Charles Kennedy, the most successful leader of the Liberal Democrats in many years, has been forced by his own MPs to resign as party leader, despite huge support by the party at large, and huge public support.

Charles admitted earlier in the week that he had openly and repeatedly lied about having a drinking problem. He called a leadership election so that the party membership could decide whether or not he should continue as their leader, and yet a cabal of MPs decided that the membership might make the ‘wrong’ decision, and so chose to announce that they wouldn’t serve under Kennedy, forcing him into resignation.

This is a great achievement by these rebel MPs: They’ve destroyed their most successful leader, split the party down the middle, alienated the party membership, and left the Lib Dems in turmoil going into the May elections. There can hardly be a more destructive thing to do, particularly when we’re seeing the Conservatives reviving and moving more towards the middle-ground which has traditionally been Lib Dem territory. And, just when David Cameron is repositioning his party as the different party avoiding ‘Punch-and-Judy politics’, the Lib Dems have successfully positioned themselves as the same back-stabbing, puerile idiots which turn the public off. Well done.

Having said all that, it was clear that Charles couldn’t continue as leader. Except in the world of The West Wing, you can’t openly lie about a serious medical problem, especially during an election campaign, and not expect it to come and destroy you at some point in the future. But would it really have been too difficult to convince him in private to resign, and hence avoid all of this mess and a big party split? There must have been a better way to deal with this: After all, it can’t have been handled much worse.

Even his resignation announcement has been badly handled. His statement, critical of the Parliamentary party, will now run in the Sundays, and again in the Mondays. That’s two days of Lib Dem bashing where it could have been just one had he announced yesterday or tomorrow. Whoops.

Who will replace him? Well, to be perfectly honest, there don’t seem any particularly startling candidates that spring to mind immediately. But then, Kennedy didn’t seem startling. He was the different, down-to-Earth ‘nice-guy’ of politics, which is what made him so popular in the party and in the country. We can only hope that his successor will be as popular, or the still-progressing era of three party politics will go into serious regression.

Having shown yesterday how terrible I am at making predictions, here’s one for 2006…

Patricia Hewitt will be forced to resign as Health Secretary before year’s end… or, if there’s a reshuffle, her sucessor will be forced to resign.  One way or another, we will see the resignation of a Health Secretary this year.

Let’s see if that’s better than last year’s prediction…

This story of members of miners’ families being told that they were alive, only for it to turn out that the information was wrong, and all but one had died, is clearly tragic, and my thoughts are with the family and friends of the dead.  But one small thing struck me: When it was falsely announced that the miners were alive, the assembled crowds thanked god.  When it was announced that a mistake had been made and the men were actually dead, they blamed the company.  I just thought that was an interesting disparity – make of it what you will.

Being the Prediction Expert – nay, Deity – that I am, I feel it’s my duty to share with you my one random prediction for 2006.  But first, let’s review what I said on January 4th 2005 – precisely one year ago today…

MSN is my ‘big tip’ for 2005… Google could be seriously threatened

Let’s all celebrate how wrong that prediction was… MSN has made big leaps forward since January 2005, but it’s not even close to challenging Google’s dominance in the search marketplace.  But as the Google behemoth is increasingly questioned by the internet community at large in the same way that Microsoft began to be questioned in the 90s, perhaps this is the moment for some other internet technology to break through and change the internet in the same way that Google did.  Indeed, business experts already report the beginnings of a second dot-com bubble.

Some say that citizen journalism will change the face of the web and the news media.  That, as far as I can see, is a load of bollocks.  Not to put too fine a point on it, of course.  But, frankly, idiots like me spouting ‘news’ and half-baked opinions and predictions (see above for example), however loud we shout, are never going to rival the newsgathering power of organisations like the Beeb.  Yes, quality citizen journalism brings a personal aspect to the news – you just have to read some personal accounts written by those caught up in th 2004 tsunami or the 7th July London Bombings to realise that.  But as more and more sites like mine spring up, where the uninformed essentially pontificate on the day’s news of which they are hardly informed themselves, the genuine wheat becomes harder to separate from the ever-increasing chaff, and the value of citizen journalism as a whole declines.

The blog is distinctly not the killer application of the web.  But what is? 

How the hell should I know?

I read today that the Government is considering electronically tagging parents who fail to pay child support (rather unfortunately phrased as ‘those dads who are not paying for their kids’, but let’s not get into that).  A simple question: Why?

The idea is to restrict the movements of people who don’t pay up.  How on Earth will that help?  Dad doesn’t have any money to give mum, mum doesn’t have any money, the child grows up in poverty.  What does tagging achieve?  Dad doesn’t have any money to give mum, dad’s movements are restricted and employability reduced so he has less chance to make some money, mum doesn’t have any money, the child grows up in poverty.

Yes, there are some parents who refuse to pay child support on principle.  But they’re already able to be sentenced to six weeks in prison.  Surely tagging is a lesser threat, and hence less likely to make people comply?  Of course, the politicians seem to be suggesting that it’s ‘easier’ to tag someone than to send them to prison.  Certainly for the CSA itself, it should make no difference, as a prosecution in a Court of Law is presumably needed for either, and given that tagging is supposed to replicate the loss of freedom in prison, surely a similar burden of proof is needed.

The CSA has never really worked properly in its entire history.  It currently costs £1 in administration for every £1.85 recovered, and that doesn’t include the cost of the prosecutions handled by the judiciary, which also comes from taxpayer’s pockets.  All in all, it probably costs more to recover the money than it would to just hand it out.  Even Mr Blair, who rarely dares admit such a thing, says it doesn’t do it’s job properly (though why it’s taken him eight years to find that out is something of a mystery). Can we not just put it out of its misery? 

Well, under a Labour government, probably not until they’ve come up with something even more bureaucratic to replace it.  Why not do the simple thing of handing the job over to the Inland Revenue and taking the money out of people’s pay packet directly?  Then there’s no chasing to be done, and far less administration, and far less chance of people failing to pay.  But then, that’s probably too simple a solution.

So, as from yesterday, we now have a choice of four hospitals for medical treatment.  Unfortunately, the computers aren’t working yet, so after referral, you will be sent a list of hospitals, you’ll reply with your preferred choice, that hospital will then be sent the referral, they’ll then put you on the waiting list.  So, going at typical NHS speed for the production of all those letters, and typical Royal Mail speed for delivery, that’s a good month between the initial referral and you actually being put on the hospital waiting list. 

Pat ‘crazy lady‘ Hewitt tells us this will make waiting times fall.  Probably by about a month, I’d guess.

From the MEN:

A NURSE who began preparing a “dead” patient for the undertakers when she was sitting up in bed alive and well has been thrown out of the profession.

A colleague pointed out she had got the wrong person, and Lelis said: “Oh yes. I got mixed up.”

The committee found that the “mistake” did not amount to misconduct, but they ruled that she should be struck off for making a series of other errors which did.

Those included carrying out a test for the killer bug MRSA – by swabbing the wrong part of a woman’s body.

She also put another patient on an oxygen because his nostrils were flared, although there was nothing wrong with his breathing.

The committee also heard how Lelis forgot to give a patient his medication – but then wrote up that she had the day after. She was caught out when she said she had given him a 150mg tablet, although they were only in 50mg doses.

Lelis was cleared of trying to offer a woman Paracetamol two hours after taking Co-Proxamol pills, which would have left the patient at risk of having a Paracetamol overdose.

That’s bad enough, but just read the comments from other nurses:

Staff in the NHS are rushed so much to meet targets etc and by patients to be seen to, there is bound to be mistakes!

Mistakes? A patient who is ‘sitting up alive and well’ being prepared for the undertakers is not a mistake many people would make however rushed they are to meet targets.

What a shame that aperson honest enough to own up to her mistakes has been judged so harshly by her own so called compassionate profession.

Honest enough to write up tablets she hadn’t given?

Everyone makes mistakes. Just because the mistakes of those in healthcare professions tend to have bigger consequences should not necessarily mean they are judged more harshly. We should forgive honest errors; but there is a line between mistakes and downright incompetence and dishonesty. If this press report is as it first appears (which may very well not be the case), then it seems that this nurse crossed that line.

John Spencer, the man who brought The West Wing’s Leo McGarry to life, died of a heart attack yesterday, aged 58. He would have been 59 on Tuesday.

For me, Spencer was Leo, the loyal Chief of Staff and Democratic VP nomination. The Associated Press notes that, in a sad parallel to life, McGarry also suffered a heart attack that forced him to give up his White House job as chief of staff. Like McGarry, Spencer was also a recovering alcoholic and – as he himself admitted – workaholic.

To Richard Schiff, who played Toby Ziegler, he was “one of those rare combinations of divinely gifted and incredibly generous. There are very few personal treasures that you put in your knapsack to carry with you for the rest of your life, and he’s one of those.”

Aaron Sorkin, who created the series, and Tommy Schlammem, one of the original executive producers, commented in a joint statement: “John was an uncommonly good man, an exceptional role model and a brilliant actor. We feel privileged to have known him and worked with him. He’ll be missed and remembered every day by his many, many friends.”

Actress Allison Janney, C.J. Cregg on the series, described Spencer as a consummate professional actor. “Everyone adored him,” she said.

“We have all lost a dear, dear brother,” said Bradley Whitford, who plays Josh Lyman.

MSNBC have a fairly lengthy tribute to their colleague, though it seems somewhat tasteless that they have already begun to speculate as to how this will affect The West Wing as a TV series. I’m certain that more full obituaries of Spencer’s life will be written by the British media as the news filters through tomorrow, as Spencer was such a well-loved, Emmy-award winning actor.

For such a talented actor and all-round good person to died at such a relatively young age is tragic, and my thoughts are with his friends, family, and colleagues. He will be very sadly missed.

Requiescat in pace

Joel Krupnik and Mildred Castellanos seem to have got quite annoyed at the commercialisation and secularisation of Christmas. And so they’ve come up with some, ahem, ‘different’ decorations:

[They have] decked the front of their Manhattan mansion this year with a scene that includes a knife-wielding 5-foot-tall St. Nick and a tree full of decapitated Barbie dolls. Hidden partly behind a tree, the merry old elf grasps a disembodied doll’s head with fake blood streaming from its eye sockets.

And their exact justification for this?

“Christmas has religious origins,” he said. “It’s in the Bible. Santa is not in the Bible. He’s not a religious symbol.”

Of course, whether or not Christmas has religious origins largely depends on your point of view. Even if you accept that the Christmas story is a religious basis for Christmas, the celebration is very much a Roman thing, instituted by the Emperor Constantine when he was converted to Christianity.

And either way, these decorations don’t really spread any Christian message… But I guess they are quite funny.

Who can resist Simon Hoggart’s description of Hilary Armstrong’s ridiculous behaviour at PMQs, and Cameron’s rebuke yesterday:

Hilary Armstrong, the Labour chief whip, started shouting, as she often does. She is the Commons’ bag lady, railing against anyone who hasn’t given her 20p. Mr Cameron broke off. “That’s the problem with these exchanges. The chief whip on the Labour side shouting like a child. Now, has she finished?” he yelled at her. “Have you finished? Right!”

It was a terrific coup de theatre.

I personally thought Cameron did extremely well at his first PMQs, and quite clearly left Blair flustered. I have to say, though, that I was far more impressed with his fantasically timed ‘absolutely’ when questioned about education reforms, than with his clearly rehearsed ‘You were the future once’. However, he certainly did much better than I had previously expected, and it makes his appointment all the more interesting.

Keeping with the Tories, but away from Camerson, The Grauny’s Wrap really amused me today, in relation to the Express’s response to Margaret Thatcher’s brief hospital admission:

The Express … front page, like the Mirror’s, is given over to Margaret Thatcher’s admission to hospital last night after complaining of feeling faint.

The former PM, now 80, is “stable and comfortable”, the Guardian reports, but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Express, while an unabashed fan of the Iron Lady, would prefer it if her condition was worse. A strap at the bottom of the front page, inviting you to turn to page five, tells readers that Baroness Thatcher was “weak and frail in last interview with the Daily Express.”

Whether this is technically correct in the sense that the Express intends to conduct no further interviews with her, a person normally has to die before you can start talking about the “last interview”.

You have to love the tabloids.