Sunday 14 March 2010

Serving up a treat

Hello again, cyber friends. As usual, I find myself apologising for an extended absence from subjecting you to my occasionally well thought out prose musing on the finer points of life. And for the most part, my idle ramblings on whatever enters my head. As much as I would like to inform you that my latest hiatus has been due to a hectic work schedule or a spell of globe trotting, the reality is simply that I have been waiting for the necessary inspiration to write about some interesting topics.

Well, since I was last here, what new things have we discovered? The scandal sheets have been full of stories of philandering footballers, writing with exclamations of moral indignation when footballers playing away from home, to use an appropriate analogy, is a tradition associated with the occupation for longer than the wearing of shin pads or the exchanging of penants before kick off. It was the exchange of a handshake that caught the press’s attention recently, although as it transpired, the handshake was not forthcoming. We will come on to the thorny subject of Bridge versus Terry in a future blog, along with some other topics affecting the beautiful game at the moment.

Outside of the national sport, the nation has been captivated by the coverage of the Winter Olympics. Well, that statement is certainly true if the nation in question is Canada. Given that Britain’s credentials in winter sports generally stop at their gold medal performances in the apres-ski beer consumption on the nursery slopes of St Moritz and of de-icing the car windscreen on a biting December morning in readiness for the school run, then Amy Williams’s gold medal in guiding the fastest tea tray in the west down the sliding slopes of Whistler was about all the mother nation could hope for. Although, I am sure the inquests into our paltry medal total have already begun. We invented snow, don’t you know?

Anyway, enough waffling from me. Let’s get down to business and waffle some more.


6 Music a sign of BBC running scared of its enemies
The recent news that the BBC has decided to discontinue the broadcasting of its 6 Music station has raised some eyebrows among media commentators. As well as closing its cult digital music station, the BBC has also announced further cutbacks with around half of its programme websites expected to close, as well as the Asian Network radio station also ceasing to broadcast.

The loyal followers of 6 Music have, understandably, been dismayed by the news of its closure, pointing to the millions of pounds that the BBC have spent on their premises relocation to Manchester. Meanwhile, the hardened cynics to whom progress is a dirty word, have observed that if all of the people that purport to listen to 6 Music had done so on a regular basis, then their beloved channel would not be going off air. Both schools of thought may merit consideration, but neither are contributory factors in why the BBC has reached this decision.

The BBC's decision to cut back on its output has nothing to do with cost savings. It also has very little to do with profitability, or even broadcast ratings. Just because 6 Music attracted comparatively small fry in terms of audience share, that is not a reason to pull the plug. When the channel was first broadcast some 5 years ago, the BBC would not have envisaged the station being a huge ratings winner. The station's music policy and the very deliberate placement of the station as a niche audience puller was a conscious decision, with the anticipation that the station would attract a small, but perfectly formed audience, but which would gather momentum over time through word of mouth.

So, you will be asking, if money wasn't the driving force behind the BBC's cutting back of services, then what was the motivating factor? Well, it would appear to me as though the main factor that has led to the BBC reaching this decision is fear. Fear of what exactly? Fear of change? Fear of competitors? Well, fear of a change in the political landscape would be my personal interpretation on the matter.

Within around two months time, the nation will have to go to the polls as the Labour Government's maximum five year term of office will expire on 6 May. At present, opinion polls vary, but in the main, it is suggested that the Conservatives' are enjoying a 5 to 8 point lead over the Labour Party. In real terms, if the electorate was to vote the same way on polling day, then the likelihood is that the Conservatives would win the most seats but would not have enough to claim an overall majority, therefore meaning the formation of a Hung Parliament.

A Hung Parliament would not concern the BBC's bigwigs as much as the prospect of a Conservative Government being formed, which looked like a formality only a few months ago. For some time, it has been well known that as and when the Conservatives next take power, one of the principle tasks they wish to undertake is to make the BBC a less powerful corporation and to muzzle the activities it is involved in. Their argument, as champions of a free market, open to many competitors, is that the BBC has become too big a player in its market and has moved away from its remit to provide a public service and instead has the structure and constitution of a corporate business. Their wide presence across the media, the Conservatives feel, is a prohibitive barrier for other organisations to realistically compete in the media market, and it is also leads to a danger of a lack of impartiality in media reporting. For some reason, there has long been a perception among some people of blue blooded stock that the BBC leans towards the lily livered liberal section of society, although there has never been any firm evidence of this.

All in all, you would have to say that the BBC in actual fact has been a victim of its own success. The corporation has shown itself to be a good innovator that has set trends across a wide variety of media platforms. You need only look at the success of its iPlayer, success that has manifested itself in the fact that all of the BBC's main competitors have now introduced a similar service to watch recent programmes broadcast by their network via their website. Imitation is indeed the highest form of flattery. Due to the BBC's ability to manoeuvre itself in so many pies, this has brought resentment from its commercial competitors, whose revenue is solely generated through advertising, rather than the licence fee in the case of the BBC.

The unique way in which the BBC is funded continues to be a source of irritation and anger among the more right aligned of the print media titles. The Conservative Party, who gather many of their traditional voters from readers of these newspapers, have spotted a convenient bandwagon to jump on (Conservatives, bandwagon, never) and so have promised that the BBC's spending and corporate governance will be top of their agenda should they assume power in May. Whilst newspapers like the Daily Mail and Telegraph have long held an anti-BBC agenda on the grounds that they object to anything that reduces the amount of disposable income that one could spend on something meaningful like a loft conversion or a pony, it is noticeable that one of the BBC's most vocal critics has been The Sun, which claims that the BBC is not politically impartial. The pungent, intoxicating stench you can detect is that of grade A hypocrisy.

As much as The Sun regards itself as the voice of the people and its powerful editorials and headlines ensure that a fair section of its readers tap into this self-promotion, the truth of the matter is that The Sun is the megaphone for the opinions and agendas of its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is a Capitalist and all of his public comments are deliberately measured for what will provide him with the best opportunity for Capitalist gain. The Sun is quite deliberately targeted at working class, blue collar workers with only a limited amount of intellect and ability to form their own opinions and so consequently, it is people from this demographic that go on to Facebook and set up groups allied to The Sun's right wing viewpoint that preys upon other like minded individuals to sign up.

The purpose of this article is not to beatify the BBC and its hierarchy, but merely to point out that its detractors are looking after number one when they criticise the corporation. In a time when some businesses are failing, the BBC remains a very successful business model, but this appears to be part of the problem. Because the BBC is a public funded organisation, people seem to think that this means its constitution should be such that it should not be governed by making a profit, and yet there is not a business in any sector, including the voluntary sector, that can be sustainable unless it is making a surplus. That Rupert Murdoch and his equally charmless son James have been so vocal in attacking the BBC because its presence restricts what activity Sky can carry out almost makes me want to reach for the Kleenex. Neither Murdoch is interested in what's best for the market or what is best for the consumer, their only motivation is what is best for Team Murdoch and for the Sky corporation.

The point of the matter is that the reason for the BBC's decision to cut back on its website output and to close 6 Music and the Asian Network has little to do with cost cutting and also little to do with ratings, but has everything to do with the fear that the hostility that the Conservative Party has shown the BBC will ensure that if they take power that they will make sure that the BBC is reformed and held more accountable than it presently is. "Quite right too" you can hear the Daily Mail tubthumpers bellowing. "Not before time" they add over in the air conditioned offices of News International. But, who exactly wins in this situation?

The BBC has taken the view that by closing 6 Music, a commercial organisation could come in and acquire the station and the brand and enable it to be moved forward in a way that the BBC couldn't, because to them it was just a niche station in quite a wide radio portfolio. But, this is a case of executives making a decision without understanding the audience that the station was set up for in the first place. Although 6 Music was only moderately successful in terms of the size of its audience, the station had a cult following and its ethos was very much as the antithesis to the plethora of mainstream pop music stations that are available via digital radio. Although I was not a regular listener to 6 Music, one of the reasons for its listeners being loyal to the network is that it gives unsigned acts airplay and it also gives its presenters more autonomy over the selection of music for their show. Musicians such as Jarvis Cocker and Elbow's Guy Garvey have presented shows on 6 Music where they have played an eclectic range of music that is influential to their sound and because the station has veered away from having a set playlist, it gives the presenter more licence to play the type of music they want to play.

Transferring the 6 Music in-house music policy to a commercial setting just simply would not work because a commercial radio station has other priorities, namely advertising. Although in theory the digital revolution gives the radio listener a far more extensive choice of stations and musical genres to listen to, the overall presentation of commercial radio is very formulaic and while various radio stations like to have their listeners believe that the music is their primary focus, there is no disguising the fact that the main consideration for these stations is the advertising mark-up. Three or four sets of adverts an hour plus additional product placement in the form of an auction style competition or a regular sponsor for the travel reports is the lifeblood for commercial radio stations in a massively saturated market.

As much as the brand name of "6 Music" would initially be a selling point for any commercial organisation that bought the station and the brand, ultimately the acquisition of the brand would be worthless unless the core values of the original station were upheld, and this simply is not compatible with the market forces involved in commercial radio. As discussed, commercial radio stations are governed by their advertisers and advertisers are more likely to go where they can get more listeners at key times. As depressing as it is to consider, mainstream is what the advertisers will choose because, by the nature of the word, mainstream means a higher and more accessible audience. Confronted with the choice of advertising on a station that is playing Robbie Williams and Lady GaGa to half a million listeners a week or advertising on a station that is playing the latest hot new act from the London folk rock scene or is playing 1960s album tracks by Bob Dylan to less than half of that audience size, the sad reality is that "Have A Break, Have A Kit Kat" will be aired to the highest audience portion.

The 6 Music listener would be less sad about the inability of the station to find suitable advertising because they are presently happy that they do not have advertising interrupting the music while it remains in the BBC family. This is another reason why it is hard to envisage the station working in a commercial format. The only way that it could really be incorporated into the commercial sector would be for an existing provider in the market to acquire the station and add it to their portfolio.

The only station I can see doing this is Absolute Radio, which is part of the Times of India media empire. Absolute, as well as having its main station, also has a specialist rock and a specialist 1980s music station. Although structurally it is feasible for Absolute to throw its hat in the ring, it has a very rigid and formulaic music policy and it is hard to see how it could continue to run 6 Music with the type of creative programming that it presently enjoys, or for it to have such a focus on unsigned acts. Acts like Florence & The Machine and Marina & The Diamonds have enjoyed exposure on Absolute, but only after they had been broken some months before on other stations. If Absolute took 6 Music on, it would likely just make it into a clone of the XFM indie station that can be heard in London. This would be all the more strange given that Absolute closed a specialist indie station just a few months ago in order to make way for its 80s music station.

In a time when mainstream tastes are catered for at every whim by countless radio stations within the commercial sector, it is a crying shame that the BBC has buckled under the pressure of its detractors and got rid of a niche service which, while not bringing in huge ratings, was never set up with that intention and which cannot be readily imitated with any great success by commercial rivals. It is ironic in some senses that the very people who condemn the BBC for forgetting its roots as a public service broadcaster have been responsible for influencing the corporation in ditching one of its services that was very much broadcasting a public service to grateful listeners, albeit they were a comparatively small audience. It seems strange that the BBC is choosing to axe 6 Music when, if any type of cull was necessary, it may have been better served to dump Radio 1 Xtra, a station that costs far more and which is offering a service already catered for by several commercial rivals. It also happens to employ Tim Westwood as one of its resident DJs and that alone should be good reason for taking an axe to the station.

The Director General of the BBC, Mark Thomson, may feel that making these changes will be enough to appease the dissenting voices in the Conservative Party, who if they had their way would force the BBC into mass cuts which would probably result in such a strain on spending that repeats of My Family would have to be shown on BBC1 every night of the week. First of all, the BBC Trust needs to ratify Thomson's recommended changes and that is by no means guaranteed. But even if it does, should the Tories get into office, I very much doubt these changes alone will be sufficient to satisfy the doubters. Thomson is likely to move on and get another executive position somewhere else, much like his counterpart at ITV, Adam Crozier managed to and then it will be somebody else's turn to keep out the enemy.

In the long run, the only way these people will back down is if the licence fee is discontinued, which could become a possibility once the digital switchover is completed as this could then pave the way to an opt-in/opt-opt out type of subscription television. In the short term, 6 Music's workers and listeners seem to be the unwitting casualties in someone else's war.

New balls please
The ongoing British sporting debacle that is the failure of its Davis Cup team recently reached a new low with Great Britain humbled by the mighty Lithuania in their Euro-Africa zone clash. This result left Britain requiring a victory against Turkey later in the year, in order to avoid relegation to the bottom division of the competition next year and face the possibility of a match against such superpowers as Iceland or Andorra. In fact, it says much for the malaise that faces Britain's team that their next opponents Turkey were defeated in their last tie by Ireland, a country that traditionally produces tennis players as often as Australia produces world champion bobsleighers.

As ever, a scapegoat for British failure was quickly identified and sure enough, it was John Lloyd, the Davis Cup captain who understandably carried the can for a humiliating result, a result that also happened to be Britain's fifth successive loss in a Davis Cup tie under his watch. Lloyd's ousting from office was inevitable because he was directly involved in picking the players that took to the court against Lithuania and so he had to take ownership for the defeat. However, whatever failings Lloyd had should not mask far greater and deeper deficiencies with British tennis which explain why a country with over 60 million inhabitants should continue to fail in producing high calibre players through its own system.

One man who has attracted criticism is Roger Draper, the chairman of the Lawn Tennis Association, the man who was charged with reforming the coaching structure of tennis in the United Kingdom. Draper seems to be another from the Adam Crozier and Mark Thomson school of soundbite, plenty of ideas, but less evidence of any meaningful action. Draper certainly has some vocal critics, not least the Brightonian comedian and tennis lover, Tony Hawks. Hawks, who coincidentally wrote the excellent "Around Ireland With A Fridge", is the patron of the campaign "Tennis For Free", a worthy campaign that tries to give children free access to tennis courts in a similar way to how they are available in the United States. Hawks's spat with Draper stems from the fact that he asked the LTA to promote his campaign, but found that support was in short supply.

The LTA have spent significant sums of money on reform under Draper's tenure and have pleaded for patience on their return on investment, but it is hard to be so sympathetic to this attitude when the LTA spent great sums of money on the hiring and subsequent pay of Andy Murray's coach Brad Gilbert, who would split with Murray acrimoniously within 18 months. Given the prize money that Murray amassed from his growing number of ATP titles, surely it was not unreasonable to expect him to pay for his own coach, rather than for the LTA to set aside the money for this purpose, creating a black hole in the coffers.

Very few top class British players have emerged in the past 20 years, in either the men's or the women's game. Of those that have, Andy Murray spent many of his teenage years being schooled in Spain and so his present status among the current tennis elite owes barely anything to the British coaching system and everything to his mother's determination for Murray to achieve the best tennis education possible. Meanwhile, the 2008 Wimbledon Girls' champion Laura Robson spent most of her early life in Australia. Rewind a few years and Greg Rusedski reached the final of the US Open, but was only representing Britain as a flag of convenience, with his schooling having been on the hard courts of Montreal and Toronto. Of British top 20 players in the last 20 to 25 years, only Tim Henman was genuinely a product of the homegrown system. In his case, he was helped by being born into an affluent, middle class Home Counties family and where tennis was in the genes. It was Henman's grandmother who was the first to serve underarm at Wimbledon.

The class divide is one of the reasons for the continued failure of Britain to produce quality tennis players, although it is far from the only one. Tennis is an expensive sport to play, when compared to other sports. A parent can pay for their child to play football for the cost of buying a ball from the local sports shop, given that the goalposts will already have been paid for in the form of a rucksack or a few coats. Cricket can initially be played with a block of wood and a soft ball with the aforementioned rucksack used as the wicket. But, apart from the possible origins of playing Swingball in the garden, tennis is a costly sport to play due to the cost of getting a court, buying the racquet and if a child is prodigious enough to play competitively, there is the cost of engaging a coach. This is where Tony Hawks' Tennis For Free campaign has its undoubted merits.

While lack of money may end up with certain talented tennis players being lost to the game, I think that the attitude that people have to the game of tennis in this country is another fundamental reason for its continued shortage of a meaningful production line. You will only need to visit your local park on a Sunday morning to see what is wrong with the attitude to the sport in this country. Kids are being kept off the court by a couple of sweaty middle aged blokes, sometimes playing with a John McEnroe vintage wooden racquet who are playing the game with no movement, but gently exchanging rallies from the edge of the baseline and will be serving the ball from inside the service line, without even throwing the ball up to serve authentically.

Now, I am not suggesting that middle aged men should be banned from playing tennis. Far from it, in fact I think that tennis is an excellent way of keeping fit. My point is that there is a lack of intensity in the way the game is played. It is a leisure pursuit for many and because it is a gentle way of passing the time on the weekend before burning off the calories in the bar, people do not really approach the sport in the way it was intended to be played, that is as an athletic sport. Apart from the point that the Sunday morning player often lacks the physique to be an athlete, or is recovering from the previous night's excesses in any event, I think the parks player is often wary about throwing themselves around an unforgiving, concrete court.

While these types of player are hogging the tennis courts at weekends, children are waiting to get a game and if their first direct experience of seeing the game in the flesh is to see a singles or a doubles rubber being played with little energy or enthusiasm, it does not encourage them to stick with the sport themselves and consequently, tennis' loss ends up becoming football's or X-Box 360's gain.

It would help, also, if the public's attitude to tennis improved. In the eyes of many misinformed people, tennis is played for just a fortnight a year on the grass courts of SW19 in late June and early July. Whatever happens before and after in the calendar year is of little consequence. We also have a knack of criticising even the best players that have come out of Britain. Tim Henman was often regarded as a failure and a bottler by some of the British public because he never won Wimbledon, and yet he reached the semi-finals there four times and was once ranked the world's number 4. With the ability he had, Henman reached the absolute apogee that he could expect to ascend to. He was playing at a time when a scud missile first serve was a crucial weapon to possess and Henman's serve lacked the power or consistency needed to land enough killer first serves in against the best opponents.

Look now at Andy Murray, who has enjoyed an excellent couple of years and reached two Grand Slam finals, both of which he lost to the best player of all time, Roger Federer. Yet, for all his tournament successes, you sense that the British public is largely indifferent to Murray and will not change their mind until and if he wins Wimbledon. Murray's Scottish heritage and surlyness is one reason that the public does not connect with him, but there have been far more spiky players in the history of the game who the same public loved. Jimmy Connors for example. A chap called McEnroe too. It does seem a peculiarly British trait that we knock our own sportsmen, especially where those that attract the flak happen to be the best that we have.

The whole infrastructure of tennis in this country, from the way the game is taught in schools, to the public facilities available, right through to the coaching structure clearly requires radical overhaul in order for the game to move forward into the twenty-first century. The stuffy, country club mentality of the tennis committees across the country looks likely to be the greatest barrier to change being actioned and until change is embraced, the same culture of failure and the same negative attitudes to tennis and how it is played will continue in to the next generation.

Tennis is a fantastic sport and its greatest tournament is held in Britain. It is tragic that we continually fall short in producing good players worthy of the tournament. Any success that Andy Murray and Laura Robson achieve in the coming few years should be greatly received, and hopefully this would provide inspiration for children to pick up a racquet and feel compelled to emulate them, much in the way that Sweden enjoyed a boom time in men's tennis after Bjorn Borg's sustained success. But in the short term, any achievements that Murray and Robson muster will be down to them and their coaching staff and will only paper over the seismic cracks in the current running of the sport.

Policies need to be clearer than personalities
While the media are excited at the prospect of a mandatory calling of a General Election any week now, I am finding myself all the more disengaged from the current political landscape. As tends to be the way, the United Kingdom is following the lead of the United States and it appears that the spin doctors advising each of the three main political parties have advised them that in a tight situation, this election will be won by personalities rather than by policies. This has led to the uncomfortable sight in recent weeks of both David Cameron and Gordon Brown being interviewed about their personal lives, rather than asking them to explain their idealologies and their plans for running the country if elected in May.

I watched parts of both Brown's interview with the boorish Piers Morgan and Cameron's interview with Sir Trevor McDonald, which also featured a testimony from Cameron's wife on why her dearly beloved is the best man to run the country and in which she constantly referred to him as "Dave". Whether Cameron calls his wife Trigger I cannot say, although he did not do so during the programme. Neither interview really offered any great insight into the party leaders' personalities other than that they had a distinct lack of one, but I dare say Piers Morgan will feel he landed a potent body punch when he asked Brown if he and his wife had become members of the mile high club when they first romanced one another on a flight.

What the political strategists need to realise is that personalities are in pretty short supply in politics these days and while it is true that the next Prime Minister will be the one that connects with the electorate the most, this connection will be largely determined by who provides evidence of the most convincing policy, rather than who can come up with the best one liner, who can pull the funniest face or who can cook an omelette quicker. Mind you, Gordon Brown versus David Cameron on the Omelette Challenge might make Saturday Kitchen compulsive viewing in the run-up to the election.

The depressing aspect of politics at the moment is that it is just weeks before an election and still all of the main parties seem unclear on what their election winning policies actually are. Prime Minister's Question Time is pure theatre, an opportunity for Cameron and Clegg to attack the Prime Minister and to point out all of the present administration's wrongs, but neither have actually explained what it is that their prospective Governments would do differently. It is for this very reason that the polls show that the Conservative lead in the polls is now anticipated to be around 5 to 6 per cent, whereas at one point last year at the height of the recession, they had a 20 point lead. This advantage has been cut drastically not because Gordon Brown has done anything inspirational, but because David Cameron has done little to convince the British public that he and his Government would offer a better alternative. If Cameron fails to get the Conservatives elected in the current political climate, it will be an indictment on his lack of clarity concerning policy.

It could also be the case that the print media underestimated some of their readers (or misunderestimated it, as George W Bush might say). The Sun has nailed its colours firmly to the mast and is fully behind the Conservatives again after its unholy alliance with the Labour Party was severed last year. Since changing horse, The Sun has given Gordon Brown seven barrels of the horns effect treatment, without ever quite giving David Cameron an equal measure of the halo effect.

Some of The Sun's criticism of Brown's Government has had justification, but some of it has also misjudged the public mood. The story of Mrs Janes, the bereaved mother of a soldier that had been killed in Afghanistan was a case-in-point. The Sun made a big deal out of the point that Brown had misspelt the bereaved mother's name in a handwritten letter of condolence that was sent to her, when in actual fact, Brown had not misspelt her name but his handwriting was not particularly legible and so this made it appear as though her name was spelt wrong. The Sun certainly scored an own goal when they then went and spelt Mrs Janes's name wrong on their website's discussion board section. But they were guilty of misreading public attitudes and forgot that many of their own readers are illiterate or dyslexic and so their attitude towards Brown was offensive to them.

More recently, Labour received another boost when it transpired that the charity that had blown the whistle on Gordon Brown's reputed physical and verbal bullying of his staff happened to have Conservative patrons, who no doubt expected to benefit from this story breaking. Nothing like manipulating your position for political capital. It was just the small matter that by throwing the story out to the public domain, it compromised the confidentiality of the person that had reported the allegation in confidence in the first place. The public will have noted incidents like this, and as with the expenses scandal, will have concluded that all political persuasions are as corruptible as each other.

As speculated on above, the forthcoming election appears to have the makings of producing a Hung Parliament, with no one party in overall control, but with the Conservatives likely to have the most seats. Such a result would thrown open the possibility of a certain amount of horsetrading among all the main political parties on the key policy issues and in the short term, it could be the way to restore some political integrity. The Italian Government, however, is not a ringing endorsement for a coalition style Government, although that may be due more to the volatility of the Italian political culture than the weakness of the system.

The biggest winners though are likely to be the Nationalist parties. In times of trouble, people become naturally more insular and in both Wales and Scotland where devolved national Governments are in place and where Conservative votes are rarer than Iceberg lettuces, it is likely that the voters will show their disdain for the national Government by increasing the vote for Plaid Cymru and the SNP respectively. The nearest equivalent to a Nationalist party in England is the UK Independence Party, which is a watered down version of the BNP except without the membership restrictions. I was going to say without the racism, but given Nigel Farage's recent outburst about Belgium in the European Parliament, that may not be altogether true. Despite certain credibility problems, UKIP will attract a reasonable portion of the vote among Euro sceptics and there are places where they could come second in the count, although I would be surprised if they won any seats.

It is to be hoped that the forthcoming Prime Ministerial televised debates provide some opportunity for the triumverate of candidates to bare their teeth in a figurative sense, if not a cringeworthy, airbrushed poster campaign literal sense. People have suggested that Nick Clegg could be the lucky beneficiary from those debates as he has less to lose than messrs Cameron and Brown due to the lack of awareness there is in his existence by the British public. This lack of awareness was backed up this week by a survey in which more people were aware of the racehorses Kauto Star and Denman than they were of Clegg. A good story, although the papers that carried the story tended to gloss over the bit that said the survey was carried out by Ladbrokes, one of the UK's premier turf accountants. One suspects that Ladbrokes take more bets on popular racehorses than they do on the Liberal Democrats winning the General Election. The only difference between Kauto Star and Denman and the party leaders is that one of the latter is guaranteed to finish first past the post.

The death of Michael Foot a few weeks ago and the subsequent obituary columns were a timely reminder of how politics has changed. Foot was an honourable man, but an unelectable party leader, and yet he was a man who always put substance and principles over style. Looking at politics now, the philosophy has been turned on its head to the point that many politicians are reticent to actually stand up for what they really believe in because of the harm it could have on their ambitions. Despite being an aberration so far as being a prospective Prime Minister was concerned, Foot at least had honour. That is not a trait that has yet to be evidenced by the three princes who would be king.