Open Road

Tuesday Jan 8th 2008

Lipstick on a pig?

News that Stephen Carter is to take over as grand vizier at Downing Street has been greeted by the usual ‘friends’ telling the world how capable, energetic, visionary etc etc he is.  All such appointments are greeted in this way until the gloss wears off and the individual is revealed in fact to be querulous, lecherous, paralysed by indecision, and of unsound mind.

The PM will be glad to know that Salieri has some (very limited) contact with Carter and on this basis can state that he seems to suffer from none of these vices.  Although his early life was blighted by being a lawyer, he recovered to be a rather good CEO at J Walter Thompson and – although it pains one to admit this – did a decent job at Ofcom.  But, as his decision to go into government indicates, he has always had an eye on the main chance:  he was allegedly infamous for the rather obvious way he angled for a senior media job during his later months at Ofcom.

Monday Jan 7th 2008

Has Brown blown it?

Well worth a good look at the excellent UK Polling Report blog for an analysis of the state of the political parties, whether Brown has blown it for good and whether the Tories really are riding high enough.  Scroll down for a view on each of the main parties.

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/

Briefly summarised, Anthony Wells’ view is that Brown will never fully recover from his current travails, that Nick Clegg will not be able to make a decisive difference and that while David Cameron and the Tories are doing well, they have been largely the beneficiaries of government unpopularity on the basis that they are now ‘detoxified’ and less unelectable than previously.  Is that a fair summary of the prospects for the main parties for 2008/9?

Friday Jan 4th 2008

Iowa, the winners and the losers

The phoney war is over. Voting, caucusing to be more precise, has finally started. And not a moment too soon, I have to say. Over the course of several recent trips to the US I have to admit to fatigue at Presidential primary politics. The seemingly scores of candidates have been on the road for over a year, there have been dozens of debates already, counting money has become the new spectator sport for Beltway insiders and Iowa – originally elevated by Jimmy Carter’s insurgency campaign in 1976 – has been lifted to a harbinger status which is hard to fathom when you compare this small Midwestern state’s demographics to the rest of the United States. I also admit to being concerned over whether any of these candidates are best placed to lead the US right now. More importantly, like many others I had become bored with constant media speculation over what might happen and itchy for the game to get going.

Thursday Jan 3rd 2008

Orwell and Harman - the odd couple

An unlikely couple you might think.  But together they featured in Salieri’s Christmas and helped him to understand a little more about the world according to New Labour.
One is of course a well-respected figure in left-of-centre circles…while the other is married to Jack Dromey.  But, cheap jokes apart, Salieri was reading a brilliant collection of Orwell’s journalism for Tribune in the 1940s - buy it here - when Harman came on the wireless suggesting that prostitution be made illegal (by the device of making it a criminal offence for men to purchase sex from women).  Report here.