Nobody can claim that I haven’t given Dan Brown a fair crack at entertaining me. I’ve read The Da Vinci Coda, Angels and Demons, as well as Digital Fortress. And, at least as far as I can see, the best complement I can give the books is the one I first gave them: ‘irritatingly gripping tosh’.

Just like the other two, Digital Fortress is by no means deep, considered, or erudite. It’s a quick story, completely lacking depth, and riddled with predictability. The most irritating part of Digital Fortress was the final thirty pages, where the solution to the whole problem of the book was glaringly obvious, and yet apparently the most accomplished cryptographers in the world were unable to work it out. And, despite having earlier demonstrated an intimiate knowledge of other obscure chemicals like freon, they are unable to recall basic facts about the most famous of all elements. And for a miliatary organisation, there’s an awful lot of insubordination.

And why on earth would one build a dome to house a top secret computer that had both a see-through glass roof to allow any passing spy satellites to have a close look, and given that this computer could melt-down at any time, have no effective emergency exits? And why would a department housing the most accomplished cryptographers have physical security barriers protected with passwords rather than keys? It’s all a little bit bizarre. There are so many gaping plot holes, I often wondered if I was about to plunge into one never to be seen again.

Brown has clearly tried to throw in a little bit of interpersonal relationships into this novel, trying to give us confused signals about who loves who, and what’s going on in various romances. Instead, the whole thing ends up looking freakishly incestuous. And yet that angle is completely ignored.

The problem with the novel is that it is genuinely gripping, because you want to carry on reading to find out where the characters are finally going to catch up with the obvious. Have they not realised that every passing observation they make later plays a key role in a Dan Brown novel?

There’s really very little to recommend about Dan Brown. Unless you happen to be fans of both cryptography and the Catholic Church. Because even in a novel about NSA cryptography, there still has to be a moment of high drama in a Catholic Church. It feels like Brown is desperately trying to avoid dragging the church into it, but can’t quite resist. The only other thing to recommend is that it is extremely easy reading. You don’t need to engage your brain, there’s no complicated moral or philosophical puzzles posed, no deep meanings; you just let the words wash over your eyes. And try to resist the urge to scream out in frustration.

As I hope you’ll have gathered by now, this isn’t a book I’d particularly recommend. It’s not even an author I’d particularly recommend. But if you do feel the urge to read it, you can buy it ‘cheap as chips’ using the links on the right.

More Labour junk mail today, here’s what they have to say (the whole post won’t be in rhyming couplets, you’ll be glad to know, it’s just started that way).

Today we need you to help us keep the NHS free.

Why, when none of your opposition parties – not even the Monster Raving Loony Party – oppose that measure?

Michael Howard and the Tories want to bring in charges for hospital operations.

Woah, cowboy, that’s simply not true. In fact, the Tories want to cut the price of private operations. That’s not bringing in charges. That’s reducing them. I can see why your party would be confused, after all when you say ‘No tax rises’ you mean ‘Higher taxes’.

If elected the Tories say they will take over £1 billion from the NHS and put it into private healthcare subsidies for those who can afford to pay.

Correct-i-mundo, thereby reducing the capacity the NHS has to deal with, and thus reducing waiting times. You’re not against a bit of private help with the NHS are you? You introduced it, after all.

So if you can afford to go private you go to the front of the queue and pay a charge.

Wrong I’m afraid. You don’t go to the front of the queue, you go in a completely different queue, just as if I were to go private today. Or are you saying that all your constituents who choose to go to a private dentist instead of waiting for you to sort out the NHS situation – which, by the way, you promised to do by last year – are jumping the queue? Perhaps you’d like to publically denounce their actions, because this is clearly damaging the NHS if they’re jumping the queue – after all, that’d be seeing patients according to their financial situation and not their clinical need, which you claim to oppose. You can’t have it both ways.

But what about those who can’t afford to pay the Tory charges to go private?

They continue under the current system, but have less time to wait because those who can afford to do so now have an incentive to go private. So both sets of people get treated faster.

You go to the back of the queue.

No, no, no. I’ve already explained this. Are you a bit thick? You don’t go to the back of the queue, you go into a different queue altogether. Otherwise, if you’re going to use that terminology, we’re all at the back of the queue at the moment, except for the few who go private. But you’re trying to sell us the idea that you’re reducing waiting times and these queues are getting better. So is being on an NHS hospital waiting list a good thing, or is it ‘being at the back of the queue’? You can’t have it both ways. Well, actually, you probably can, since you can say you’ll oppose top-up fees and then go right ahead and introduce them anyway.

The costs are not peanuts.

No, but they are a lot lower than they are under your current administration. 50% lower, to be exact.

Take a look – costs to jump the queue:
Cataract removal £2,500
Hip replacement £6,650
Knee replacement £7,500
Heart bypass £11,500

Please pay attention! These are not costs to jump the queue. They are private healthcare charges. And you charge double those figures. So surely I should be smiling with delight to find that I can now get my hypothetical cataracts removed for £2,500 in a plush private hospital, whereas under Labour, I have to pay £5000. So what the heck is your point?

Britain faces a clear choice in 17 days, between those who support a National Health Service as envisaged by its founders – free at the point of use.

Well that’s a nice, if grammatically flawed, sentence.

And the Tories who would bring in charges for hospital operations.

Oh, there’s the other half. And you still don’t get it. Let’s use some boldness. The Tories will not bring in charges for hospital operations. That is a lie. They will reduce the cost of private operations that poeple pay under Labour. Whichever way you look at it, the cost of healthcare is reduced. It’s free to everyone, and if you choose to go private you no longer have to pay twice for your operation, because the portion you’ve paid in tax will be refunded.

Since 1997, our commitment to the NHS has provided record numbers of doctors and nurses and in a historic Labour third term we will continue our investment.

Or, indeed, in an historic third term. But every other party also advocates increased spending on the NHS. This is not a unique distinction of yours. It tells me nothing about how Labour policies differ from the policies of others.

The choice is clear: forward with reduced waiting times, better hospitals, more nurses and more doctors or backwards under the Tories to charges, long waiting lists and more than £1 billion being taken out of the NHS to subsidise private operations for the few.

The Tories will not charge for people to have NHS operations. I can’t believe you don’t get this. And if more people are encouraged to go over to the private healthcare system, how does that make waiting times longer? That’s a crazy thing to say. And, it’s a smaller point, but the Tories are not taking £1bn out of the NHS, they’re just not putting that £1bn into it.

It is not enough just to want the NHS to get better.

You mean sitting here saying ‘I want the NHS to get better’ won’t change anything?!

If you value the NHS, you have to vote for it.

Erm, that will be difficult, because the NHS is not a candidate in this election.

We need everyone who wants to keep the NHS free to sign our petition now and send Michael Howard a strong message that the NHS should be kept free.

Michael Howard has signed the petition, because he also wants the NHS to remain free. I’m sure Charles Kennedy would sign it too. So what exactly is the point of a petition, when everyone agrees on a similar position?

Sadly, no salutation from anybody on this, so I don’t know who wrote it. But whoever it was is either trying to deliberately mislead people (something Labour is intimately familiar with), or they’re just to stupid to understand other policies, and look at the merits of them. Either way, someone who’s attempted to ram a blatant lie down the throat of however many people this unsolicited email was sent to should resign. But then, in the Labour party, lying is encouraged, and is certainly not something one resigns over. Is it, Mr Blair?

When I say ‘we’, I don’t mean me specifically, not being Catholic, but you get the idea. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has been chosen as the first German Pope in almost 1,000 years, and the oldest in almost 100 years. Who says the church should be looking ‘forward, not back’?

If you’re expecting some deep and in-depth analysis of what Pope Benedict XVI will do for the church and the world, then you’re clearly not au fait with this site, and should probably browse the archives a bit more. What I will say, though, is that poor Rafael Behr from the Observer spoke a bit too soon earlier today…

It’s a quiet news day.

Oopsie. Having said that, it’s probably a good job he was under that impression, because otherwise I’d never have found out about this special flash animated non-profit eleciton message. Watch it and enjoy.

Google Local and it’s partner Google Maps are now available in the UK. As is Google SMS. It’s all very exciting.

I think most people have heard about this going on, but I certainly hadn’t seen the photographic evidence. Until I found this and this on ToryScum.com. And then there’s the endless fun you can have at Your own Conservatives poster, where you can make – well, I think it’s pretty obvious.

Despite all of this mocking, though, I think we have to give credit to the Tories for creating the most striking ads of any of the three major parties during this election. No-one’s talking about “We oppose / We propose”, you never hear much about Labour’s plethora of different kinds of poster (except when I’m telling you that most of them are wrong), yet “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” has wormed its way into the national lexicon.

Today’s swing figure:

» 1.54% swing to the Conservatives «

A pretty terrible day for Mr Howard today, then. Three new polls out, and his swing is reduced to just one-and-a-half points, which would give Labour a majority of 142 – a third landslide for Mr Blair. I think some brainstorming is urgently needed in the Conservative camp.

Today’s polls: FT/MORI have things 40/32 in Labour’s favour, Indie/NOP are on 37/32, and Times/Populus – which two weeks ago had them almost level pegging – has it 40/31 to Labour. There’s not much to report on the Lib Dem front, with them holding pretty steady, at 21 in all three polls.

Let’s hope Mr Howard can turn things around, or we’ll be having another government with an uncomfortably large marjority.

They’ve sent me some ‘News from Conservatives.com’. Let’s see what it has to say.

Conservatives have announced a £1.7 billion tax cutting package aimed at tackling the nation’s pensions time-bomb, and at repairing the damage done to basic rate taxpayers by Mr Blair’s pensions tax.

A bit of Labour-bashing there, but at least they’re actually announcing a policy, too.

Under the plan, the Government will add £10 to every £100 a person saves towards their pension pot. The aim is to encourage people of all ages to put more money into their pensions.

And, obviously, this policy reward those rich people who have lots to save with more money than the poor who have less to save. So the rich literally get richer, whilst the poor… well… don’t benefit quite so much.

The scheme will mean that for a person on average earnings, the relief across a working lifetime could boost their pension by up to £500 a year. It is expected that around 10 million basic and starting rate taxpayers will benefit from the tax relief immediately.

But the ‘pensions timebomb’ is less than a working lifetime away. So it isn’t really going to kick in properly until long after we actually need this cash. So, all-in-all, it’s good protection for the next generation of pensioners, but the one’s clocking off for the last time right now are in the poop, and need help now.

Speaking to Conservatives.com about the announcement, Mr Howard said: “When I meet people they often say to me “too many politicians are interested in the short term – tomorrow and next week, rather than ten years time. Today, we’re announcing a detailed, carefully considered and fully costed proposal to repair the long term damage done by Mr Brown’s pension tax.”

People he meets on the street are announcing proposals now?! Oh no, I see, he’s not quite got a command of punctuation yet. I don’t know who exactly it is that Mr Howard is meeting on the street, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say anything like that, in this consumerist buy-now-pay-later credit gobbling society.

He went on:

And on.

“Only by encouraging more people to save can we ease their anxieties about their long-term security and give our economy a brighter, better future.”

I’m not convinced that’s the only way to go about it. Compulsory saving would cut out the ‘encouraging’ middle man, and stop us ending up with penniless grannies who didn’t bother saving, who would end up getting support anyway, making the people who had bothered to save feel like muppets. But not Cookie Monster, because cookies are only a sometimes-food. Whereas these muppety feelings would be an always-annoyance.

The latest announcement is the second of the Conservative Party’s package of targeted tax cuts worth £4 billion.

I’m not entirely sure I call this a tax cut. It’s giving money away, not cutting tax. So that’s a little bit miselading.

Conservatives have already announced they will halve council tax for more than five million pensioners aged 65 or over in their first Budget.

But as the population shifts to have more people aged over 65, that’s going to mean that tax rates have to go up at some point to compensate. Once you give this kind of discount, you never get to repeal it, so this increases the burden of tax on the next generation, in order to reward the previous generation. A bad move. Far better would be to use this money to have a blanket reduction in Council Tax, which may only be relatively small, or to prevent council tax rises for a few years. Alternatively, you could of course swap to a local income tax, which (at least to me) seems like a far more sensible solution in the long run (though with its own inherent problems).

A third tax cutting announcement will be made later this week.

You are a little tease, Mr Howard, aren’t you… Are you trying to seduce me?

Conservatives believe that tackling the pensions crisis will be one of the key challenges facing the next Conservative government.

I don’t think I can disagreee with that.

Under Labour, the amount of money people save has fallen by more than a third.

But is that really Labour’s fault? Well, actually, I think it probably is, partially. They’ve helped to create the current economic climate, and so should take responsibility for the bad as well as the good. But that’s just my opinion.

Gordon Brown’s £5 billion a year raid on pension funds and the spread of means-testing have damaged pensions and savings.

I’m not sure they’ve actually damaged pensions and savings per se, but they’ve clearly damaged the image of them. Which, I guess, is effectively damaging the schemes in themselves. I’ll let them get away with that one.

Conservatives believe that the tax system should encourage people to save for the future – not penalise saving.

I don’t think any of the parties beleive differently to this, so the point is somewhat moot.

For me, the crucial difference between Labour’s (unsolicited) emails and the Conservatives’ (solicited) emails is that Labour’s have, thus far, been doing nothing but ridiculing the Tories. They have not used this, nor any of their other major campaign tools, to announce policies of their own. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have sent out this email to inform me of what they plan to do to improve pensions. Yes, there’s a little bit of Labour-bashing in there, and it’s not all necessarily warranted, but that isn’t the main thrust nor the main point of the email.

Which do we really want running the country? A party which rubbishes everyone else’s proposals whilst doing nothing about telling us its plans, or one (of two) that tries to come up with creative solutions to long-standing problems, and tells people about these? I know which I’d prefer, but at the end of the day, who you vote for is up to you, not me. But since you’re reading this, you’re clearly a voter of the highest calibre, and I’m sure you know what to do. What a wonderful personage you are!

Ros Taylor goes where countless others (even me), trying to work out exactly why it is that Mr Blair refuses to take part in a debate with the other two main party leaders.

But there’s even more to recommend about this particular page, because of this lovely anecdote from ‘Vioce 1’:

“Hands up all those whose parents will be voting Labour on May 5?” he asked. Every hand went up except one.

“What’s wrong with that poor child’s arms?” the Minister asked the teacher, while gesturing at my pal’s immobile daughter.

“Nothing to do with her health care, is it?” he whispered in rising panic, as he envisaged his photo opp turning into another government NHS trap.

“No, there’s nothing wrong with her arms,” teacher confirmed.

“You didn’t raise your hand, my dear,” said the relieved Minister. “Which party would you vote for?”

“The Scottish Socialist Party.”

“And why would you vote for them?” he mocked.

“Well, my dad says none of you are worth voting for, but he says if he did vote that’s who he would vote for, so I’d be a Scottish Socialist, too.”

“Well,” said the Minister, “that’s no reason for you to vote for the SSP. You don’t always have to be like your parents. I mean, what if your mum and dad were thieves and vagabonds, you wouldn’t be a thief and a vagabond, too, would you?”

“No,” she agreed. “I’d be voting for you.”

I do love that kind of story.

Today’s swing figure:

» 2.51% swing to the Conservatives «

A good day for Labour today, with a couple of polls out to give the Conservative swing a bit of a battering. An ICM/Mirror/GMTV poll has things at 41/33 in Labour’s favour, while Telegraph/YouGov has it 36/33. YouGov have the LibDems on a fairly even upward course at the moment, currently at around 23, which is five points up on 2001 – far better than either of the two big parties are doing. And even though YouGov are the only pollsters to have them on a continuous up, every one of the most recent polls from the six big pollsters have them up on their 18% share of 2001.

Compare this to the Conservatives, who are only a couple of points up on 2001 at best, and Labour who, until today, had been down in every poll going. If the trend continues, the Lib Dems could easily win an extra ten seats, which is quite impressive for a party of their size.

At the moment, it looks like Labour are going to hold on to a three-figure majority, though. Which is not what I wanted. You know what’s needed. A ‘Simon Election Broadcast’. Cancel one of the PEBs, no-one’ll notice, and stick me on instead. That’ll sort it. 😉

Blackadder is coming back. I feel a strange sense of dread at this news, because I worry that one of the best comedy series ever made could be ruined by a final poor quality series seventeen years after the last series ended. Look at Back and Forth: Yes, it was a reasonably amusing one-off, but it certainly wasn’t up to the standards of the originial Blackadder. I suppose we can only hope they don’t make a hash of it.