Given the slightly silly way in which Mrs Blair has had to be included in the recent trip by the Prime Minister to the USA, with the two just ‘co-incidentally’ being in the US at the same time on different trips, and Mr Bush just ‘happening’ to invite her along, would it not seem logical to formalise the arrangements and have an official role for the Prime Minister’s spouse, a role on which they could be elected alongside their husband rather than just happening into a job of such power?

Even the Prime Minister’s Spokeswoman agrees with the general idea that Mrs Blair is an important stateswoman: After all, earlier today, when asked why Mrs Blair was introduced to the President by Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Washington DC, she responded that this was normal for

any prominent British citizen visiting Washington DC

I might be overanalysing this, but my dictionary defines prominent as ‘conspicuous in position or importance’. As far as I am aware, Mrs Blair has no official elected position, and certainly no formal importance.

I have no ideological problem with the Prime Minister’s spouse taking a bigger official role – I think that a First Lady style position could be very useful in some circumstances – and I think Mrs Blair is given an exceptionally bad press in this country for no good reason. But to take a bigger role means that they will no longer be able to hide behind the ‘privacy of the family’ excuse when things get tough. Mrs Blair simply cannot have it both ways: She cannot be both a stateswoman and also free from accountability. She has to take one with the other. And if she does, then good luck to her.

Gideons International recently asked Leicester NHS Trust if it could put Bibles into patients’ bedside lockers. The hospital responded that they would like some time to investigate whether or not there was a possibility that having the same Bible there for each occupant might pose an MRSA risk. To me, that seems a sensible request.

Iain Mair, executive director of Gideons International UK doesn’t think it’s sensible:

They are saying there’s a potential MRSA risk, and we say that is nonsense

I’m not sure what expertise Mr Mair has in the field of infection control, but I’m fairly convinced that he doesn’t have quite the same qualifications as the Trust’s Infections Control team. He claims that Gideons International have commissioned reports from consultants to disprove the theory. Surely there would be little point in commissioning such research if he is not then going to allow the Trust to examine the research prior to reaching a decision on the matter?

The tabloids have become (predictably) become angry about a ” hospital plan to ban Bibles” recently. Despite the fact that there is, as yet, no such plan. But that’s not the kind of thing that’s stopped them before. Other papers called it ‘tantamount to banning the Bible from NHS wards’. That’s obviously not true either.

The Leicester NHS Trust also wish to take time to consider whether allowing the provision of these Bibles would appear as the Trust favouring one religion over another. Which is a fair enough thing to consider. Unless you’re Iain Mair, in which case…

It’s political correctness gone mad.

It would clearly be impractical to have a whole library of religious books supplied to each patient. And yet, I wonder if Mr Mair would think it ‘PC gone mad’ if all patients were to be supplied with copies of the Koran, and, along with his plan, given advice that ‘other religious texts are available’.

The Trust wants to investigate the possibility of tracking which patients have come into contact with which texts, so that potentially infectious ones could be removed from circulation. That seems fair, if something of an invasion of privacy. The best solution, as I see it, would be to make patients aware that religious texts were freely available to take away and take home. That way, the religious texts get further than just being something to read when you’re bored in hospital, and the infection problem is essentially overcome.

I’m sure the Trust will come up with a solution that will be appropriate to all parties. Although, frankly, I’d be rather less inclined to help when Gideons International want to make such a fuss over such a small issue. But that’s probably just me.

Anybody who follows the news will know that Newsweek recently made the slightly absurd claim that a soldier at Guantanamo Bay had flushed the Koran down the toilet. Clearly, they didn’t think through the physics of the situation, and evidently later had to retract the story. The official White House line was that Newsweek had done ‘lasting damage’ to the US image in the Muslim world. Given that the Pentagon have now released details of incidents at Guantanamo Bay where guards kicked, wrote obscenities in, and threw water and splashed urine on copies of the Koran, this frankly makes the White House look plainly and openly vindictive.

Before condemning Newsweek, the White House must surely have looked into the case to confirm it wasn’t true. And in the course of that investigation, these other incidents must surely have cropped up. And yet the White House has the audacity to condemn not the soldiers who have abused the Koran, and by association the Muslim world as a whole, but Newsweek. Even though the central message of the story – that the Koran was being mishandled – was effectively true. It’s not even that difficult to see that the ideas of covering something in urine and that of flushing it down the toilet are not that far removed from each other, and could easily become confused in translation.

The Newsweek story caused riots across the Muslim world, and thus indirectly led to the deaths of at least fifteen people in Afghanistan. Does the White House really believe that these people were protesting because of the particular details of the Newsweek story, or does it believe that the riots were caused by the US’s lack of respect for other cultures? Or does the White House no longer hold any true beliefs, other than belief in the supremacy of the US and US citizens?

Of course, this action is not a million miles removed from our own Andrew Gilligan incident, whereby he reported that the Dodgy Dossier had been ‘sexed up’. Effectively, it had. And yet, for tripping up on the details – in this case, misrepresenting the position of David Kelly – Gilligan and the Beeb were condemned. Yet the story was basically true.

Is it right that administrations should cover their embarrassments by ridiculing the relatively minor errors of others? The argument can be made that the media are forever condemning politicians for minor slips and lexical errors. But, in my mind at least, this does not mean that they can do the same to the media. Politicians, whether they like it or not, are quite rightly held to a higher standard. They have to prove to us that they are worthy of leading the country, and that they have the moral standing necessary to lead a country morally. To refuse to admit to a wider problem because of small errors in accusations – indeed, to ridicule the person who made those accusations – is neither moral nor open.

And to think, politicians wonder why the public don’t trust them.

Just days after the French rejected the EU constitution, the Dutch have done the same. Not that it was much of a surprise. Mr Juncker, President of the EU, is obviously not happy. The Beeb says

Mr Juncker seemed so distressed that he could hardly take in the fact of the second “No” vote. The mood in Brussels is deep gloom.

I’ve never really imagined Brussels as a happy place anyway. But maybe that’s just me.

Last time I wrote about this, when the French rejected the Constitution, I couldn’t come up with a viable solution to get around this impasse. Now I’ve come up with one. And it’s remarkably simple: Separate out the Constitution from the Treaty. Make the Constitution a short statement of self-evident rights and truths – which one would expect to be in a Constitution – and then have a separate treaty with all the legal eagle stuff in it. Then you can treat the Treaty as a Treaty, reforming it and remolding it over time until you eventually find the right mix, and the Constitution should sail through and easily be ratified by all twenty-five countries.

To the papers… The Guardian still appears to be mourning the loss, though it’s overcome its initial anger: “Crushing defeat leaves EU vision in tatters”; it also appears to think we’re “facing the prospect of a protracted period of recrimination, conflict and crisis”; The FT is somewhat less emotional: “Europe in turmoil as the Dutch vote No”.

Judging by the state of The Guardian, you’d expect The Indy to be in floods – and yet. whilst it’s clearly not a happy chappy (“The Netherlands has delivered a crushing “no” vote on the European constitution and plunged the EU into a crisis of confidence unprecedented in almost five decades of European integration”), it does at least seem to be looking forward, rather than excessively wailing over spilt milk.

I’m really quite surprised at The Guardian’s reaction to all of this, and for the first time in a long while feel slightly alienated by it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this degree of apparent grief, bordering on depression, from a national newspaper – and particularly not the Guardian. It’s so far gone that it’s bordering on parody – I almost expect to see the Constitution get a full page obit.

So where will things go from here? It’s hard to say, because this is European politics, in which logic seems to play no part. After a brief period of depression, the politicians will just have to regroup and see where they can take us. They’ll probably try redrafting a bit, and trying to get it past the countries again. And failing. And then they’ll have to do something pro-active, like reconsider the need for a Constitution and what should be in it. And then we might just get somewhere.

It turns out that the Make Poverty History white bands on the wrists of everyone who’s into such things at the moment has been made in factories which break Chinese working conditions law, as well as the standards of the Ethical Trading Initiative. Mainly because it uses forced labour and pays less than the minimum wage. Oops.

From The Grauniad:

A Cafod spokesman said: “We are disappointed this situation has arisen. However, we are now engaging with the supplier to improve conditions within the factory. Under the Ethical Trading Initiative standards, when we find out a supplier isn’t in line with those standards we don’t just pull away. We attempt to engage with the supplier and work with that supplier to improve conditions so they are in line with the Ethical Trading Initiative standards.”

Personally, I prefer this from The Indy:

“We were stupid,” said Dominic Nutt at Christian Aid. “We didn’t check it out, Cafod didn’t check it out, and Oxfam didn’t check it out.”

Really, though, this is the kind of thing you’d hope these charities would look into before they order tens of thousands of items. You’d think it would just be part of their day-to-day practice, to check out companies before ordering from them. But, to give Oxfam credit, whilst they ordered 10,000 wristbands from the affected factory, they haven’t sold these. It doesn’t really make much difference, because presumably the factory will still be paid, but I guess there’s not much more they could do in the circumstances.

Also in the Make Poverty History circle today, Bob Geldolf has been announcing the details of the Live 8 concert he’s planning for five weeks from now. Whilst it’s admirable that so many stars are coming together in this massive event for charity, I don’t understand the point of it. It isn’t being used to raise money, it’s supposed to serve as a message to politicians. Which I don’t understand. After all, people are not going to see these concerts because they support the cause, they’re going to turn up and tune in to see the celebs – so it’s going to send no greater message than that the public like pop acts. Which I think we already know. So what’s the point?

Surely, a more logical thing to do would be to ask people to amass at the stadia without any incentive, but simply to try and persuade politicians. This would not only spare the people of Edinburgh the descent of a million people on their city, but it would also actually send a message. The small problem being, not many people would go.

With fifty-five percent of the French voters giving the EU consitution the thumbs down, many of today’s papers are using words like ‘crisis’, ‘confusion’ and ‘fear’ today. There’s even talk of ‘huge’ margins, which seems a bit over the top. Even The Indy, which declared on Saturday ‘The significance of this poll lies in the campaign, not the result’, gets its knickers in a bit of a twist. Though it does seem to accept the result of this referendum, unlike Tony Blair’s victory in the General Election. Nobody seems to even mention the 70 percent turnout, and ask what it is we could learn from this. If we Brits have a referendum, I’d be surprised if fifty percent of voters bother to vote.

The Guardian has Europe stunned by the result, and its wesbite has Tony Blair calling for a time of reflection. This combination makes it sound rather like somebody’s died. They even seem to be progressing through the various stages of grief: We’ve had denial all this week, while they’ve been clinging on to the hope that a ‘Yes’ vote might just happen, and today we appear to have moved on to anger:

France’s no is highly damaging to the credibility and popularity of the EU, already in very poor shape as shown by the record low turnout in the European elections last summer.

You evil French people… You’ve let the EU down, you’ve let Chirac down, but most of all you’ve let yourselves down.

The Telegraph is obviously pleased that the vote has gone their way, and they’ve done the predictable thing of printing a picture of a smiling Chirac casting his ballot.

The Mail’s position can be summed up by saying that it’s the fifth headline on their website, just below “Rod’s daughter steps out with stepmum’s ex” and two Big Brother headlines. Despite the fact that today’s print edition says Big Brother has ‘reached new levels of debauchery’.

So what does all this mean for the future of the Constitution? Well, pretty much what we’ve all known for weeks. It’s not going to get very far without some redrafting. Which is incredibly predictable: You won’t get hundreds of millions of people of different countries and cultures to agree to a 400-page document easily. And, to be perfectly honest, I’d be surprised to see it happen at all.

It’s clear to anybody that the EU isn’t working, and is in need of reform. But the reason it isn’t working is because it’s tried to become something it never intended to be in the first place – so the foundations are not appropriate. And to wait until there are twenty-five members and then try and negotiate a new set of firmer foundations seems rather silly. Yet this is the situation in which we find ourselves, and there’s not an awful lot that can be done to change the past. So, where do we go from here? I don’t know. It would be impossible for the EU to break up completely, because some of the bonds are too strong. Piecemeal reform of existing agreements wouldn’t solve the overall problem. So it looks like we’re stuck with what we’ve got for now, with all of its quirks and inconsistencies. The existing treaties may not be a practical way to manage the newly enlarged EU, but, at the end of the day, when has European politics ever been straightforward and practical?

…as the French go to the polls in their referendum on the EU Constitution. My jokes never improve on this site, do they?

For all the coverage of the vote in today’s Sundays, there seems little point in commenting until the decision is made and announced. But, hey, this is a comment site so I feel somewhat obliged. The Grauniad website has published a 7pm update, as most of the polls across France close. It looks fairly clear that this is going to be a ‘Non’ vote, unless everyone has followed this voter’s lead:

Katia Volman, a 22-year-old student, left her ballot blank, saying the issues were too complicated to fully digest. “I had so many reasons to vote yes or no so I left it blank and that way I won’t regret my decision two days later,” she said.

Shortly afterwards, she returned herself to her usual wooden box, which she locks herself in night and day, claiming that the world is too complicated and she doesn’t want to do anything in life that she might later regret. The reason being that she wants Edith Piaf singing ‘Je ne regrette rein’ at her funeral. Or perhaps I’m just being cruel.

The Sindie says much the same thing; the Torygraph manage to write a full article on the referendum without mentioning Tony Blair, which is fairly impressive, even in their Q&A about what will happen if the French vote ‘Non’. At the other end of the spectrum, the first word in the Times’s article is ‘BRITAIN’.

Other newspaper websites lead on clearly much more important stories than the future of Europe: ‘Has Cilla been jilted for a young blonde?’ – The Mail; ‘Posh and Becks [sic] bubbly boozathon’ – The Mirror; and ‘Huntley’s devil woman’ – The Sun.

I also nearly forgot to mention that the Guardian has a rather exciting game, to explain the various different possible outcomes of the referendum, on it’s website. Exciting, of course, if you like that sort of thing. Which I’m not ashamed to admit I do. Well, a little bit ashamed, I guess.

When trying to decide what exactly the document Lord Goldsmith produced and put before the House of Commons before the vote on the War in Iraq actually was, it would seem sensible to consult it’s author directly. Not surprisingly, when the Daily Telegraph interviewed him earlier this week, they did, and received the following response:

I never said it was a summary.

Except, if we flip back to November 2003 in Hansard, then he was, erm, saying it was a summary:

This statement was a summary of my view of the legal position

So he did say it was a summary, whether he likes it or not.

To provide you with a summary of my own: When the full document was secret, his document was a summary; Once the full text was released and everyone could compare, it suddenly wasn’t a summary. Funny, that.

We know that the Blair government likes massaging the facts a little, but here he’s on record as directly contradicting himself. He’s absolutely doubtlessly proven as lying. Yet, far from resigning, he hasn’t even been sent out into the frenzied world of the media to apologise, or even clarify his comments. And all of this from a government which promised to be ‘whiter than white’.

If we were observing a developing nation with a government that was lying about the process of deciding about launching an internationally condemned war, not only would we have a few nasty things to say about said government, but there would be those in our government who would want military action taken against it. And yet when it’s people in their own government doing it, they don’t seem to mind quite as much. Talk about double-standards.

There’s a very sobering piece in today’s Independent, with regard to an investigation they’ve conducted into recruitment of medical staff from abroad – particularly Ghana.

At the main Komfo-Anokye hospital in [Kumasi, Ghana] … Hundreds of patients besiege the accident and emergency unit each morning, staffed by a single doctor and a handful of nurses, and serving a city of more than one million.

A critical shortage of medical staff who have been lured away to work in hospitals in Britain and the US is crippling Ghana’s health service. The rich countries of the West are systematically stripping the developing world of their doctors and nurses in one of the worst acts of global exploitation in modern times.

The hospital is in a critical state … Almost 1,000 nurses and 150 doctors have left Ghana for the UK in the past six years, and the flow is accelerating. Hundreds more have gone to the US, Australia and other countries in a mass migration fuelled by the worldwide demand for medical staff.

At 3pm on a Thursday, there were still more than 100 people waiting to be seen in the accident and emergency unit crammed on to the blue benches under a high roof. A young man stripped to the waist lay full length on the concrete floor, unattended, victim of a mob beating after he had been caught pickpocketing.

As I stopped to talk to Ajala, the mother of Fawuzani, a bright-eyed six-month-old boy with a fractured skull, the injury clearly visible in his misshapen scalp, others crowded round thrusting X-rays at me, begging me to examine their children. A young mother in a red T-shirt pushed her son forward who had large swellings on his head which she described as boils. Another woman with pleading eyes stood her four-year-old in front of me and lifted his T-shirt to reveal a grotesquely swollen scrotum.

The whole article makes for very moving reading, and it seems to suggest that this government’s present policies on not recruiting from countries where the medical staff are desperately needed is simply not working, and clearly needs to be re-examined. But, of course, refusing to hire such staff severely limits their individual prospects in life – surely it is only fair to allow these people to get the best job for the best pay of which they are capable of obtaining.

Clearly, in an ideal world, we would pay medical staff in Ghana the same as in Britain through our international aid budgets, but that’s simply not a practical solution as it would obviously be far too prohibitively expensive – we can’t even seem to afford a decent wage for some nurses in this country! The other ‘ideal’ solution is to create enough medical staff to cover our own needs – but that’s unlikely to happen too, as we’re not training enough, and people perceive many medical jobs to be unattractive. So what is the solution? I can’t think of one… but surely our elected representatives, supposedly some of the greatest minds of their generation, should be able to…

I know editors have it tough when there’s not much to report, but today’s Mail is so unintentionally hilarious that I feel the urge to share it with you.

Page 2 has a big mug-shot of Littlejohn (apparently not a recent one), and a report that he is rejoining the Mail. Somehow, they completely fail to mention that he’s joining them from The Sun. Clearly, they don’t want to be seen as a newspaper that accepts The Sun‘s castoffs.

Then we have ‘Complaints may force a change in the weather’, a bit of a moan about the BBC Weather, that contains no real news, but just a rehash of last week’s articles, even repeating the syndicated quote by Bill Giles, as if it is fresh. And a complaint about ‘digitally generated rain’ – so presumably they want us to go back to magnetic symbols.

Next, we learn that the word ‘cost’ has finally disappeared from the Mail lexicon, with the headline ‘Delays that rip off customers to the tune of £370m will go, eventually’. Unfortunately, that particular headline is wrong on so many fronts as to be completely false, and contradicts the article completely. That’s one subeditor that needs firing, then.

Then there’s an article by some moaning teenagers who think they’re hard done to because they go to private school, are predicted three A-Level ‘A’ grades, and yet have still been rejected by all their chosen universities. Apparently, they feel like they are being treated as second-class citizens. Have they not considered that A-Level grades aren’t the only thing that is considered when applying to university? Frankly, if they moan as much as they do in this article, I wouldn’t want them in my university either. One of them is a propective medical student, who applied to three London colleges and Brighton and Sussex. Everyone who applies to the London colleges has, at bare minimum, three ‘A’ grades. That’s the very least you’d need. So to find he’s been rejected should not come as a surprise, particularly as he’s only studied two sciences. And he thinks people should be chosen purely on grades. Well that’s probably exactly why he’s been rejected.

The Mailscience reporter Robin Yapp files a report on ten questions that find whether you’re blessed with that special charisma magic. Including, of course, the predictable picture of Diana.

There’s a fascinating double-page spread on pop stars who look a bit like rock stars. Amazing. Oh, and then there’s the equally amazing story of a small person who – get this – had a small flat! Hilarious! Followed swiftly with another double-page spread about Jamie Oliver’s wife’s experiences of giving birth. How much did she get paid for that?

A ‘leading doctor’ – by which they mean someone who no-one’s ever heard of who works in that world-famous Leicester hospital – suggests that parents should not be told the sex of their babies before they are born in case they decide to have an abortion based upon that knowledge. Except that’s almost certainly not what he said.

‘I had surgery to pin back my ears. Then one fell off.’ You couldn’t make these headlines up.

And the depressing thing is that I feel I’ve had to pick-and-choose from the ridiculous stories, otherwise I’d be sat here all day. So, if you want a laugh, go and buy today’s Mail. Or check the website; current top story: “I let my girl have sex at 11, admits mother “.