Unintelligent Intelligence

Adland is a fairly mythical place and with good reason. Nevertheless, there is a fine distinction to be drawn between poetic licence and flat-out factual inaccuracy. Moreover, when the potential sinner is theoretically in the business of intelligence, proper appreciation of the niceties of reality is positively essential to avoid death by irony.

In fairness to GCHQ, the task they face in terms of recruitment advertising is enormous. MI5 and MI6 have the Beeb fighting their corner with Spooks which, while increasingly delusional (Code 9 may be the single most insane spin-off programme ever created) at least imbues the spies foreign and domestic with a little je ne sais quoi. GCHQ, meanwhile, sits in its monolith by the motorway with no action heroes or pin-ups to overcome the fundamental London-centricity of our national psyche.

Realistically, the only approach available is to turn that perch on the edge of the Cotswolds into an advantage. It's an approach that should be fairly easy to implement too; naturally biased against the place as I am, even I will admit that heading to the leafy Georgiana of Cheltenham is massively different to the sort of governmental exile that the DVLA or HMRC represent.

Unfortunately, the splendour of Montpellier and the gentility of Charlton Kings weren't enough for whichever agency is responsible for the latest round of shelter posters that were adorning the Great Western Main Line as I made my trip east this weekend. Instead of classic urban living or suburban bliss, the image we instead find beneath the vaguely pathetic but contractually required claims of coolness by association is that of a Cotswolds village. The tagline?

Work for your country. Live in the country.

It's a beautiful sentiment, but one let down by those pesky strictures of reality. Note in particular the key enjoinder of the poster, namely that the energised reader should text a word to a five digit number. It is fairly fundamental that, if your chosen method of communication is a text message, the type of person you are trying to attract is a young one; then again, the type of person you're trying to attract to a career with a poster is probably not exactly middle-aged either.

Equally, said young person is unlikely to be far along the career path and as such is being recruited to a junior post, and a junior non-London weighted government post at that. One thing that you can say for certain about such positions is that the pay isn't going to get you very far in the property market of the Cotswolds, the land that affordable housing forgot.

Still, advertising would not be advertising if there wasn't one born every minute. And yet somehow the thought of the ones born every minute being our first line of defence in the intelligence war doesn't exactly inspire confidence...

Nostalgia The New-Fangled Way

Give praise to the munificence of Wikipedia (albeit by the strange route of John Poulson - John Cordle - Bournemouth East and Christchurch - Christchurch By-Election, 1993) for this profile of the by-election by a scarily young Mark Mardell. Watch out for disturbing evidence of the origins of "The Real Alternative" and a certain Scottish MP making an embarrassing mistake in a former life....



PS Can anyone identify the other members of the Christchurch office who appear?

PPS Oh, and if you're really in need of a pick-up, how about the declaration itself...

Great (And Unfulfilled) Expectations Of An Intelligent Journalist

With official figures confirming the widely held view that the UK economy is going to hell in a handcart, you'd expect an august organisation like the BBC to report this important news to the public they allegedly service. And bless them, they tried the darnedest. Unfortunately, there is no try, there is only do, or do not...

Because what the Beeb are actually reporting is "UK economic growth at standstill". And unlike James Graham's example, it's not just faulty headline composition, the whole article talks about "growth being unchanged" and "growth contracting". In case it needs spelling out, what the ONS measures is the percentage change in the size of the economy, which either shows it to be growing, contracting, or stable. This month's figures show the economy at 0.0% change, i.e. stable; the growth isn't at a standstill, for this quarter it simply doesn't exist.

I wouldn't mind, but this comes just a day after part two of the annual GCSE easier-than-it-was-in-my-day-a-thon. Well clearly it's not if even the economics journalists can't correctly evaluate a percentage change when it stares them in the face...

Clegg Whispers Those Three Little Words

It may surprise regular readers to know that I actually quite enjoy it when the party launches another new energy policy. Not because they're good; I know full well they will be moronic, technologically illiterate and suffused with the very worst in pseudo-religious Church of EnvironMentalism dogma. Nevertheless, there is great humour value in our pontifications; rarely is so imbecilic a policy promulgated with such high-handed earnestness and faith in the one true way of viridism.

So I was fully prepared to leave today's press stunt well alone and was fully willing to give it nothing more than a cursory glance amidst the triple jump final at the Bird's Nest. But then my cursory glance alighted on three little words that were missing from the press coverage. Because despite the spin, the paper absolutely does not say that we want to make Britain energy independent by 2050. Instead, it adds a vital and, frankly, offensive caveat, because what it actually says is;

Britain needs to set itself an ambitious goal - to become energy independent within the EU by 2050.

Let's leave aside for a moment that by using “independent within the EU” we're cribbing lines off Plaid Cymru and ask ourselves one simple question.

Why on Earth would you need to apply that specific caveat?

I mean, I'm all for reducing our dependency on dictatorships like Russia and Saudi Arabia, but is it really necessary to define the world of stable democracies as being those countries that pledge fealty to Brussels? Haven't you just told the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan and the rest exactly where they can shove it? Isn't such an attitude nothing short of despicable from the party that more than any other shouts its internationalist credentials to the rooftops?

What's worse, there's actually a lot to like in this policy. Neither Labour nor Tory has yet grasped that delivering even the renewables targest we have now will actually at some point require HMG to actively do something instead of going around telling everyone how nice it would be if somebody else did something, so to see us getting on board is very welcome.

But then it's all let down by the headline and the three little words. The real tragedy of it all is that, without the caveat, we could have put forward the first realistic energy independence policy of any British political party. For while the renewable dream we've put forward today is the worst kind of technologically illiterate bullshit, with Canada and Australia in the mix we could push on with a truly revolutionary nuclear-renewable mix that really would end our dependence on the Putins of this world.

The headline isn't wrong; we really do need the sort of technological revolution that mankind has so far only managed to fuel through the worst of wartime hatred. I fear however that it is not so much an Apollo that we need, but a Manhattan.

Excuse Me While I Get My Gun And March On W12...

Does anyone know whether Ming is in the country at the moment?

I only ask because Newsnight are trying to evaluate the effect of our Olympic performance on the national psyche and they're doing so with the help of everyone's favourite athlete-cum-politician...

Jeffrey Archer

Setting aside the morality of giving media air to a convicted criminal, could they really not have got the politician who actually ran in the Olympics rather than the one whose athletic claim to fame was being hit by a discus while watching a race?