes that they have some good points:

The bendy has some advantages. I like the fact it's disabled-friendly and buggy-friendly and it is a prodigious carrier of people and fits under underpasses. But it doesn't have that open back platform.

He also admits that his "new Routemaster" would take four years to produce. And I slightly doubt whether the Health and Safety Executive will allow any new bus to go into service these days with an open back platform. I don't think these exist anywhere else now outside the Third World. So if that is supposed to be the main point of it, the whole idea is even more of a nonsense than we thought.

Also, Johnson now describes moves by commentators and opponents to scrutinise and cost his Routemaster policy as "a hysterical attempt to focus on a small aspect of one policy". To start with, this proposal was his one big flagship idea. Now it's "a small aspect of one policy".

And he thinks Ken Livingstone should learn to drive, because "we all need to understand what it's like to overtake a bendy bus in traffic". But no, Boris, most of us don't actually. The vast majority of people moving around in central and inner London don't drive there because they know that driving motorcars in city centres is (a) pointless, and (b) a selfish use of a scarce finite public resource (urban road space).

Roads vs. trains

Christian Wolmar raises a very pertinent question, Why are roads favoured by the right and trains by socialists?:

... a whole host of right wing think tanks in the US lobby strongly for increased spending on roads, while simultaneously trying to kill off public transport systems, arguing they are inefficent and expensive. (...)

What is it about roads that attracts the Right? Surely they must, by now, realise that the freedom afforded by the car is illusory, since, as usage rises, the extra societal costs of more people getting on to the road outweigh by far the benefits. And the simplistic view that roadbuilding is the answer has been widely discredited. There is a gaping intellectual gap in the Right's thinking which environmentalists and public transport supporters should be more adept at exploiting.

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

This from The Onion made me laugh:

The Newsnight mayoral debate

Dave Cole has a fair analysis of Tuesday's Livingstone-Johnson-Paddick debate conducted by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.

As Cole notes, transport is really the Mayor's biggest responsibility. And Ken Livingstone's track record on that issue, whatever else you might think of him, is pretty impressive.

Still, having just spent two hours leafletting for Ken on the mean streets of South London, I suspect our biggest enemy, at least in the inner suburbs, is not Boris Johnson, so much as apathy. Most people, of course, aren't interested in politics. How do we persuade them that voting on 1 May is actually going to make a difference to their lives?

Train of the day

British Rail TV advert from the 1980s, featuring an HST 125 diesel or "flying banana". These were some of the best trains ever made and they are still going strong, albeit with new engines.

Stable doors and bolting horses

Tories outline rowdy pupils plan, the BBC informs us.

David Cameron proposes to "ban classroom troublemakers and give powers to protect teachers".

Another gimmicky announcement not properly thought through. The general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders [sic] explains, lower down in the BBC piece, why it will just make matters worse.

Anyway, it is much too late to do anything about this. Where obedience and discipline and respect for authority in schools are concerned, the pass was sold at least 25 years ago.

Yes, I'm mostly a lefty but I am a bit right-wing on this issue.

Is Brian Paddick credible?

Up early this snowy morning to find Brian Paddick on Steve Richards' GMTV sofa. Paddick seems to be getting his act together, and seemed less wooden and flakey than in some previous appearances.

Paddick certainly speaks with authority on crime and policing. Anyone can see that he knows what he is talking about when he dismisses Boris Johnson's proposals on crime as pure fantasy. He will also collect plenty of gay support. But he loses all credibility for me when he tries to claim that Ken Livingstone has a poor track record as Mayor. I doubt if anyone really believes that.

Livingstone's flagship achievement has been the congestion charge. Is it not revealing that hardly any of the other candidates, not even Johnson, are now proposing to abolish it? They thus tacitly admit that he got the one big thing right, yet try to pretend that he has a poor track record. It doesn't make sense.

Paddick's problem is that it will be amazing if he is one of the top two on first preferences. I have yet to find anyone who seriously doubts that it will be Boris v. Ken. So really the only interesting question about Paddick is where his second preferences go when he is eliminated from the race. Steve Richards tried several times to press him on his own second preference, but he clearly felt he had to maintain the fiction that he thinks Johnson and Livingstone are both equally bad from his point of view, to such a degree that he proposes (so he claims) to waste his own vote by not using his second preference. Of course, politicians always have to pretend they are going to win, but this seems to me pretty absurd.

Ken vs Boris, part 94

I am often a little slow catching up with who has said what. I've just come upon a piece from several days ago by David Aaronovitch called It's Horrid Ken v Chaotic Boris.

Aaronovitch -- no lefty he, these many years -- says he thought Ken Livingstone was going to be a lousy Mayor, and now admits he was entirely wrong. (I remember that Polly Toynbee went through exactly the same mea culpa.)

But it didn't happen. Instead we got the congestion charge, the most successful and courageous attempt to turn back the inevitable gridlock to which the city was condemned. London managed what Edinburgh and everywhere else flunked, and it was Ken who made it happen. The mayor got Londoners back on buses, Tube and bicycles at the expense of the cars that were killing the capital. Ken also helped to win London the Olympics, one of the most important and sought-after honours that any city can attain. Far from alienating the bankers and industrialists, Ken wooed them when necessary. Ken, wrong on all the things that don't matter in a London mayor, has been right on almost all the things that do.

Of Boris Johnson, Aaronovitch writes:

... a commitment to "rephase traffic lights", which is code for giving pedestrians even less time to cross the road, and motorists even more. This is almost the exact opposite of what we need to do, and might best be described as a uniquely anti-green and anti-child measure.

He goes on to point out that Johnson is completely unreliable:

There is hardly a senior soul in this business who hasn't turned up to an evening with Boris, to discover that it is an evening with anyone but. "I'm sorry," says the chair, anticipating the boos of disappointment, "but Boris Johnson is unable to be with us," followed by some lie.

The man is chaotic. The notion that a Boris administration will, as his website promises every few lines, subject London's finances and procedures to the most rigorous of scrutinies, is beyond parody.

Meanwhile, Neil Harding reminded us yesterday, in case we have forgotten, of a whole string of reasons why you have to vote for Ken if you want a greener London, better transport, affordable housing, etc., and pointed out that, on the basis of opinion poll evidence:

... if this election were being fought on the issues Ken would win easily. Most Londoners think Ken has done a good job as Mayor, only the Evening Standard smears and lies can explain why Ken is not ahead of bumbling Boris.

Harding returns to the fray today with a piece called True 'liberals' Will Vote For 'liberal' Policies Not Personalities, pointing out that:

Livingstone of course has built a coalition far wider than new Labour, his competence, vision and political bravery have won voters from Tory, Lib Dem, Green, trade unionist, muslim and other ethnic and minority backgrounds, but his 'brand' has been severely damaged by unfounded accusations from a London press that would shame North Korea in its levels of bias.

Ken Livingstone, Harding reminds us, has also garnered support from the gay movement, the anti-war movement, and anti-racism groups, not with vague gestures but through actual concrete policy measures.

Finally he draws our attention to a fascinating site called VoteMatch where you can take a survey that shows which candidates are closest to your own views. My results came out with Livingstone the clear favourite for my set of views, and I think the message is that you may not like Ken personally but you need to ignore that, and make a rational judgement about his actual policies vis-a-vis those of the other candidates.

Heathrow expansion vs. railways (again)

I never thought to see it, but the normally loathsome Evening Standard has come out with an editorial with every word of which I agree.

The subject is Heathrow airport, and the fact that its further expansion is both unnecessary and undesirable:

Plenty of capacity could be freed up by reducing services to
destinations such as Paris and Brussels which, thanks to the successful new Channel Tunnel rail link and St Pancras Terminal, are better served by high-speed rail than ever.

The same applies, of course, to the scope for abolishing most domestic flights and instead building new rail capacity within the UK, as I argued recently in my submission to the Transport Secretary, No to Heathrow Airport expansion.

Remarkably, the Tories have come round to my way of thinking on this -- not just Boris, who might have been accused of mere opportunism, but the party nationally, as explained by their spokeswoman Theresa Villiers:

She said: "The Government is set on building a third runway regardless of whether key economic and environmental questions are answered. However, they have failed to make the case."

She also questioned the thoroughness of the consultation document outlining expansion. "On page 55 of one of the annexes to the consultation document, we find them casually admitting that they have failed to price in the carbon effects of surface access to the airport... (...)"

She said the Government should look at a northsouth-high speed rail line linked to Heathrow and the Channel Tunnel as an alternative to expansion.

"We could dispense with the need for hundreds of the flights now clogging up the airport," she said.

She added: "The Government... has given us a consultation document which fails to make the economic case, fails to make the environmental case, and fails to consider the alternatives."

For almost half a century, from the 1959 general election onwards, I have been fighting against the Tories. Now, on this and some other issues, they are more on my side than a Labour government. What on earth is going on?

Where Are They Now, No. 94: Illtyd Harrington

Well, there's a name from the past.

And the answer turns out to be: he's alive and writing a column in the Camden New Journal.

Here's his comment on the mayoral election:
Is Ken the man to tackle our biggest challenge?

Penguins of the day

Cleggover and male bonking

I am surprised at the fuss over Nick Clegg's interview in GQ where he says that he has discussed Ugandan affairs with some 30 people in his life so far.

My own figure is probably something of the same order, as far as I can remember after all these years.

Surely this is pretty unexceptional for most men? (Hughie Green, played brilliantly by Trevor Eve in a BBC4 biopic last night, is supposed to have slept with 1,000 women).

According to an article in yesterday's Grauniad, a 2005 survey in Canada found that men reported an average of 31.9 partners.

One expects Anne Widdecombe to be shocked, of course, but she has always been completely out of touch with reality, and barking to boot. Those of us who inhabit the real world must know that Clegg's figure is quite normal, and therefore the shock being professed in some quarters, such as this piece by Amanda Platell, is just hypocrisy.

Thank goodness, then, for Catherine Townsend, who in a piece called Sleeping Around in today's Indie tells us that her own figure is "between 60 and 100", and believes her experiences make her a better partner. She adds:

It seems that the people bleating the loudest about everyone else's morality are either seriously repressed or hiding sexual skeletons.

Whether any politician is wise to answer this sort of question in the first place, whatever the figure might be, is a different question, discussed here by Steve Richards, who finds that other commentators think it was a seriously unwise move.

The end of capitalism as we know it?

The current world economic crisis has provoked various commentators recently to speculate that the rules of the capitalist game are going to have to change. These have, if memory serves, included such writers as Larry Elliott, Will Hutton, Naomi Klein, Polly Toynbee and Johann Hari.
The trouble is, those are just the sort of left-inclined people you would expect to say those things, and there is the risk that it is just wishful thinking.

Last night, however, the BBC gave an hour of prime-time television to a documentary called Super Rich: the Greed Game, explaining (I quote from the Radio Times) "how the super-rich were able to amass their fortunes, leaving the rest of us to pick up the bill for their avarice".

And this was not one of those "a personal view by ...." shows that they occasionally let people like John Pilger make. No, this was presented by the BBC's Business Editor, Robert Peston. Of the behaviour of the bankers and hedge fund managers, he says:

It has encouraged people to take foolish risks that are now endangering the financial system.

So, if it is now official that all this is a huge scandal, will anything be done about it?

Not here in the UK, I fear, as long as Gordon Brown is in charge. He has been buttering up all these shysters and crooks for donkey's years.

Read Robert Peston's blog entry about the programme here.