In normal circumstances, it’s distressing to watch someone’s grip on reality drain slowly away, often through crippling illness or just old age.

However, watching power slip from the hungry hands of a destructive politician, whose overwhelming sense of entitlement has alienated many in his own party, is an epicurean experience to be savoured with pleasure.

As the Americans put it, Gordon Brown has lost his mojo.

Quite what he was up to yesterday in opposing the settlement in Britain of a few thousand Ghurka soldiers, who have consistently risked all for this country, is not accountable to reason. The country is rock solid behind the little Nepalese men, not to mention fragrant Joanna Lumley.

Unsurprisingly, the government lost the vote in Parliament to an Opposition motion supported by Nick Clegg and David Cameron. Quite a humiliation you might think, but also unnecessary.

Brown’s weird performance on the awkward MP’s expenses row deserves better psychoanalysis that I can give. First, he set up an inquiry under a respected chairman to produce a solution. Then, without warning he came up with his own ideas, reported not to Parliament, but on YouTube.

If you’ve ever worked in the casting department of a film production company you will have seen many such clips lying around on the cutting room floor. Gordon looked as if someone was tickling him from behind, as suddenly a great girlish grin would suffuse his face at moments unrelated to the words he was intoning.

“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” is the classic response, quickly followed by, “Where do they get them from?”

At a subdued Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Brown was in soft consolidation mode, pretending to be nice to everyone. He looked fragile, as if he couldn’t take another boll***ing from anyone. Only Cleggy broke the torpor of the moment by calling him “shameless”. Sometimes the Lib-Dem leader’s tetchiness sounds like an old scold having a go for the sake of it. This time he hit his target right on the bullseye. My score: Cameron 6, Clegg 5.9, Brown 3.

There was an interesting aftermath to PMQs. As Brown got up and made his weary way from the Commons, the Speaker called, “Statement on Afghanistan, the Prime Minister.” Brown was forced to make a rueful re-entry from behind the Speaker’s Chair. Embarrassment doesn’t begin to cover it. How can you forget a statement on a major war?

He is behaving like a shuffling old man, totally out of touch with events and public opinion. His whips seem to have given up, leaving a shambles in their wake.

I’m beginning to believe, in all seriousness, that this man is no longer capable of running the country. He is clearly sick and depressed and needs a long time to recover. Gordon Brown is a broken man.

When two major foreign leaders criticize him in public, and the American President “disses” him openly, you wonder how long the men in grey suits in his party will put up with it.

There must also be a procedure whereby he can be forced into a medical and psychiatric examination for the sake of the rest of us. I imagine the Cabinet Secretary could instigate proceedings.

But is Gus O’Donnell the man for the task? Like most top Civil Servants he seems to be very thick with the current incumbents.

Frank Field has just said that Labour MPs have no idea what will be in the manifesto on which they will fight the next election. The mood among backbenchers is either desperation or resignation.

If they decide that they’re doomed, they may turn on their leader just for the hell of it. Someone should.

John Evans

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This must be the first morning for 15 years that the Tory leadership woke to an absolute conviction that they WILL win the next General election, whenever it’s sprung.

Vultures at a Tibetan sky burial

In this column last week, I wrote: “Labour will react to defeat by crumbling like an ancient mummy lifted from a smashed sarcophagus by heavy-handed tomb robbers.”

Little did I guess the sarcophagus would be bare within seven days.

This morning, reading through the left-leaning commentariat was an open-mouthed experience. To a man and woman, with practised esprit de corps, they evicerate their former dear leader, Gordon Brown. Like Tibetan monks at a sky burial, they lay out his corpse on a mountaintop for vultures to pick over.

Ardent loyalist Steve Richards believes Brown is no longer able to lead the Labour Party because his every move will be closely scrutinized for attack-dog tendencies. Jackie Ashley quietly damns him to the underworld in her usual elegant style. Rachel Sylvester revisits Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Others, on the right, pile in like contestants in the Eton Wall Game. Dominic Lawson chews on the bones and speaks darkly of assassins. Stephen Glover mournfully reads the runes. William Rees-Mogg signals the end in his Mail 2 column.

It’s a bit like putting a magnet under a table covered with iron filings. Suddenly they all point the same way.

It’s hard to see how Brown can get out of this. Not only are his enemies against him — it was ever thus — but his closest supporters and allies now seem to be gathering gloomily together poised for assassination.

Syntagma predicts his downfall within weeks. No, make that days.

John Evans

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As it’s a holiday weekend and we’re all supposed to be tackling the puzzle supplements that newspapers inexplicably distribute at this time, I thought Syntagma should have its own version.

Well, one puzzle, at least:

In the world of apples and oranges, two plus two equals four.

In the world of water droplets, two plus two equals one.

Does that destroy the cosy world of mathematical certainty? Answers in a linked blogpost or by hitting the contact button in the sidebar.

Dirty tricks are all over the British newspapers this Sunday morning. A senior government aide has fallen on his machete, and the Labour blogosphere, such as it is, has gone into meltdown. More heads are predicted to roll.

I’m not going to comment on the specific incidents or personalities involved because I’m too far off the action to contribute anything of interest. Iain Dale’s blog is the place to get the lowdown and links to other players.

On a side note, this site has twice been the victim of dirty tricks. Two years ago I wrote a review of a new IT product launching in Britain. I criticized the cost of the deal and held the view that it would be a flop over here. I was wrong, but that’s irrelevant. Almost immediately our servers were subjected to a three-day distributed attack, presumably from zombie computers, that closed down our sites for 72 hours.

That was a commercial intervention. I’ve reason to believe that an ongoing kicking is political.

I’m not going to spell this out because that might prejudice the operation of the site, but someone very web-savvy has caused considerable inconvenience to the operation of Syntagma.

Taking into account the new revelations of the extent Downing Street will go to attack its perceived enemies, plus the anti-Labour nature of much of what I write here these days, it doesn’t take much to invite strong suspicions.

Putting two and two together, and making either four or one, it seems just possible that someone who knows about these things is throwing a few silent blows in our direction.

I can’t prove it, of course, but I’m about to approach a third party to investigate.

Politicians are supposed to take reasonably-argued criticisms in their stride. After all, politics can be a brutal game. It seems that this is not the case. Someone somewhere has a thin skin masquerading as a thick one.

The historian Dr David Starkey, has accused lady colleagues of writing only about women in history.

A few of them have replied with the charge that he writes only about men.

Girls, girls!

It’s true that Antonia Fraser and others have penned many pages in the cause of Elizabeth I. Boudicca (Boadicea) attracts a great deal of interest from women historians.

Starkey, who has just begun a Channel 4 series on Henry VIII, is sticking to his guns.

Isn’t it reassuring that some of our most distinguished historians, who interpret the past for us, are capable of having such a deep and edifying discussion?

Rod Liddle, an old Today Programme hand, has informed us that he gave up chives for Lent. A noble choice, and a great sacrifice, given how easy it is to become hooked on chives.

Many years ago, I made a more subtle decision. I gave up giving up for Lent.

In an ad hoc straw poll, someone asked around how many people now give up anything for Lent. The result was vanishingly small, and not much better among Catholics and High Church supporters.

Most, apparently, genuflect towards the practice by giving up something they never consume anyway — Liddle, you have a lot to answer for. Others just lie about it, or ignore it altogether.

Like Advent calendars at Christmas, we just can’t be bothered with all this paraphenalia nowadays.

Apart from farmers, does anyone mark the Quarter Days, for example. Michaelmas is not often mentioned in my presence, even on the day itself. However, it remains part of our poetic heritage, occurring mainly in novels by Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and others of their vintage.

With many Anglicans only using churches for “hatch, match and dispatch” purposes, (births, marriages and deaths), Church leaders really are fighting Canute-like against a tide of indifference.

As today is Easter Sunday, probably the most significant day in the Christian calendar, it does indicate a bleak future for the old religion.

Even America, Christianity’s most humble servant for 200 years, is going in the same direction.

If it is disappearing, do we need to find a substitute fast, or will it be replaced by something infinitely worse and more terrifying?

“When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.”
G.K. Chesterton

An opportunity, or a fall from grace? Times change, but human nature retains its propensity for disaster, and genuine mystics will always be thin on the ground.

The latest answer to the perceived problem of climate change is a process called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).

A current advert by the Shell oil company informs us that “capturing” carbon dioxide gas (CO2) from industrial processes, and “storing” it underground, is the safest way of reducing our “carbon footprint” on the Earth. While the company admits this will not be easy, it nevertheless promotes the practice for the future.

Now, I’m trying to visualize this process in the real world. By common consent we emit vast quantities of CO2 from almost everything we do. I haven’t got a number for it, but it must be millions of tons of every day.

If all of that is somehow blown into underground caverns, do they suppose there won’t be leaks? And not just leaks but whole plumes of the stuff spraying out into the air in some places.

Adverse conditions underground, like earthquakes, could make this a nightmare scenario. Imagine not only having to cope with the effects of a quake, but with vast amounts of carbon dioxide gas in the local atmosphere too.

CO2 is not deadly toxic in the way carbon monoxide is, but enough of it has poisonous effects and might reduce the oxygen in the air sufficiently to suffocate many people. It might also be changed by atmospheric conditions — sun, cosmic rays, etcetera — into deadly monoxide and kill everyone in sight.

Here’s what expert website Analox.net calculates:

After a few decades of this process, the amount of the gas stored underground will be vast. Given scientists’ knack of getting things wrong, how can we possibly allow this to happen?

We may be in more danger from the climate scientists than the climate itself.

TV veteran Michael Parkinson, had this to say about Jade Goody’s death: “When we clear the media smoke screen from around her death, what we’re left with is a woman who came to represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today.”

Jade Goody’s grandmother replied: “If I could see him face-to-face I would love to give him a right mouthful and a wallop.”

It proves Parkie’s case, doesn’t it?

John Evans

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How I came to be talking to the most glamorous woman in the room I shall never know. She introduced herself as a “chrematist”. I must have flinched slightly, picturing her shapely form shovelling bodies into a furnace.

“It’s a political economist.”
“Ah, of course. Not…er…?”
She smiled darkly. “There are some I would dearly like to get my hands on.” Glancing swiftly round the room betraying, I fancied, just a touch of anxiety, she asked, “What do you do?”

I became acutely conscious of my own inadequacies: what can one say about clerical duties?
“I’m an exequatureur.”
“A what?”

I remembered the word from an old document I had found in a disused filing cabinet. “I process government licences for foreign agents,” I said as airily as I could, then back-tracked. “Commercial agents, actually.” It was substantially true, but low-ranking civil servant would have been more to the point.

Deftly she took a martini from a rapidly passing tray. I had missed and contrived to push the hair back over my ear with the trailing arm.
“We’re almost in the same line of business, then?”
“Indeed?”
“Forex.”

I raised my eyebrows non-committally. “I advise the Minister on the foreign exchange markets.” She swung round again to survey the entire room in one panoramic sweep, giving me a fleeting opportunity to regard her more closely.

The cut of her jib was undoubtedly superior to any jib I had come across before. Her lustrous eyes matched the heather-flecked colour of her hair, and the slight Scottish burr was a visceral pleasure. More to the point, she had a power job that made mine seem like a deckchair franchise.

I found her viewing me quizzically; my baleful expression must have shown. “The finger buffet is always excellent, if you’re hungry?”

It took me a little while to realise that she was inviting me to lunch, albeit standing up with a nibble. We stood over minuscule smoked salmon sandwiches, hardly speaking. Various bodies flitted to and fro, pushing us together as if we were part of some encounter group. Presently she spotted someone on the other side of the room. “Oh look, there’s the Minister.”

He had seen her and was scurrying towards us, a portly cove in his late forties, his familiar face festooned with a multitude of smiles for his lovely adviser. She was only slightly less welcoming; but there was a fine edge there which he did not seem to pick up.

She attempted to introduce me. “Tom, this is…” She didn’t know my name. My reply was completely drowned out by the tannoy making some feckless announcement about a BMW in the car park. The Minister shook my hand vigorously as if after my vote. He started to talk about the feelgood factor, while his arm reached squidlike around her waist. I sensed a minute discomfort on her part, professionally concealed. He whispered something in her ear and was almost instantly gone with a wave and a twinkle. I condemned him silently without trial. Lounge lizard!

“Why don’t you come over for supper tonight?” To say I was surprised would be the understatement of all time. “Er…yes…Ok…if you like…why not.”

She handed me her card. Her name was Tania Lawson. In my confusion I forgot to give her mine. Thus we parted half strangers, almost as we began.

The evening started well. Tania looked stunning in a little black number that knowingly emphasised the finer points of her person. Supper was almost certainly tarted-up fare from the supermarket chill cabinet, but in her company it was a feast for the gods. We talked about the City, the current political situation, of which she was exceptionally well informed, and a film called “Thumb”.

Over coffee, I noticed a faraway look in her eyes. “I like this time of year, don’t you?” I glanced out of the window at the slashing rain driving against the glass. “It’s so masculine,” she sighed. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance and for some reason I thought of Odin. “I believe they mentioned storms in the forecast,” I ventured, lamely. “Don’t worry, you can stay if it gets worse.”

I must have gulped audibly. She stared at me for a moment as if it were the sort of invitation I would receive all the time. The sky thundered uneasily, matching my mood. Her glass tapped sharply on the vitreous surface of the coffee table. She rose absently and went over to the picture window. “How much do you earn?”

I was jolted yet again out of my reverie. Here was a conundrum. After a moment’s hesitation I settled on playing it long.

“You’re not going to sell me a pension, are you?” She was silent a long while. So that was it! She was going to sell me a pension. I should really have known better.

She turned abruptly, her face peculiarly intense. “I like you. You don’t boast about your income. That’s different. It’s a great asset.” She was not going to sell me a pension. I inhaled gratefully.

“What’s your favourite football team?” “Er…I haven’t got one. Can’t stand the noise frankly.” “Even better.” She clapped her hands with girlish glee. I couldn’t put a foot wrong.

“Do you like Pavarotti?” Now here was a cliffhanger. Was she an original instrument purist or a Classic FM groupie. I went for the former with an almost visible tremor. “Excellent.” Tania swivelled towards me.

“Favourite book?” “Er…Hornblower and the Hotspur.” She paused for just a second: “The 19th Century is the future.”

Tania was looking straight at me now: “Favourite piece of music?” I fumbled, not being even faintly musical. Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony rose unbidden. Her smile said it all. “Those chords!”

I had got it right again. Aware that my luck could change, I tried to head her off. “Would you like to see my CV?”

“Sense of humour, good taste, man of the world…” I grimaced with some disbelief. Was this an ego massage, or a subtle trap? I confess I hadn’t a clue.

“You could be head-hunted.” “For what?” “It’s my little joke — a woman’s joke.” “Ah, of course,” I said, pretending to understand.

“What car do you drive?” I had a vision of my old Talbot Alpine with its livery of white and rust. “It’s a kind of classic car…You know, Inspector Morse…that sort of thing.”

Tania beamed her approval. The clock struck ten. Like Cinderella at the ball, she unaccountably span round and stared hard out of the window with that strange intensity I found oddly unsettling. I fell silent for quite a while, unable to connect with her ragged ideas.

Suddenly, no doubt becoming aware of my increasing bewilderment, she swept towards me with that same assured impulsiveness that seemed to be her trademark. She sat down beside me on the sofa, placed her liqueur on the table and, without a by your leave, threw her arms around my neck. Utterly astonished, I felt her warm, moist lips press invitingly against mine. I surrendered willingly to her charms.

Almost at that very moment the door of the flat boomed open with a violence that startled me out of my torpor of delight. I looked up to confront the Minister, framed voluminously in the doorway. His eyes thundered down on me, pinning me mentally to the seat with silent damning accusation.

Tania stood up immediately, her eyes ablaze, though not without a hint of trepidation. “I told you it was never on, Tom,” she said with the brittle calmness of a prepared speech.

The Minister glared. Not a man to cross, I rapidly surmised. “You’ve met…er…haven’t you?” I realised I had still not told her my name.

He remained silent. I calculated it was not a normal characteristic of his and boded ill. “…at the buffet, this afternoon. I did tell you, Tom.” She was stumbling gamely to an inevitable collapse.

The Minister visited a satanic glare in my direction. No feelgood factor now, I sensed. “He’s in forex,” she continued. “Briefs agents. Top gun. High flyer. Into vintage cars.”

Now, it is my experience that when a man wants something from a woman, finding her singing the praises of another is not designed to ameliorate the situation. I opened my mouth to comment, but was inexplicably lost for words. The tableau continued without my intervention: Tom scowled menacingly; Tania had stopped talking and sat down heavily beside me.

“What are you going to do?” she asked pathetically. But the Minister had wheeled on his heels and made a noisy exit.

Tania turned guiltily towards me. “I’m sorry to have used you like this.”

So that was it. I was nothing but a buffer to repulse the advances of the importunate Minister. “I had to do something,” she almost whined. “Can’t you see that? He was all over me. I thought that if he found me in the arms of someone else…” She trailed off.

“But he had your key,” I reminded her stiffly, still not entirely satisfied. “It’s one of his flats. I had nowhere else to go at the time.”

“I see.” Words were not coming easily. There was a long pause.

She turned to me again. A kindly look, almost human — a departure. The thunder roared outside and we began to be aware of the rain. “What about all those questions?” “Just conversation.” “Filling in time before Tom came?” It was all plain now, and to give her her due, she didn’t deny it. Why did I suspect that, despite all that had happened, she was actually laughing at me. The dupe, the fool whose body stood between her and God knows what fate at the hands of the diplomatically-challenged Minister?

“Stay for a while.” “What?” She gazed down at her feet. “He might come back.” There was another pause. “I should tell you…hmm…that Tom is yesterday’s man. The PM is on his way out and the smart dosh is on Simonson to take over. Tom won’t appear in his Cabinet — old scores, you know.”

“Yes, I do know.” I said wearily. “And where does that leave you, Tania?” Her eyes gleamed. “In pole position, of course.”

It seemed she was moving in with Simonson, who had never married. “He feels the need of a young wife to make him look cool.” “That’s a bit mercenary.” “Way to go,” she said, with a wink that to my imagination contained the kiss of death.

“Tom has moved me sideways.”

I considered her trim figure and then her shell-shocked face. “That seems a pointless exercise.”

“He’s posted me to Overseas Development. I’ll spend the next five years cutting through African jungles and punting down the Amazon in hollowed-out tree trunks. Naturally, I’ve resigned.”

She had asked me to stay overnight in case Tom came back. When I agreed, she put me into a small box-room in an out-of-the-way corner of the apartment. I had already ventured out into the local park to shake off the effects of the lumpy mattress stoically endured in her cause.

Sheepishly I handed her the flowers I had picked on the way back. “They’re a white variety of blubell, apparently known for their scent”

It was meant to be a tender moment but she responded like an automaton, burying her face dutifully in the bunch. I watched her features screw up in disgust. “Where did you get these — a Greek restaurant? They stink of garlic!”

It was not an auspicious start to the day. After she had thoroughly showered for the second time that morning (she has an aversion to the onion family, especially floral bouquets of wild garlic), her fine mind turned briskly to the business of the day.

“I’ll have to find a new flat.” “What about Simonson?” “He’s not making waves just now, not until the PM resigns.” “Yes, of course,” I replied dubiously.

“And a new job.” “Quite.” “Of course, I might be head-hunted.” “So you’re going to the Amazon after all?”

Tania was not in the mood for jokes. We drank tea in silence. Her preoccupation was unnerving. I was used to a near-manic Tania, swinging from mood to mood like a psychological Tarzan. This figure of despondent introversion was entirely new to me.

“Well, maybe I’d better make a move. Things to do, people to see …” “Agents to brief. You are so lucky. I don’t suppose you can second me onto your team”

I gulped. My team? I had a team of two if you included a part-time typist and the tea lady. “Tania, you need to strike out on your own now. Don’t be content with second best or sideways. Call in your favours and insist on some respect. After all, you stood up to the Minister. Simonson should be able to find you a job, at the very least.”

She gazed at me entranced. “That’s what I like about you. You’re a go-getter, a grasper of the moment. You’ll go far. No doubt about it.”

I did. I beat a hasty retreat before she could make inroads into my defence. I never saw her again.

A month later, the Prime Minister resigned for health reasons. By some strange twist of fate Tom was asked to form a new Government.

A week after that bombshell, Tom rang me at home. His voice was more smug than ever. “Look here, I want you to come and work here at Downing Street. I was very impressed with Tania’s opinion of you. She may be a very foolish young woman, but where work’s concerned, she’s got an eye for talent.”

I felt myself busking. “Er…what happened to Tania?”

He chuckled. “Reduced to the outer darkness, I’m afraid. Said to be marrying that old loser Simonson — can’t see it myself. So then, will you or won’t you come to work for my policy unit?”

“Yes Prime Minister…of course,” I stammered. He cooed, as his type do when getting their way.

“Incidentally…what is your name?”

I’m dropping my Tuesday series: Bulletpoints for a Conservative Government.

The reason is, I’ve had a few communications saying my ideas are too ambitious and impractical for real politicians in the real world.

Hello! Has anyone noticed what’s going on out there? The old methods and certainties have all blown away in the political equivalent of Hurricane Katrina.

Sitting on the sidelines, as I am, I’m constantly excercised by the lack of ambition of many politicians. Policy is designed around presentation rather than substance. How will it play in the Daily Mail is the criterion for success. If you’re looking out for logs you might trip over, you’ll eventually walk into a wall.

As for Gordon Brown, if you took him for a stroll through Sherwood Forest and asked him his opinion of it, he’d probably reply: “What forest? I only saw a lot of trees.”

So, big, bold ideas for big, bold times.

Would any party actually leave all those international institutions? Actually, I’d be satisfied with just an exit from the European Union. I’m a simple soul.

Let’s hope David Cameron is a true reformer. If he is, he won’t need my battering-ram ideas.

John Evans

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Foreign Secretary David Miliband was on the Andrew Marr programme this morning and in subdued mood. The only memorable thing I recall is: “We have to inject demand into the economy.”

Does he know what “demand” actually is? And can it be injected?

The Keynesian left often uses mechanical words and phrases to describe nebulous processes. The aim in this case is to increase spending in the real economy to boost employment and lower social security payouts. There are many ways of doing this, mostly they don’t work.

For example, if civil servants went to a typical High Street to hand out briefcases full of banknotes, what would happen?

Two years ago most recipients might head for the nearest celebrity chef restaurant and drink the menu. On the way home they might pop into a jewellery shop to buy a bauble for the missus. That would push money into the real economy and boost employment. But it wasn’t needed two years ago.

Today, by contrast, a hollow-cheeked citizen would probably open the case and exclaim, “Now I can pay off the mortgage arrears, pay down the credit card, and put the rest into a savings account.”

Since all that money will end up back in financial institutions, it’s not going to affect unemployment at all. And since banks are hoarding cash while asset prices are falling, it’s not going to improve credit either.

Typically, Keynesians call this “priming the pump”. When was the last time you used a pump?

Demand is not a mechanism that can be turned on and off, it’s a psychological idea and depends on many unknown unknowns. Even then, is it actually “demand” we’re discussing here?

Do we walk into a supermarket and say, “I demand you sell me these eggs!” Or a car dealer’s forecourt: “I demand to own that car”. Of course not, demand is not involved at all, unless we’re robbing the place.

Our “needs” will generally be met in a downturn because we can tailor them to our resources, and we don’t actually need very much.

In a modern economy, it’s our “wants” that add the froth and pump up economic activity. By engaging in “demand management”, the government is really making us spend on inconsequentials, fripperies and other luxuries we can well do without. It’s trying to create “disposable income” which we can dispose of without a qualm.

Moreover, our wants are viewed from a different perspective when times are hard. The puritan side of our nature re-emerges and we scorn our previous spendthrift activities. We become rational again.

Odd, isn’t it, that our elected representatives prefer us to be irrational, and use our own money to bribe us into exuberant expenditure. How are they different from the pushy credit card companies at the height of the boom?

But it’s still not Demand, is it? Wrong word. Let’s use Wishful Spending instead.

I know it’s not as impressive or managerial as Demand, but at least it means what it says, and we would know what the authorities were trying to make us do.

Wishful spending management: the infantilization of the population completed. Mission accomplished!

Politicians have their own terminology of praise, faint or otherwise. One favourite is: “He has bottom”. Strange, it’s never used about a woman.

Does Gordon have bottom?

Well, you could do worse than glance at Gerald Scarfe’s wicked cartoon in today’s Sunday Times. Brown is depicted as demonstrating quantitative easing to members of the G20.

I’ll leave you to imagine the scenario … or pay the £2 price of the paper.

The roasting of Gordon Brown proceeds apace this weekend.

Yesterday it was Matthew Parris’s turn to take aim and fire. In The Times (London) he eviscerated, excoriated, then practically excommunicated the man from all polite society west of Margate and south of Dunfermline.

Today, Matthew d’Ancona of the Telegraph squeezed him dry till the pips squeaked: “The spandex-clad superhero has lost his aura of power. Mervyn King has cancelled his credit card.”

Peter Oborne also weighed in on Saturday with more thudding blows to an already bruised body. Following Daniel Hannan’s surprise rapier attack on European soil, the commentariat is piling in for the kill.

It’s not surprising. The world is expecting its Saviour-in-Chief to pull a giant rabbit from a small hat on Thursday. The G20 has been massively over-promised, thanks to Brown.

The decline is over, only the fall is left. Will he walk away now from the defeat that’s coming? Or will he limit the pain by calling a June General Election?

He’s no William Wallace.

The enigma at the heart of the hysterical response to supposed man-made global warming, is that paradoxically, its goals are so limited.

If carbon is indeed the problem, why keep trimming away at the edges? Why not ditch carbon completely?

At present, every human activity results in the production of carbon. Every morsel of energy we use, for light, heat, propulsion, manufacturing and servicing, somewhere down the line involves the burning of long dead trees.

It’s an astonishingly primitive process for a so-called advanced technological society. If we explained to a Stone Age caveman where our abundance of energy comes from, he’d remark drily, “We do that too. You’re not so clever after all.”

Where is the new motive power source for a truly innovative age that doesn’t depend on combustion of some sort? Wind and solar power require large areas of land to serve a small population, land that will be needed to grow food on in the future.

Greens want to chip away at the usage of carbon burning sources while the human population is doubling every century or so. It doesn’t add up.

All effort and investment should be directed at eliminating the combustion phase in the production of energy, not spending vast sums shoring up defences against future events which may never happen. If all the resources devoted to “green” alternatives were switched to that one objective, do you suppose it would fail?

Why pauperize whole economies in a futile attempt to empty the sea with a bucket?

Niall Ferguson’s thoughtful lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies (Get pdf here) on the trilemma of modern politics, prompts a lot of questions. Here’s one of them:

What halted the Doha international trade agreement was India’s veto. They were worried about the possibility of mass suicides among Indian farmers helpless against huge surges of imports into their country. Once again it was a clash between local sensibilities and a theoretical set of principles set out by the world’s power brokers. Local versus global.

The notion of “one world” is valid only on a spiritual level. As a philosophical Idealist, I certainly hold that view. However, on a practical level, it’s not true at all. Go and talk to those Indian farmers to find out why.

C.G. Jung’s description of a Collective Unconscious tells a complicated story. Many of the “archetypes” found there deal with self-preservation and can be terrifying to behold. He warned Westerners in particular not to lose themselves in this psychic realm because, as rationalists, they have no defence against the symbolic nature of it.

The nearest we have to a world mind is the internet. Jung would have been fascinated by it. However, his warnings ring true when some people get so caught up in the web of social media sites that they become unhinged and separated from reality. All those teenage suicides in the small town of Bridgend gives us an inkling.

People need feet of clay to be contented in this world. A satisfactory local environment is needed for mental harmony. It’s not speculative. It has actuality.

Our minds are not constructed to deal with planetary affairs, however much half-deranged politicians like Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson may insist the contrary.

One World is forever an aspiration, never a finished construct. Only swamis in caves in the Himalayas can contemplate the cosmos as a unity.

For the rest of us, it’s business as usual, right here, right now. The G20 will produce only sporadic results papering over many cracks.

It’s the cracks we should be celebrating, not the glue. They are the real thing. The stuff of freedom. Wabi sabi, as the Japanese say.

When the world can live with its cracks and fissures, then a kind of unity is possible.

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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A new feature summarizing policy ideas suggested on this site.

From: DIARY: Education, March 1, 2009.

The State education system in Britain just gets worse and worse. Hyperactive jobsworths are forever coming up with new wheezes that dazzle in the headlines for an hour but have no merit in practice.

The entire structure is probably beyond repair after 12 years of scorched earth policies for everything that promotes a well-stocked mind and an understanding of the principles that stand behind ideas and formulations.

The Conservatives have yet to jettison some of Labour’s most pernicious obsessions, like the refusal to allow selection in academic subjects. I have high hopes they will do so in office.

But what should the basic education system provide?

It should give students the ability to position themselves in time and space, with historical narrative as the time axis, and geography as the space axis. Both subjects have been severely downgraded in primary and secondary schooling.

The curriculum should also be shorn of soft “social” subjects better learnt at home or through experience. All attempts at social engineering should be strictly outlawed.

Psychobabble has become a wordy substitute for a true understanding of human nature, which is not a machine. Allied to that, PC (political so-called correctness) has assumed fascist proportions in attempts to control the thoughts of the population. Schools lead the way as mind-cleansing centres of anything with which the government disagrees.

Why do they do that? Because “they” — and we know who they are — want us all to be just like them.

Sorry, we don’t.

A lost generation of schoolchildren from the Labour years will probably never be redeemed and will haunt the future as they carry the mouldy seed of mediocrity forward.

The Conservatives can make a start on creating a new wave of educated young people with a better grasp of the fundamentals and of more use to the 21st-century world.

From: Conservatives dream of Silicon Alley, February 27, 2009.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to adopt the can-do attitudes of West Coast Silicon Valley and Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train home-grown developers and software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East. More engineers in general are also urgently needed.

From: Why is Gordon Brown protecting the rest of the world?, January 31, 2009.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

The Conservative Shadow Education spokesman, Michael Gove, will have his work cut out to make instant improvements to a depressingly hopeless State education system. It will take three Parliaments to get the structure right, never mind the quality teachers it needs.

Opposition from the blockheaded educational establishment will be fierce. An alternative approach might be to set up a separate system alongside the State one, allowing parents to migrate across voluntarily. It would be difficult for teachers’ unions to strike against the freely made choices of parents and pupils.

Abolishing the politically contaminated teachers’ training colleges would also be a godsend to good heads and concerned parents.

Liberal-Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s new overgrown-schoolboy hairdo is much too Red Nose Day for inclusion in a serious political website — so I’m writing about it here.

When William Hague first adopted his Mekon cut, I remember thinking he must have lost his marbles along with his tresses. Do you recall his Neanderthal mane at 16? But, over the years, his egghead look has grown on us. At least it allows him to age gracefully.

By contrast, as Cleggie gets older, his haircut will become younger and younger. A bit like the picture of Dorian Gray.

I bet this dyed, bristly, birdsnest soupcon is redesigned before very much longer.

As a natural-born conservative, I’ve always been attracted to Edmund Burke’s idea of the “natural society” — one in which people find their own social levels according to ability and inclination, and are able to speak out freely as they wish.

It seems obvious to me that such an arrangement results in a generally contented population, and therefore a peaceable one.

The Labour government (1997-2009) has destroyed that homely consensus. Early on, it introduced a rigid system of Marxist equality legislation that imported alien doctrines and rigidities into Britain. All manner of inoffensive folk were inexplicably demonized, and often criminalized, for views and actions that would not have been remarked upon during centuries past.

Ideological correctness was the order constantly barked from above. An Orwellian State sprouted up where once civility and civilization stood. Society as a whole became disorganized and sullen, with serious outbreaks of violence on the streets, especially among the young of all classes. Alcoholism is now commonplace, as are hard drug habits, knife and gun crime.

All this recent misery and disorder can be traced back to obsessive social engineering by government ministers we wouldn’t trust to assemble a flat-pack whelk stall.

How we have lost our natural society, and what we can do to retrieve it, is a big topic for another day. For now, let’s speculate on what the founders of psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung and Adler, would have made of New Labour Britain — in my own, surmised, words:

“Equality is a dangerous matter for politicians to touch. They have no idea what complex areas of the mind they are meddling with. Equality before God, the law and the ballot box is as far as a democratic society should go. Any further and it risks wholesale disturbance across the population.

“If people are forced to bottle up their natural instincts and inclinations, with no outlets of expression, they develop severe anxiety neuroses and tensions that will increasing boil over into social disorder. People who are discontented most of the time inevitably reach for the bottle and the needle to calm their inner turmoil.

“Enforcing equality of attributes is a minefield best left alone. It is also self-defeating because attributes are, by their very nature, unequally distributed across the human population. Every parent observes that fact in the personalities of their children, which are anything but equal, despite sharing a genetic makeup.

“Nothing, save losing a war on homeground, is as explosively destructive of civilized values than enforced equality of attributes. Karl Marx, like all socialists, never understood human nature. Look where that got him — he nearly destroyed the world.”

Something else for David Cameron’s Conservatives to get rid of then?

Have you tried Sainsbury’s sugar-free dark chocolate? I’m chewing on a lump now and it’s surprisingly good. In fact it tastes just like normal chocolate.

It’s supposed to be beneficial to the old ticker too. Something to do with antioxidants and all that.

Predictably, the killjoys were out in force this week rubbishing claims that the dark brown stuff is good for you. You’ll get fat, they shriek. Obesity is a fate worse than death. Stop before it’s too late!

It’s enough to give you a heart attack, isn’t it?

Why do the current crop of British politicians copy everyone else?

Whenever a new policy is suggested, the accompanying spin alerts us to the supposedly comforting fact that it’s been developed and tried out by Sweden/Australia/America … and other generous countries around the world.

Has the UK lost its ability to create policy ideas pertinent to its history and the specific aspirations of its people?

Let’s be frank, the Labour party is an ideas-free zone, it can no more identify the wider needs of Britons than it can manage the economy for any decent length of time.

Under its diktat, almost every part of the country has been reduced to pathetic shards of failure and dereliction. Observe Labour’s strongholds in Glasgow, where constant Labour local government has bequeathed the inhabitants a life-expectancy lower than sub-Saharan Africa.

Make no mistake, the task of the upcoming Tory Government will be like the Labours of Hercules.

As we gear up for a possible June election, all the old arguments about that hallowed stretch of real estate, the centre ground, are bubbling up again.

This sacred turf is said to be the only place from which a party can win a General Election. Both centre-left and centre-right positions deter a crucial constituency — Middle Britain.

Given that Gordon Brown has boxed himself in electorally by a strange combination of anger and timidity — classic traits of the bully — a June 2009 poll is overwhelmingly his least worst choice. Even Peter Mandelson apparently accepts that view. We must assume it’s a strong possibility.

Will Brown try to regain the centre ground for Labour from the artful Conservatives? And should the Tories attempt to defend it by circling the wagons?

My own view is that the so-called centre ground is a myth. Margaret Thatcher won three elections in a row. Her radical thinking became the norm, the consensual heart of British political discourse. Yet most voters saw her as distinctly right wing. How can that be explained?

What she occupied was not the boring old centre, but the High Centre Ground, that pinnacle from which the entire terrain is visible. As the old song has it: “On a clear day, you can see forever”.

This week, David Cameron’s apology for failing to spot the flaws in the runaway economy plonked him squarely in the High Centre of British politics.

You had your chance, Gordon. You blew it!

Again.

For months I’ve been putting up pieces in Syntagma exploring new policy initiatives for an incoming Conservative Government. (Note the capital G in the spelling; Labour always gets a derisory lower-case for its dismal performance.)

However, these snippets are distributed around the site unmarked and less coherently than they should be. So we’ve decided to start a new weekly feature column: Pointers to a Conservative Government on Tuesdays, in the run up to Dave’s misty-eyed entry into 10 Downing Street.

It will be a new dawn, will it not?

It will also be the beginning of a Trojan effort by the Party to rebuild a truly blasted heath of a country. It will take at least three Parliaments to achieve.

We’ve already covered education, manufacturing, public borrowing and public sector govenance, along with globalization and parts of foreign policy (see yesterday’s Saturday Ramble), but will now put them all under one roof for convenience.

I hope the views of a Burkean Democrat Minimalist Conservative (BDMC — a new species) may prompt an echoing response from within the Party’s leadership.

They will need all the help they can get.

John Evans

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