Alastair's Blog

I have refrained from saying too much about the Jimmy Savile saga, not least because any time I mention anything to do with a BBC ‘crisis,’ out from the woodwork come those who continue to defend the Beeb’s false reporting and grossly unprofessional handling of the WMD dossier issue a decade or so ago. It [...]

The reason we ended up with a coalition government is that the public did not want Labour back for a fourth term but they did not want the old Tory Party back either. So they chucked in the Lib Dems and said ‘you lot sort it out.’ Analysed coldly, David Cameron should have won the [...]

I wonder if Tommy Sheridan ever gets fed up of being called a ‘firebrand Scottish politician’? Probably not, any more than the far more loathsome George Galloway tires of presenting himself as the victim of conspiracy theories, the latest of which is so tiresome I could not get beyond the first eight sentences of The [...]

For the third time, I failed to persuade Chris Mullin, who would be brilliant if he embraced it, to join Twitter last night. As fellow diarists of the New Labour era, we seem to have become a fairly regular double act and this time he was interviewing me at Chatham House about the influence of [...]

You might remember that a week ago, following George Osborne’s ludicrous statement that Tony Blair ‘achieved nothing’ in ten years in power, I reeled off some of the facts that negated his view. I also noted that so far, there was little by comparison that the Cameron government could put down as historically equivalent to [...]

Sunday Times columnist India Knight and the charity MIND got into a good old ding dong yesterday after she wrote a column (which I have posted below) on the slew of celebrity memoirs revealing the author to have had depression. As the row kicked off, she and her supporters sought to justify her piece by [...]

I missed Little Lord Fauntleroy’s address to the faithful, but it appears I did not miss a new strategy for growth. So that’s two years in a row on that front, Gideon. It is heartening, however, to hear that despite being the most unpopular Chancellor since Norman Lamont, and the most incompetent Chancellor since, er, [...]

Good fun as ever in Ireland yesterday, with a seminar on alcohol abuse with politicians and policy experts, a meeting with the See Change and Headline campaigns against mental health stigma, a tour of twitter HQ and then off to the Late Late Show. Great to meet up again with retiring (in both senses of [...]

So, to the excellent question I was asked at a software conference yesterday – is David Cameron doing anything right, does Nick Clegg have a future, and is Ed Miliband electable as Prime Minister? I ended up answering yes, yes and yes, but with varying degrees of caveat and qualification. For Cameron, the problem I [...]

To the Institute of Directors this morning and a speech to a large room full of experts from public and private sector, at a conference organised by software specialists KANA. It is always good to get an audience laughing before going into serious stuff like economic mayhem, political shambles and transport fiasco. So I told [...]