This was an incredibly brave thing for Polly Toynbee to write and publish in today’s Grauniad (though I’m not sure she’d have seen it in those terms). As usual, I agree with most of what she says, and she makes some very fair points. I realise that the whole point of the way this piece was constructed required it to be published on the day of the Pope’s funeral, but I’m still not sure whether that was a stroke of brilliance or a great insensitivity. I know I wouldn’t have done it.

Altogether though, it is certainly worth reading, and presents the Pope in probably a much more accurate light than most of the fawning obitiuaries that are published when someone in a position such as his dies.

Clearly not having learned from the furore surrounding Jack Straw’s handshake, Prince Charles has now grasped the hand of Robert Mugabe. Considering his luck lately, the poor fellow was bound to make some diplomatic gaffe, and if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it properly.

That said, it’s clearly not the best of ideas for the future King to be aligning himself with such people, but I do have a degree of sympathy for Charles, since he really couldn’t do right in this situation. Had he followed Ronnie Richard Corbett’s advice…

This was a golden opportunity to deliberately and very visibly refuse to shake hands with this man. To fail to do so was, frankly, stupid.

…then I think this would have looked somewhat inappropriate at the funeral of one of the most respected men in the world – a very solemn event.

One MEP said, according to the Beeb, that this was “flagrant breach of the EU travel ban”. This person clearly wasn’t very well informed – as a memeber of the European Paliament, one would expect that he’d know about important agreements such as the Concordat, which allows Mr Mugabe to travel through Italy to reach the Vatican, which is an independent state.

So, for once, I’m going to stick up for Charles on this issue, since I think he probably did the only thing he could in the circumstances. Whether the circumstance should have been allowed to rise is another matter, but surely not one for the Prince.

Today’s swing figure:

» 4.88% swing to the Conservatives «

No huge change today, clearly 0.06 is well within the margin of error, but better that it’s a swing away from Blair than one towards him, I guess.

Today’s figure, which includes a slight refinement to the secret swinging formula…

» 4.82% swing to the Conservatives «

It’s a good day for Mr Howard as his lead increases and he reduces Mr Blair’s majority to about 60 seats. This is the level at which Mr Blair’s leadership would start to be questioned, since it would look like he’d done some serious damage to Labour’s share of the vote. We’ll see how this develops over the coming days…

I’ve just finished this book, and it certainly soars to levels far above anything else I’ve read lately. It has a wonderful central message, which is continually revisited and all brought together nicely at the end, and the quality and style of the language over hundreds of years is spot-on.

The book is essentially constructed of six smaller books, each interrupted at a crucial moment in their story – one even midsentence – and returned to again later. The story spans from the 1800s right through to a distant future, with each of the different small books being about a different time period, and written in the style of that time period. Because of this, the book could have been enormously gimicky, and been very poorly written, but it wasn’t. Mictchell clearly has the amazing talent required to construct such a story of such amazing ambition, and to transcend both styles and genres.

Whilst this is a marvellous book in itself, it reminded me of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller in several respects, especially since both are essentially collections of stories-within-stories. However, whilst Traveller was an excellent novel, Cloud Atlas is far more accessible, and much more of a populist novel that one can just sit down, read, and enjoy, whilst still maintaining a number of worthy themes and messages. This is accessible literature, but not a trashy Dan Brown airport read.

Cloud Atlas is a very clever novel; in fact, it is so clever that you end up forgetting just how clever it is, and just run along with the story. There aren’t many writers about who can achieve this delicate balance of being smart whilst resisting the temptation to show off and overshadow their own story. That said, I found the first 100 pages or so quite hard going, as I tried to get used to the format of being cut-off mid-flow with no immediate explanation, and leaping from Dan Brown to 19th century America is a fair leap. Still, once you get into this book, you won’t come out until you’ve finished.

I highly recommend this book, and if you haven’t already got a copy, I suggest you get hold of one (and there’s no better way of doing that than by using the new-style Amazon link to the right) and start reading, because you won’t be able to stop.

Election swinging, of course.

With all the polls about, it seems just about time to share with you my predictions, which are based on a wide number of polls and a patented (not really) formula I’ve created in order to predict the swing in the upcoming election. I intend to make this a regular-ish feature, because as new polls come out the figure will change.

So where does the swingometer lie today?

» 4.39% swing to the Conservatives «

So what would this mean for Mr Blair? Well the news wouldn’t be so bad, actually. He’d still be left with an overall majority of about 70, which wouldn’t be seen as such a bad defeat. And my local constituency would have turned Conservative, too.

I’ll do my best to keep you updated on how this changes as the polls change. But there’s every chance I’ll forget.

It’s still unfortunate the Blair doesn’t have the courage of his convictions necessary to stand up to a live TV debate before the election, but at least this will bring us something close – a special live edition of Question Time, in which the party leaders will all partake – but separately from each other. Since the same audience will be used for each party leader, it’s going to be something like a debate via third-parties, and the success of the event will depend completely on the order in which the party leaders appear.

Clearly, this whole event will be unfair if the leaders simply appear one after the other, with the first not able to respond to the accusations of the second, and so-forth. Mr Blair will end up going last, telling lies (like the big £35bn lie), and the Conservative leader will not have a chance to respond. That’s clearly unacceptable. There has to be an opportunity for the non-participants in each round to reply to any accusations made, or the whole thing is simply a farce.

Having said all of that, this is clearly a major election coup for the Beeb, and they should be very proud that they’ve managed to bring it all together. I’ll certainly be watching: 28th April, 8.30pm, BBC One.

Other good news from Auntie this week includes the fact that This Week is going twice-weekly, now appearing on Mondays as well as Thursdays. Good news indeed.

It’s my favourite kind of spam again… this time, purporting to be from Mr Anthony Blair himself:

If you have been keeping up with the news, you may already know that I went to the Palace a few minutes ago to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament.

What, no greeting? Well, anyway, yes, I did know that. But it was more than a few minutes ago. In fact, it was several hours ago.

I wanted to get this message out to you straight away about what’s at stake at the election and how you can help. This will be a tough campaign and we will have to fight for every seat and every vote.

Well you didn’t do very well on your ‘straight away’ target, did you? But then, what targets have you done well on? This will be a tough campaign, I quite agree – after all, most polls agree that Labour’s going to win, and it’s not going to be easy to get the necessary swing to stop them. We really do have to fight for every seat and every vote, you’re quite right.

We’re going to need the help of every Labour supporter – to distribute the leaflets, to talk to voters on the doorsteps and get on those phones.

I know much of the local party membership dislike Mr Blair, but would they really campaign against him? I think you’re being a bit optimistic, dear.

If you’ve never volunteered to help Labour’s campaign before, make this your first time. If you’re an old hand, we need you now more than ever.

Why would I want to volunteer to help Labour? Oh, I understand, you think I should sabotage the campaign from the inside. But isn’t that a bit of dirty politics? I guess we have to stoop very low, though, to beat a party which is a dab hand at cheating in elections.

For what’s at stake on May 5 is the future direction of our country – whether it goes forward or back.

I certainly don’t dispute that.

Labour hasn’t, by any means, achieved all we want yet.

After eigtht years? What have you been playing at, then? Launching illegal wars, and getting your knickers in a twist about keeping the fact they’re illegal secret?

And you may not agree with every decision I have made.

Too true.

But there’s been real progress in communities up and down the land.

What’s progress? Where exactly are you talking about?

Our country is fairer, more modern and successful than it was eight years ago.

Is the introduction of top-up fees by people who were paid to go to university fair? Is the inability to run an election free of blatant fraud modern? Does the fact that we have to cater to Brussels’s every whim make us successful?

And May 5 will decide whether we can build on – and accelerate – the progress made in spreading opportunity and prosperity.

What progress in spreading opportunity? Does providing young people with criminal records through ASBOs help their opportunities? And what’s this about prosperity? We’re worse off now than we were last year!

Or whether the Tories can succeed in taking Britain back to the failed and risky policies of cuts, charges and economic mismanagement.

Here we are again with the ‘Tories = Evil’ message, without actually making any firm promises of your own. Do you think the electorate don’t notice this?

Over the next five weeks, I will be out and about across the country spelling out that choice. And so will all my colleagues.

Oh dear God, please don’t come near here. And I’m sure you won’t be out and about that much, given you’re absence (until today) from your party’s homepage, and your unwillingness to engage in an open debate with the other party leaders. What is it you’re scared of, Mr Blair?

I hope to see you on the campaign trail.

I very much doubt that sentiment.

But if you have a question for me, you can visit the website labour.org.uk and let me know.

Hmm… How about, ‘What exactly was the full advice given to you by the Attorney General in advance of the Iraq War?’. Or how about, ‘Why did you present intelligence you knew was shaky as firm and concrete?’

I can’t promise to answer them all.

I’ll bet. It’d be something of a first if you actually answered any questions that weren’t to your liking.

But I’ll answer as many as I can throughout the campaign.

Carefully screened first, of course. In fact, why don’t you just make up your ideal questions, and answer them? It seems to be your PMQs strategy.

It’s less than five weeks now to polling day. Five weeks in which the future of our country is in our hands.

Very definitely.

We have a good story to tell.

Very true – a story of lies, deceit, and corruption.

Let’s go out and tell it.

Well, you see, I would, but every time anyone criticises your government, you launch a massive smear campaign that’s always full of blatant lies and often offensive to great swathes of the population, which rather creates difficulties for us.

Yours sincerely, Tony Blair

I doubt that very much – do you even know what the word ‘sincere’ means? And do you think anybody believes you actually write this political poop?

If that isn’t a cliché, I don’t know what is… but the point is that the Election is now officially underway. Don’t forget our special election page (sjhoward.co.uk/election2005) which has been online for some time now, and the accompanying election RSS feed.

Stick with sjhoward.co.uk throughout the election for partisan, biased, opinion-based election coverage.

This should be much more damaging that it has been for the Labour party – in the run-up to a general election, it has emerged that members of the Labour party have been involved in rigging a local election – this should be huge. Talk about a corrupt political party – you can’t get much more corrupt than actually rigging the vote. Tag on to all this Alan Milburn’s comment that he’d do anything to win the election, and it becomes a very big story indeed for one of the tabloids.

If only this had come out a week earlier, when we weren’t all so concerned with the Pope and the Royals, it could have done considerable – perhaps irrepairable – damage to the Labour campaign. Of course, Michael Howard can’t throw this particular mud at the PM without being made to look stupid for trying to extrapolate one local council election to the whole Labour party. Anyway, we’ll see what happens tomorrow, but I don’t think many will have a free front-page to sling it with.