Alastair's Blog

Once upon a time, there would have been only one contender for the main story of the coming week – the gathering of the Trades Union Congress in Liverpool. It used to be an event covered with exactly the same focus and intensity as the main party conferences, with the Liberals a poor fourth behind Labour, [...]

Memo to SJ From AC re: earphones Great to see you looking so well after your liver transplant, and well done on all the new products. Can’t say I understand them all, but judging by the fact you made the top trends on Twitter, even as you were speaking, it is clear the SJ magic [...]

Was it Atticus Finch who said don’t judge a man until you have tried to walk in his shoes? Or was he just quoting someone from the Bible, or from Shakespeare, who said pretty much everything there was to be said, long before The Beatles said all had been said before? Whoever it was, it came [...]

Well, we got a right old debate going yesterday, when I picked over the parody that was Dave’s performance on the BBC News, and the uber-parody of a piece in the Telegraph on so-called Tory Cool. I’m not pretending all comments, whether on the blog, Facebook or Twitter, were supportive of my view, and there [...]

If you’d watched the BBC News last night, you’d have thought Rory Bremner had given up his serious commentator bit and gone back to being a funny impersonator dreaming up lines that no politician, surely, would ever have the nerve to deliver. David Cameron’s performance was beyond parody. The scene was Dave’s kitchen, where he was [...]

I’ve just been for a longish run along the Newcastle quayside, which confirmed me in the view I tweeted last night – that this area has seen a real transformation since the days of successive Tory governments. I know the people who responded on Facebook and Twitter, being ‘friends’ and all that, are likely to [...]

BBC Question Time is not alone among programmes in wanting to attract as much attention to itself as it can. In a noisy, crowded marketplace, where viewers have almost infinite choice of how to spend their TV and online time, if you’re not known, you unlikely to get watched. So they will not be unhappy to [...]

If you want a taste of what Barack Obama is up against in the ferocity and the bovinity, if such a word exists, of right-wing Americans, scour around the place for some of the reaction to the President’s plans to make a speech in a school in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday. Parents are threatening to [...]

Keen to find out what Gordon Brown said in his speech about Afghanistan, I tuned into the BBC News Channel at 9pm. What bits I saw seemed good. Clear about why our troops are there. Clear about the link to life here. It cannot be stated often enough. And to be fair, in total there [...]

In Paris for a TV programme, I wake up, get ready to go for a run, then take a look at the pouring rain and decide the hotel gym treadmill might be a better idea. (Cue my favourite treadmill story, about the woman in Texas who tried to recruit me to the George W Bush [...]