Wednesday 8 December 2010

When leaking gets boring

I am bored of Wikileaks. I am bored of Julian Assange (who, I have to admit, for a long time I thought was called Julian Le Singe inducing images of Monsieur Lavisse trying to coax a monkey from a tree in Cours IllustrĂ© de Francais livre 1). I really don’t know what the organisation’s current campaign is all about or what it is trying to achieve. None of the revelations are actually that revealing. Today’s release of cables relating to the release of the Lockerbie bomber tell us nothing new, although they do underline that the American administration didn’t understand devolution which isn’t so terrible, most of the UK media don’t get it either. No big cover ups have been uncovered, no allegations of torture have been made, no plots have been made public. All we have learnt over the past couple of weeks is that American diplomats send back frank reports on all manner of meetings to the State Department. Well, I should hope so – it is part of the job. They should absolutely be free to report as they wish. What we don’t want to encourage is a culture of secrecy in which nothing is committed to paper and entered into the formal record and people rely instead on conversations. This does not make for good government - a goal I believe I share with Wikileaks and Mr Assange.

Tuesday 7 December 2010

Put me out of this Widdie nightmare . . .

I breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday evening. Ann Widdecombe was finally knocked out of Strictly. She was truly dreadful – incapable of dancing, unable to keep the beat and not a ounce of humility, no recognition that better dancers than her (that is everyone else) were being eliminated. The woman can’t dance and I didn’t find her entertaining. But you know what I held my tongue. But, I can do so no longer. The first testing on my patience came on yesterday’s Today programme. It wasn’t Jim Naughtie’s spoonerism that offended me but his piece about 20 minutes later about Widdecombe leaving the show. We were “treated” to 1 min 32 of puffery, ending with the words “delightful”. When was it decided that Ann Widdecombe was a national treasure? I don’t remember being asked. I would have campaigned against. Apart from her disservce to the world of dance, let us not forget that she is a climate change denier, consistently voted against equal rights for homosexuals and when a minister order female prisoners to be shackled to their beds during labour. Stephen Fry she ain’t. Won’t someone please make her exit stage right?