What A Bunch Of Celts

In these harsh economic times, it's nice to see that some organisations are still hiring. Take the Conservatives, who are advertising for a research assistant for Cheryl Gillan and David Mundell.

Yes, that's right, they want one member of staff to work jointly for the Shadow Secretary of State for Wales and the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland. Because obviously, those two nations are easy to treat as one big whole, being only 155 miles apart and possessing of entirely different legal and political systems...

They can spin 'till they're blue in the mouth, but ultimately, to the Conservatives Wales is still the pink bit 8 inches west of Henley and Scotland is still the pink bit two feet above Potter's Bar.

Less Than Twitterpated

As I've hopefully mentioned several times before, my two favourite columnists (pipping my British favourite, Howard Jacobson, to the post) come not from the worlds of politics or news journalism but from American sports. Gregg Easterbrook and Bill Simmons of ESPN combine weighty sporting analysis with insights into American politics and popular culture from their day jobs (political journalist and comedy writer respectively).

I mention this because I've been watching the blogosphere's love affair with Twitter for some time and feeling unusually stuck in the mud about it (early Facebook adopter as I was, though that was more to do with my fan club than anything). And then Bill posted this in answer to a reader's e-mail...

The more interesting angle for me is how Twitter and Facebook reflect where our writing is going thanks to the Internet. In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome. Do my friends REALLY CARE if I send out an update, "Bill is flying on an airplane finishing a mailbag right now?" (Which is true, by the way.) I just don't think they would. I certainly wouldn't. That's why I refuse to use Twitter.

As for Facebook, I don't mind getting status updates and snapshots of what my friends' lives are like as long as they aren't posting 10 times a day or writing something uncomfortable about their spouse/boyfriend like "(Girl's name) is … trying to remember the last time she looked at her husband without wanting to punch him in the face" or "(Girl's name) is … just going to keep eating, it's not like I have sex anymore." Keep me out of your personal business, please. Other than that, the comedy of status updates can be off the charts. Like my college classmate who sends out status updates so overwhelmingly mundane and weird that my buddies and I forward them to each other, then add fake responses like, "(Guy's name) … snapped and killed a drifter tonight" and "(Guy's name) … would hang myself if the ceilings in my apartment weren't too short." It kills us. We can't get enough of it. We have been doing it for four solid months. And really, that's what Facebook is all about -- looking at photos of your friend's kids or any reunion or party, making fun of people you never liked and searching for old hook-ups and deciding whether you regret the hook-up or not. That's really it. All in all, I like Facebook.

And now I feel much better about my future as a semi-professional curmudgeon.

British Ballsless Corporation

It says something about the poverty of political journalism in Wales, and indeed the recent introspection of the meeja hor brigade, that I've had more calls from the press about the University Challenge saga that I wasn't involved in and haven't written about (namely three) than about the controversial council meeting I was involved in and have written about (namely zero).

Of course, when the subject of discussion was just the meeja hor reaction to Gail Trimble I really didn't want to write about it; anything I could say as an alumnus of the defeated university and as one of her predecessors as brainbox of the series would have sounded like sour grapes, and in any case if I want commentary on the proclivities of the modern news media I'll happily get it from Private Eye rather than trying to produce any of my own.

But then the whole thing turned into Corpusgate and I started getting phone calls (not least from BBC Radio Gloucestershire, on whose air you can hear me expounding at around the 2hr50 mark in this programme) and it struck me that, as one of the few people who knows something of what the Corpus team will have experienced over the last six months, I should put what I know on the record.

Unlike the egregiously inaccurate Starter For Ten, the actual University Challenge process starts with applications and auditions around March/April (making this year's furore doubly problematic because it comes at exactly the time teams will be forming up and down the country). The show is then filmed over three weekends; the first round in June, the repechage and second round in July, and the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final in October.

That filming schedule is necessary because the series is broadcast in the autumn and winter, or at least was; in 2006 the series ran from September to May (I should know, I appeared on both the first and last shows!), but that's crept backwards recently so that this year it was July to February. Broadcasting the show during the academic year when the student bodies can get excited about it is only natural and entirely sensible, but it does leave you with the fundamental problem that contestants are being recruited in one academic year to appear in the following one. For that issue, the application form has the following to say for itself;

Students taking their final exams... will not be eligible unless they intend to return to the same university/university college to study as post-grads.

Now this is the rule that allowed me to compete in 2006; when the first round was filmed in June, I had applied for and been accepted onto my MSc course but had not had my final exam results and thus was not conclusively guaranteed of my place. Of course, I got my Desmond and went on to get the Masters as well, so I was fine. Without the evidence that the Beeb had, we cannot know how they interpreted Mr Kay's intent and it's a row the barrack room lawyers can have to their heart's delight.

At the most fundamental level, I absolutely agree with the Manchester team themselves (and if you haven't seen their appearance on BBC Breakfast, do take a look at it) and wouldn't wish to editorialise their sentiments about the decision that's been taken in any way; I fear it's unavoidable that I will do so and I can but apologise to them in advance for that.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the decision that was taken in this case, I can't help but feel that Auntie backed herself into a corner and got burned as a result. It would be perfectly easy and perfectly clear for the BBC and Granada to have an eligibility rule like age-level football does, namely that if someone qualifies at the start of the process, they qualify throughout the competition even if they cease to meet the original criteria later on. Instead, the rule they have reeks of ambiguities and to no readily identifiable purpose.

What's more, as this evening's coverage testifies, those ambiguities have been alive and well for a number of years. The Beeb may be considered unfortunate that Kaya Burgess, a journalist on The Times, was not only a contestant on this year's series but one who broke the same rule herself, leading to the digging that uncovered two more cases of victors with ineligible team members who are probably the tip of the iceberg. But having had the same rule in place since the series was revived in 1994, when the Beeb span the Gail Trimble story into acres of press coverage and record breaking ratings (5.3m, as opposed to 3.1m who watched me three years previously) they were begging to be hoist by their petards, and so it was.

Most of all, though, I feel terrible for Gail, who despite being a blameless bystander in this saga was prominently featured, on her own no less, on several front pages today (indeed, that little example of Fleet Street dicklessness was the final straw in my determination to blog on the matter). As I know from my seven months between winning in the studio and winning on the screen, the initial catharsis of victory turns to an agonising wait for the climax of brief national acclaim. To have that moment snatched away almost as it happens must be heartbreaking.

And let's make no bones about it, both she and her team deserve it. While I may not buy the hype of it being the best final ever (I tend to prefer my team's win by ten points, but I'm understandably biased), the statistics don't lie; the Corpus team scored more points than any in the Paxman era and Gail herself almost certainly took the series and single game records for starters answered.

Ultimately, however, the politician in me reflects that this is yet another step in the BBC's relentless self-immolation, a process itself based to some extent on rules with no real purpose being applied too late. I hope the name suggested in the title (as shamelessly stolen from Bill Simmons) doesn't become real, but it's getting there, and coming from Wales, where the television news battle will soon likely as not be between the English-language Beeb and the Welsh-language one, it's a terrifying prospect.

Adventures In Experimental Meeting Technique

I hadn't been expecting to write about tonight's budget meeting; after all, the proceedings do look rather different when your party is leading the ruling coalition. But after what happened tonight and in view of the level of coverage it's likely to receive, there should be a record of what actually went on.

At the start of the budget debate, the Lord Mayor went through, in some detail, the protocol for the debate that had been agreed by the Business Committee. The explanation wasn't helped by the complaints of the Labour group, who managed to forget that the Business Committee is a public committee and not some secretive coven.

In any case, once all the motions and amendments has been formally moved, the debate started with the Executive Member for Finance introducing the coalition's budget proposal. The various Executive Members then spoke in turn, followed by the proposer and seconder of each group's amendments. In all those cases, the members in question were allowed to forego those speeches in order to contribute later if they so wished, and several did so.

The floor was then opened up, and in accordance with the agreed protocol each party was limited to a particular number of speakers, including all the proposers and seconders according to proportionality. The first Lib Dem got up and spoke and as she sat down, your correspondent, in a moment of historic poor timing, got up to answer the call of nature.

But as I sidled out of my seat, there was a marked pause. On the screens that display the list of speakers, nary a name was to be seen. Remarkably, at the height of the budget debate, the three opposition groups were playing exclamatory chicken. With no one willing to speak, what was our chief whip to do but call to go straight to the vote?

Of course, immediately the call was made, everyone pressed their buttons, but it's difficult to have sympathy for people who are less eager to convey their points than to achieve the perfect grandstanding position. In any case, by then it was too late; the Lord Mayor had to consider the motion once it had been tabled, and soon both it and the coalition's budget were passed.

During the break after the budget debate, it became clear that the opposition unhappiness over proceedings was going to escalate, thanks strangely to a question about a Focus leaflet. To explain; Cardiff's Labour group leader, Cllr Ralph Cook, now represents a split ward, after we took one seat from Labour in May. Ralph was especially unhappy about this development, and in his "Thank You" leaflet, complained bitterly of Lib Dem "stormtroopers" engaged in a "blitzkrieg" of leafleting.

Tonight, Ralph asked a question about a Focus leaflet which included a photograph of our councillor with two Communities First officers. At the end of a lengthy answer to his question, he was reminded of his earlier transgression and that he had never apologised for it. Ralph's response was that the terms "stormtrooper" and "blitzkrieg" were coined in WWI and do not specifically refers to the Nazis and to ask why, after what had happened, it was unfair to associate our behaviour with that of the early Nazi regime (as if Dachau hadn't opened in 1933 and there was some mythical period when they were just a bit nasty to the Social Democrats on their weekends off...)

Answering the question, the leader of the council understandably demanded that statement be withdrawn, but Ralph only made a vague, mumbled gesture. A few minutes later, I asked a question about Ramesh Patel's "ethnic cleansing" comments and mentioned Ralph's behaviour in my supplementary. During the answer to my supplementary, it became clear from Ralph's heckling that he hadn't withdrawn his earlier comments and when asked formally to withdraw them by the Lord Mayor, he repeated his excuses and walked out.

Only time will tell what consequences will befall Ralph for his remarks tonight. I for one hope they will adequately reflect the heinous nature of their content.

£7bn (Or, What You P****d Away Before Lunch)

It's fairly rare, even in the "We could have fought an election on the issue of competence" era, for a minister to get their political willy out and wave it in the air shouting "Look at me, I'm a complete and utter moron". We should therefore hold today's example of that art in the highest regard.

It comes from Geoff Hoon, whose Department That Thinks Transport Is A Jolly Good Idea And Somebody Should Definitely Look At Doing Some today announced the preferred bidder for the £7.5bn Intercity Express Programme. The announcement was accompanied by a lovely computer simulation of what the new trains might look like (half of which focuses on what they'll look like on the inside in the vain hope that the shinyness will obscure the stupidity).

To explain, the HST fleet is rapidly reaching the end of its working life; having been introduced in 1976, the recent engine replacement programme should keep them going until around 2015. Replacing HST is the biggest single rolling stock upgrade the modern railway can undertake, with twice as many units as the Pendolinos and multiple operating companies involved. Given the amount of hassle it takes to get even one train operating company to admit to anything as sordid as capital investment, the government was forced to step in and procure the replacement itself.

There is, however, one further complication to the HST replacement that the Pendolinos did not face. For while Virgin's search for a high speed electric train could span the world (leading eventually to an off-the-shelf product from Italy based on technology originally acquired from BR), the list of countries with high speed diesel trains starts in the UK and ends here too. The press coverage of the announcement trumpets that the trains will be built at a new factory in Britain, but that was inevitable; no-one else has a diesel high speed train factory because no-one else has diesel high speed trains.

And neither should we. For all the swooshiness around the new trains being hybrids and dual-mode, they will still be fundamentally more polluting than electric trains. The government could have been really bold and electrified the Great Western Main Line, advantaging local services as well as expresses; instead, they're going to blow it all on something unimaginative but temporarily shiny.