George Osborne’s past claim that Gordon Brown is autistic has been crawled over again in recent days, most recently by Stephen Glover in today’s Daily Mail.

Autism is generally regarded as a spectrum of disfunctionality. A bundle of related problems might be a better description. It also crosses over with other complaints.

Reading about Brown’s reactions, both to last week’s nasty email shenanigans in Downing Street, and earlier behavioural quirks, leads me in a different, if no less serious, direction.

Gordon Brown can’t bear to be challenged by anyone, especially by a colleague who may possibly usurp his position. Any heads peering over the parapet allegedly set off the kind of vicious reputational attack he employed Damian McBride to execute on his behalf.

Those are symptoms of paranoia.

Another tendency, illustrated by claims in the press that he resembles that well-known fictional Scottish gentleman known by the twin names of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, reveals something else.

Some comments report Brown as a kindly, erudite personality, always willing to help, and a good friend. Others insist he’s a deranged madman, hurling laptops and mobile phones around the room, and at people who cross him. Presumably this is at taxpayers’ expense?

This suggests a schizoid character who appears to be two people rolled into one.

A psychological clinician — which I’m not — might well diagnose a case of paranoid schizophrenia. Since Brown obviously manages to function reasonably well most of the time, an additional tag of “borderline” might be added.

But borderline or not, such serious disfunctionality in a Prime Minister should not go without comment or public medical reassurance.

Brown’s manic handling of the economy over 12 years, from Prudence to obsessive spending on anything that took his fancy, suggests another aspect of a split personality: bipolar disorder. It may also explain why the country is in such a mess.

Shouldn’t something be done? Pronto?

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
The schools of Leonid Brezhnev and of Mephistopheles
Snake Oil Brown slips up
Imagine Gordon Brown as PM in 1997

A view frequently expressed by internet entrepreneurs and commentators is: “Local is good”. To put it bluntly, it means that there’s more money to be made by serving a local community with advertising than by offering global coverage.

Three years ago that was not true. Even when the dollar was low and the pound high, a British website could make more from U.S. ads than British ones. I know, I tried both.

Here I’m more concerned with very local conditions: individual towns and counties. And, in particular, that “river of gold”, classified advertising.

Small Ads, as most people call them, are deserting local newspapers in a mad stampede and migrating online. Big ticket categories like cars, properties and jobs are piling into specialized websites where you can upload pictures and text, then sit back and wait for the response.

Local papers are losing out across the board in these areas. Many are closing down, most are currently up for sale. A month ago the Daily Mail group sold the prestigious London Evening Standard for £1 to a Russian oligarch who was once a KGB spy. The original Northcliffe must be spinning in his tomb.

The economics are stark: the costs of printing and distributing a newspaper or magazine, to the standards we have grown used to, are now prohibitive. Big websites may not yet be yielding a profit, but their smaller, nippier competitors are, or are about to do just that.

The question of where we will get our local news from is a pertinent one, especially as many councils are using badly-drafted anti-terror legislation to spy on people’s habits and activities. Not only do we get a KGB spymaster owning a major local newspaper, but KGB methodology too.

Clearly we need to be informed in our local patch. While 24-hour news concentrates on mainstream concerns at a national and international level, big TV is generally retreating from small stories in small towns. It’s not at all obvious whether small stations can fill the gap, while radio is blind and full of pop music.

It’s also true that big broadcasting and big print occasionally miss the point big time. The Daniel Hannan moment where a politician’s denunciation of Gordon Brown bypassed the mainstream media completely, but became a worldwide hit on YouTube, is a typical case. The story subsequently reflected back into MSM as an internet phenomenon rather than a political one.

Local information needs a light and deft touch, often absent from the big battalions.

As local newspapers fade away, they will be replaced by cheaply run local websites — a cut above blogs but using the same kind of technology and methods.

Here at Syntagma we are setting up a separate company to move into this space. We will start with a Devon and Cornwall site in May, followed by Somerset, and other counties down the line.

It’s an exciting time to be online in the content business. Costs are low, opportunities wide. But above all, with a whole tier of local news disappearing, including ITV’s variable contributions, it’s all to play for.

Local is not only good, it may well be best.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
Syntagma Media is three
Paper, London and Life
Silicon Valley and the credit crunch
Do internet writers work too hard?

Aren’t you just sick of Charles Darwin? On his 200th birth anniversary he’s all over the media like measles.

On the BBC (where else?) David Attenborough sheds a discreet tear and religiously places a bust of the great one in the National History Museum, replacing a more deserving scientist. Richard Dawkins, the Ayatollah of Darwinism, hurls fatwas at anyone who disagrees. Even Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has a go in The Times (London): “In praise of Darwin and the spirit of inquiry”. Pass the collection bucket!

And we still have Andrew Marr’s “film” about Darwin to come — stick to politics, Andrew, there’s a good chap.

The fact is, Darwin was wrong in his central assertion: natural selection.

Consider the development of the eye. By the minute stages of natural selection, it would have taken thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years to evolve. For most of that time the eye wouldn’t be functional. It would not carry any survival advantage at all. Clearly, it wouldn’t have survived, according to the theory of natural selection.

Unless, of course, it was deliberately protected during the long prototype stage, which would suggest a creative agency at work. I suspect Darwin himself might have preferred that outcome.

The problem with both “natural selection” and “Creationism” is that neither stands up to common-sense scrutiny. The newer, more sensible, version of Creationism, Intelligent Design — damned and blasted by the jihadists of Darwinism — is also wrongly named.

The word “design” suggests activity of the cerebral cortex, and therefore a human agency. “Intelligent” is open to the same critique.

Syntagma is happy to suggest an alternative to this “mis-seeing event” to solve a needless dispute.

Purposive Evolution. Teleology for the televisual age.

Happy to be of service.

I’ve written here a few times about the Czech Republic — currently holding the rotating Presidency of the European Council — and its inspirational Head of State, President Klaus.

Yesterday, Peter Hitchens provided us with a wide-ranging and revealing account of just what is going on inside that country for which Britain went to war in 1939: How the Czechs are fighting the marshmallow EU tyrant.

It still astonishes me that the British are reduced to depending on President Klaus — and the Irish electorate — to keep us out of the despised European constitution, currently masquerading under the pseudonym, “Lisbon Treaty”.

What does that say about our own cowardly Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who lied and lied again in the service of the nation they were meant to protect?

Klaus is ten times the man they are.

If you listen to some commentators, President Obama has failed already. Some journos even compare him to Tony Blair, as I did early in the campaign. From a British perspective, that comparison is by no means favourably intended.

Even now he reminds me of Blair in his first year of office when he said: “It’s much harder than I thought it was going to be”. Blair couldn’t have given it much prior thought, even if he had any to spare.

But there are some aspects of Obama I warm to:

“I screwed up” and “We’re in for dangerous times ahead”, are almost impossible to imagine coming from Gordon Brown.

Ditto: “We’ll do this ourselves. We won’t wait for others to act”.

The Syntagma honeymoon, such as it is, remains intact. Just.

If you’ve ever clicked on the polls at dailymail.co.uk, you’ll have noticed that they usually split around 90 percent to 10. The Mail appears to know its reader demographics very well — not surprising for such a profitable newspaper.

Whenever I have a go at any of them, uncannily I always come out on the 90 percent side. I don’t think I’ve ever missed the winning mark.

Imagine, however, if identical polls were run on the Guardian/Observer site. I suspect the split would remain at 90/10 but in the opposite direction of opinion. At the muddled Independent, 50/50 would probably be the boring outcome.

So the Daily Mail polls serve no psephological purpose beyond reinforcing known attitudes and prejudices. Aren’t they just a distraction from all the pictures of semi-clad women?

President Sarkozy of France intends to cut the country’s notoriously bloated public sector and spend the money on tax cuts and shoring up essential infrastructure.

He criticizes Gordon Brown for mismanaging the British economy by piling up unprecendented levels of public debt. He also sneers at his derisory VAT cut and the waste of money propping up non-jobs in the public sector.

Brown has apparently called for an apology, and got one.

For what, precisely, was Sarkozy meant to apologize — his hurt feelings?

Quote of the Week
“You can never tiptoe lightly enough once you start building a world of eggshells. PC makes communication impossible. It renders a people literally illiterate: The conventions of language used by functioning societies throughout human history — irony, indirect quotation, period evocation, and, yes, even obsolete comic stereotype — are all suddenly suspect.” Mark Steyn

Article of the Week
Global economy nears abyss as central banks dither by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

This is white-water rafting now, with Niagara ahead.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
DIARY: Today, 24-hour news, 10 rascals, depression, swans
DIARY: Shadow banks, BlackBerries, Flanders, Jackson, liberal fascism
DIARY: Darling, Obama, Parris, Portillo, Devon
DIARY: Kaletsky, Klaus, greens, hedge funds, Sunday papers

It’s been decided. Gordon must go … painfully.

Such is the extent of his crimes against humanity, the nation, the planet, and especially the Labour Party, the biggest jury ever assembled has decreed he must suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Even the political commentators — who are finding it hard to reinterpret the death throes of this man’s career in new and original ways — were virtually unanimous this weekend on his ultimate fate. Only one that I read put up a lukewarm defence: Peter Oborne in Saturday’s Mail. But there was something weary and attenuated about his piece.

For a more red-blooded approach “Pollygate” takes some beating. The Guardian’s Pollygamous lapdancing correspondent (if Richard Littlejohn is to be believed) was immortalized by parliamentary round-robin, when her extended version of the last rites was circulated by email to every sitting Labour MP. Imagine opening an email and discovering a thousand words by Polly Toynbee on your BlackBerry. Spam doesn’t begin to cover it.

Over at its sister paper, The Observer, Andrew Rawnsley patrolled his now familiar beat, Gordon must go … Oh, the tedium of it.

Turning right into the Telegraph offices, even Gordon’s editor for his new book on “Britishness” (Heaven preserve us!), Matthew d’Ancona, gave the old screw another twist, albeit with just a modicum of concern. Heads and brick walls, Matthew.

Melanie Phillips takes up the baton in this morning’s Mail. It’s a war of attrition now. “The strategy is to undermine Brown by withdrawing support on the Labour benches to such an extent that ministers have no alternative but to wield the knife upon the stricken Prime Minister, and put him and the party out of their misery. … [T]he public is simply sick to death of the whole lot of them.”

The Grim Reaper, it seems, in the person of creepy John Reid, who could teach Vladimir Putin a thing or two, is hovering in the background like a Glaswegian Brutus. He may even decide to stand against Brown. What, another Scotsman? He wouldn’t pass the Paxo Test.

This whole scenario is taking on the form of one of Shakespeare’s more gruesome theatrical extravaganzas. Maybe the party should hire Trevor Nunn as a directorial consultant and be done with it.

In keeping with the theatre noir mood music, Peter McKay talks of Viking funerals, and paraphrases the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Gordon thought he could reap Tony’s seed, keep his wealth, wear the robes he’d weaved and bear the arms he’d forged.”

Not so sure about Tony’s seed though.

Back at the now intensely compelling Guardian, Andrew Marr’s missus Jackie Ashley writes, “The Labour party could be on the verge of destruction. Out of money, and facing an electoral smash and a massive factional fallout, it may not survive as a major political force.”

On Gordon himself she reports, “In private he brims with enthusiasm about child poverty, perinatal mortality in Sierra Leone, and the impact of rising food prices in China.”

Perinatal mortality in Sierra Leone? Says it all, doesn’t it? Out of the mouths of babes and Guardian columnists …

The ever-dependable William Rees-Mogg in The Times has, “Labour’s best hope lies with the Palin effect. Gordon Brown is guilty of boring the nation. His party should look to its women to make itself interesting again.”

But where is a Sarah Palin in the massed ranks of Labour wimmin? The Blair babes are like Gordon, ideological nutcases and social engineers working on the principle that they know best how the rest of us should live, despite the deficiencies in their own lives.

Sarah Palin speaks from real experience learned in the harshest of environments. By contrast, Labour females have the odour of insipid British local government hung about them.

Rees-Mogg revisits his championing of Harriet Harman — Labour’s Hillary — but also adds Ruth Kelly to his shortlist who would swing a bit of interest back towards the Labour Party. I agree, but in both cases it would be accompanied by national derision.

The unsmiling Harman is too frosty and way too feminist, while newly-glamorized Ruth Kelly has a most unfortunate accent that drains her presence of seriousness. An election campaign filled with her drone and Labour’s cacophony of glottal stops would drive us all potty.

Sarah Palin is the nearest America has come to finding a Margaret Thatcher. She explodes onto a stage and holds her audience by the force of her personality and the “wow” effect when she articulates positions that resonate naturally in the minds of her listeners.

She probably reminds Americans of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau who spoke with folksy common sense in an aura of spirituality. That’s why she’s beating the pants off wonky, cerebral Obama. It’s the psychology, stupid.

Does anyone imagine Harman or Kelly speaking to the British soul as does the Last Night of the Proms?

Margaret Thatcher did. Sarah Palin does in America.

Janet Daley in the Telegraph nails it when she urges David Cameron to begin speaking for the nation. “Shouldn’t the voters be made to feel that there is a prospective Prime Minister who is not playing this game purely for party advantage and is actually prepared to speak up on their behalf?”

Silence is often interpreted as conspiracy.

Comments are now on.

Related Stories
Gordon Brown and Sarah Palin
British politics back to normal – Regency style
Gordon Brown should emulate Marshall Foch
Gordon Brown – Leader of the Opposition Designate

Politicians nowadays speak to us in code. If you still believe that the vacuous utterances of your average politico are nothing but sad soundbites and sugar, think again. The brew is teeming with cipher messages for fellow conspirators.

Currently it’s the crumpled Labour Party that’s responsible for more encrypted signals than GCHQ. Even the political commentators are picking up this irritating habit.

One of the more popular of the code words now doing the rounds is cojones, which is not a type of Welshman. Both Matthew d’Ancona and Andrew Rawnsley used the new “c” word yesterday.

Cojones, pronounced CO_HON_ESS in its native Spanish, has a lot to do with the driving force behind fighting bulls. And I mean behind literally. To be delicate (as we must on a family website), think of our Education Secretary as Ed Cojones. If I also say, two Eds are better than one, you should by now have interpreted my codified intent.

Not surprisingly, the main target in the cojones wars is David Miliband, that prize chump who bounced across our screens last week, grinning like a clown with a painted-on face, on the back of a dreary article in The Guardian. And, yes, the article was seen as so encrypted you’d need an Enigma machine to work it out.

Miliband is sometimes referred to as the British Obama, the Boy David, Millimetre, and, for some reason, even Millinery Hatband. Oh, I get it!

Milly is the cryptic leader of a putative coup against our Gordon, if the signals are read aright. He even answers questions about his dreary “manifesto” in double-code: “can” instead of “will” apparently carries enormous significance with the nerdy types who watch these things.

Variations on the conditional tense are also a big giveaway as in, “I have always wanted to support Gordon”. Meaning, “I haven’t quite got there yet, and it looks a bit late for that now … but I live in hope [Wink].”

Oh, the chuminess of it all. Such ripping fun all round.

Not so for William Rees-Mogg in Sunday’s Mail. After slipping up last week with “the British Obama”, he really gave the lad a smack yesterday.

“Least of all can one sympathise with teenage rebels without a cause who think it would be nice to be the next leader of the Labour Party. They seem to understand nothing about the depth of crisis in which their party and Government find themselves. Grow up or shut up is the best advice to them.”

Such invective is rarely heard from the Somerset Levels.

Liz Jones, also in the Mail, and not normally associated with the cloak and toothpick world of politics, sweetly writes that Milly could be our very own Brad Pitt. Not William Pitt, mind you, but Brad.

There’s only one obstacle to clear. His wife must look like Angelina Jolie. The fact that Ms Jones sets this hurdle, almost certainly means she doesn’t. That must be a great relief to Mrs Milly. I imagine though that Milly himself has enough vanity to rather fancy following in the footsteps of Brangelina.

I think we’ve squeezed all the juice to be had out of Milly’s cojones for one week. However, we do notice that another bandwagon (Milibandwagon? — ah, the composites available to this man) has begun to roll in favour of the other Miliband, Ed — not cojones Ed, you understand. And I’m not suggesting Ed M. doesn’t have what it takes in the boot.

You know, scribbling about British politics can get very complicated. Come back David Cameron (currently in Cornwall), all is most definitely forgiven.

Oh, and bring Occam’s razor with you, along with that big pile of psychology books.

Today, for some reason, I’ve been reviewing how I consume news and commentary, both on- and offline. It must be the persistent wind and rain outside.

This is not going to make a long article, so I’ll get straight to the point.

I live in England where, contrary to Robert Scoble, we have a superb selection of national broadsheet newspapers, plus a dubious pot of red-top tabloids that entertain us from time to time with their wild excesses — though none quite as bad as some in the U.S.

I find I tend to consume hard news — like “Obama wins primary”, “Brown reneges on solemn promise” — on TV rolling news programs, principally the BBC’s News 24. Never for more than 20 minutes, though, because nothing is more life dehancing than watching the same clips over and over — unless they’re about you, of course.

Tech news is best read online. Techmeme, TechCrunch (and the other Crunches) and Robert Scoble put the print press in the shade. It’s very much a case of deja vu if I glance at the technology pages in The Times or the Guardian. In fact I think they source a lot of their material from the tech blogosphere too.

Here at Syntagma Towers we only buy the print version of The Daily Mail because it loses a lot of its visual value online. It’s more of a magazine these days, so you need to have it in your hands for maximum impact.

I read the American press online, which means The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It’s so much simpler than buying late print versions flown over.

I also consume the British broadsheets in pixel form. Unmissable commentary in large blocks of text does not require a paper version in an age of big screen monitors.

The Telegraph is the first port of call, with its brilliant array of journalists : American Janet Daley (who, annoyingly, is rarely wrong about anything) ; International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, whose commentary on the credit crunch is required reading — oh, and I knew some of his relatives in Oxford. Charles Moore can be relied upon to throw fresh light on any subject, and Jeff Randall is a one-stop-shop for untangling what’s going on in the business and political firmaments. Add Matthew d’Ancona’s take on politics and the paper really is de rigueur for anyone interested in the world we think we live in. Not forgetting Simon Heffer, of course. That’s quite a galaxy of stars.

The Times (London) ditto. Anatole Kaletsky’s macroeconomic pieces are perfectly read online, as are Matthew Parris’s musings on politics and everything that moves.

So, a newspaper nut like me only reads one paper in its native print version. What does that say about the future of print?

Keep the aspidistra flying folks.