Whenever I write about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, it’s impossible not to laugh at the scale of the mess this £6 billion pile of junk has produced.

You may remember it was turned on in September last year, in the presence of Andrew Marr no less, and was immediately shut down when it threatened to burst into flames. Mind you, considering that some people thought it would consume the whole universe, I suppose we got off lightly.

Naturally, it hasn’t worked since.

When I last wrote about the contraption, I was tempted to say, “all they need now is to find Osama bin Laden has been working there for five years”.

No, far too implausible.

Well, we are now told that a nuclear physicist at CERN, working in the atomic energy department, is a prominent member of Al Qaeda’s “North African wing”, and has been linked to an attempt at nuclear terrorism in Britain.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN aims to “recreate the conditions at the time of the Big Bang”.

Be careful what you wish for.

American Presidents should never be given the Nobel Peace prize whatever the circumstances. The job involves the post of Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military forces, as well as its largest nuclear arsenal. At any one time, this immense power will be in theatre somewhere in the world.

Semantically, it’s just possible to claim that military might is a force for peace rather than war if used wisely and sparingly. That would be reinforced if it’s not operated as a silent weapon to browbeat less powerful states.

The controller of the world’s Sword of Damocles should not in practice be a candidate for such a prize.

A President Obama with a Nobel Peace Prize in tow will be like Sampson without his hair, bound by psychological chains never ever to flex the superpower’s muscles in a straight confrontation.

That, in itself, is a dangerous position to be placed in.

Someone in my position should never mention other writers’ typos or spelling mistakes. I make too many myself.

Occasionally, though, it’s hard to resist. Take this blooper on page 4 of Saturday’s Daily Mail (print version):

“… the Shadow Chancellor’s plans to raise the retirement age to 66 ten years ahead of Labour and institute a one-year pray freeze …”

I would not be at all surprised if the Church of England resigns its role as “the Tory party at prayer”.

David Cameron made an interesting speech to the Conservative Party Conference on Thursday.

It induced both wild enthusiasm and torpid shrugs across the commentariat. Some loved it, some scoffed, even on the Tory side of the argument.

I hate political triangulation. Even a small amount ruins a dish, like too much sage in a pudding. It’s a common trick. A politician faces both ways at once to gather votes from opposing groups. Thus Gordon Brown says one thing to his conference, but the opposite to an audience of bankers in the City.

Triangulation is fundamentally dishonest, it’s soon spotted by the electorate, and produces increasingly diminishing returns as time passes.

David Cameron spoiled what was largely an excellent speech on Tory values by refusing to see the flaws in the NHS and the wildly expensive Sure Start scheme.

I’m sure the focus groups warned him off touching them. I recognize too that he can’t do it all in his first Parliament as Prime Minister. But a promise of improvements to both services by cutting waste and bureaucracy, would have chimed with the rest of his message and not left an overwhelming taste of sage in the mouth.

At the risk of being dubbed “swivel-eyed” I can’t resist another mention of the Lisbon Treaty. Note the new demonic tag applied to anyone unafraid of pointing out the fascism inherent in the latest Brussels power grab.

While I was disappointed by the small part Lisbon played in the Leader’s speech at Manchester, I’m now persuaded by fellow swiveller Daniel Hannan’s analysis of the situation, backed up by inside information from Cameron and Hague.

We must assume that the Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, will have signed a slightly modified treaty before the British election. To wait in hope gives up our powers of action.

Hannan hints that it may be no bad thing, because a subsequent negotiation could repatriate powers stretching back to the Maastricht Treaty in John Major’s day.

The danger is that an inexperienced team may not be tough enough in the bargaining rounds, conceding much that needs no concession. In particular, we should demand opt-outs from the Presidency and all foreign affairs, including the proposed High Representative, the diplomatic corps, and the EU army.

Trade should return to these shores too. Negotiating our own trade deals around the world would add a lot to Britain’s prestige and bring back a fleetness of foot to UK business.

Needless to say, legal issues, the City, and social matters need also to be brought back into the fold.

I think many of us would settle for such a deal.

Dan Brown’s latest novel The Lost Symbol, practically drowns in symbols. Wherever you look, there they are, symbols galore. There’s no rest from the little critters. Every wall is plastered with them, monuments are symbolic in themselves, the villain of the piece is tattooed from head to foot in symbols.

It’s a good job the hero of the tale is Professor of Symbology at Harvard University. Without the Prof the book would be incomprehensible.

It’s a wonderful romp, though. The action never stops, and while some passages are almost unbearably gruesome, you’ll be hooked to the end.

Of course, if I were to tell you what “the lost symbol” actually is, it would save you a lot of time and a little money.

The lost symbol is … a common household object.

Work it out for yourselves.

John Evans

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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

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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

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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?

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“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

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

John Evans

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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.

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