I have absolutely no doubt about the main duty of any prime minister: it is to do everything possible to protect the security of our nation and its citizens.

…there is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack.

I couldn’t disagree with Tony Blair more. If we start making this the ‘greatest’ civil liberty, then the logical conclusion is surely to live in a police state. And a PM should certainly not do everything possible to protect its citizens: He should do only what is necessary and prudent, balancing the possibility of danger to citizens against the restrictions of freedom which must be imposed in order to protect them.

I find it very worring that we have a PM who wants to take all possible steps to protect the country, and it’s not a policy I could ever support.

I’ve got my results from the January exams today. Unfortunately, a general mix-up with the exam papers means that a number of questions had to be taken off the paper, meaning that I only have results in the ‘What’ and ‘How’ strand. (The three strands, all of which must be passed, are ‘What the doctor is able to do’, ‘The doctor as a professional’, and ‘How the doctor approaches practice’)

I’m very pleased to say that I received ‘S’ in both strands – that’s ‘Satisfactory’, which means I passed! Hooray! So I’m very happy.

This is worth a read: I certainly had no idea this kind of thing was going on.

The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq that military action could be ruled illegal.

The government was so concerned that it might be prosecuted it set up a team of lawyers to prepare for legal action in an international court.

And a parliamentary answer issued days before the war in the name of Lord Goldsmith – but presented by ministers as his official opinion before the crucial Commons vote – was drawn up in Downing Street, not in the attorney general’s chambers.

This shouldn’t play well for Mr Blair, but it probably won’t make much difference in the long run. Nobody trusts what he has to say over Iraq, and facts like these shouldn’t make much difference to the general election result.

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said the government’s position had been seriously undermined. “The substance of the attorney general’s advice, and the process by which it was partially published, simply do not stand up to scrutiny,” he said.

Sir Menzies added: “The issue is all the more serious since the government motion passed by the House of Commons on March 18 2003, endorsing military action against Iraq, was expressly based on that advice.”

He continued: “The public interest, which the government claims justifies non-publication of the whole of the advice, can only be served now by the fullest disclosure.”

I don’t really see how publishing the advice would serve the public interest, but I think that hiding it is against the public interest. So, in that sense, I think Mr Blair should come clean and publish the full advice. But he almost certainly won’t.

From today, I’m helping to turn the web red as part of the run-up to Red Nose Day. I hope that my readers will contribute to the campaign – contrary to how the top-right of the site looks at the moment, I don’t support every campaign going! I support Comic Relief as I believe they are experts at both raising lots of money and then distributing it wisely. I have supported them for many years, including on previous incarnations of this site. Don’t worry – everything will be back to blue again right after March 11th (except for the MakePovertyHistory ribbon, which is staying all year).

Buckingham Palace said “this is not a snub” and added it was because “the prince and Mrs Parker Bowles wanted to keep the occasion low key”.

There’s low key, and then there’s your mum not coming. I don’t think the former and the latter are equivalent. But for some reason I can’t explain, this story has really been making me chuckle. Maybe I’m just very mean.

You just have to love this picture of the beautiful bride, though. Not the kind of picture you’d normally see just days after the royal couple have announced their engagement – I’d normally be expecting really nice pictures, at least until after the wedding. But this should clearly be captioned “Ahhhh! The hand of doom!”. Or something like that, but wittier.

I particularly like this comment:

Historian Dr David Starkey said “one can only speculate on the reason” behind the Queen’s decision.

“It could be security, that she doesn’t approve, or that she doesn’t care – a position which would unite her with the majority of her subjects,” he added.

I was dismayed to read of Tony Blair being harassed by a member of The Wright Stuff audience on Five.

This is becoming almost a common occurrence — the hostile and cynical TV audience who haven’t a good word to say about anything the Prime Minister does.

I was at the inauguration of President Bush in Washington in January, and the contrast could not be starker. Some 265,000 people on the National Mall saw his swearing in and there was no booing, no slow hand-claps, no irate members of the general public demanding to have their say.

Americans, whether Democrat, Green or Republican, respect the office of the President and the scenes on The Wright Stuff would simply be unthinkable in the US, a nation that falls in line behind its President.

My question for Des Brown: Are you suggesting that challenging the leader in an open forum is a bad thing?

I didn’t see The Wright Stuff, but I did see Talk to the Prime Minister, and I have to say that it did occur to me that the programme was anything but balanced in terms of the selection of speakers. Just a few years ago, this would have been unthinkable – there would doubtless have been comparatively little criticism of the PM.

Yes, we should respect the office of Prime Minister, and perhaps we don’t do this enough. But we shouldn’t end up in an American situation, where to criticise the incumbent President is seen by a large sector of society as unpatriotic criticism of the country as a whole.

I think we are priveledged to be able to broadcast programmes like this, where we see the PM defend himself against the criticisms of the masses, and I think that this should, for the large part, be celebrated, not criticised.

Libby Purves has had an interesting thought on health care:

The Human Race has a long history of worrying about the wrong thing, then looking back decades later in disbelief at the way it missed the point. There was a time when religious parents fretted so much about encouraging base animal nature that they would not let their babies crawl like beasts, but strapped them in upright walkers for decency’s sake; yet all the time the same poor brats were being poisoned by laudanum and stifled by corsets. Victorian England worried more about sin than gin. Early-20th-century consumers, while providing a vast market for useless “nerve foods”, calmly accepted advertisements which claimed that “Most doctors smoke Craven A” and declared tobacco a health benefit.

So an open mind should ask the question: which danger to health and society do we ignore now? We do not go short of scares, from mobile phones to trans-fats. But what are we missing?

I’m not sure I agree with her conclusion that television is the missing idea, but it’s certainly worthy of consideration: What are we missing?

My problem with the government’s anti-terror plans as they stand, including the (unnecessary) proposed new legislation, is that it focuses on attacks as they have happened in the past.

If I were a terrorist (interesting concept – as someone who’s not particularly relgious, what would I be fighting for?), then I’d be thinking that huge terrorist attacks such as 9/11 and the Madrid train bombings have been done. People are already scared of these things, which (I would imagine) are difficult to co-ordinate, and potentially subject to being reasonably easily stopped if the plans are uncovered. So I wouldn’t do that kind of attack.

Imagine instead the massive psychological damage which could be caused to nations across the globe if, for example, a series of comparatively minor attacks were co-ordinated to occur simultaneously in towns across the US and UK. Nobody would feel safe anywhere. It would be a massive psychological blow, and would also be relatively easier to co-ordinate. All that would need to be communicated to local operatives would be a chosen time and date, and then those operatives could simply plan something to happen at that time – even something as simple as arson or a small explosion, with no need for any illegal materials or specialist equipment or knowledge that might pick up a security service tracking. Imagine: Burning or exploding shopping malls, for example, across the small towns of the UK – those small towns where the people feel safest. That would cause true terror.

Of course, the problem with this idea is that extremeist groups, by nature of their very extremity, would never be able to recruit enough people to make this the truly terrible event it could be. I suppose, due to the smaller nature of the area, the UK could be targetted in this way, but the US is just too big a place to recruit enough people to get the density of small-scale attacks which would be necessary.

So my problem here is that the UK Government seem insistent on protecting the big institutions, like Parliament and the capital as a whole, but that isn’t where the greatest threat lies, because a massive and fundamentally more damaging attack than 9/11 could very easily be co-ordinated without raising many, if any, red flags with the security services. The Government need to think outside the box, and a law to allow people to be detained in their homes doesn’t help that: Whilst it could stop a 9/11 style attack, it couldn’t even begin to stop a terrorist attack such as that I’ve described. And, as we’ve seen on 9/11 through the transformation of passenger jets to effective guided missiles, the terrorists can be far more creative than the spooks.

It’s almost at the stage where we can say ‘another day, another poll, but at least this one contains some good news: The gap is closing between the Conservatives and Labour, and hence Labour’s potential majority is beginning to slide. Why Michael Howard is getting such good ratings when his policies are so abhorrent is beyond me, but since it’s working in my favour right now I’m not going to complain. Once the campaign starts and the Lib Dems get a bit of a boost, we could easily see a rough three-way split in the popular vote, which I personally think would make the kind of Parliament which is needed right now.

This election certainly seems to be getting interesting as time goes by now, after that brief period where it seemed that nothing was happening and that Labour were going to walk this election with a huge majority and not much of a challenge.

Interesting, too, to see that floating voters (I do dislike that term) greatly prefer Gordon Brown. There’s no way Mr Blair could survive anything near a full third term if he’s seen as doing great damage by leading the party into a less than hugely successful general election, so we might well see him resigning sooner rather than later – though he’ll doubtless put it down to his health.

It will be fascinating to see how this all plays out over the coming weeks.