There’s been much speculation over the last few days concerning Charles Kennedy’s drinking past, mainly fueled by the pending release of Greg Hurst’s new book. Essentially, though, it doesn’t seem to say an awful lot more than most people already presumed.

I say past drinking problem – but just exactly how “past” is it? I know that any recovering alcoholic would say they are never really ‘cured’ of alcoholism, but there’s certainly been a general idea that Charles has given up the alcohol after being in an alcohol detox Arizona center for several months, and is doing his best to adjust to life without it: An admirable ideal. Indeed, back in January, when admitting his problem for the first time at an extraordinary press conference, Charles said:

As a matter of fact I’ve not had a drink for the past two months and I don’t intend to in the future.

But Guido now appears to be suggesting that Mr Kennedy may not be living up to the high standard he’s set himself:

Sharper readers of the dead-tree-press will realise that headlines like “Kennedy ‘must recover’ before return” and “Sir Menzies Campbell made clear that he would be welcome but only once he is ‘fully recovered’ ” don’t make sense if he is now sober …

To be fair, when asked on television recently when it was he last had a drink Kennedy avoided answering the question. Guido knows that he has been the worse for wear as recently as June.

I like Mr Kennedy. I don’t think he’s the solution to all the world’s problems, but he was a different kind of politician to those who usually gravitate to the position of leader, and that was probably healthy for democracy. I would really hate for him to be politically damaged further by appearing to be deceiving the public a second time. I don’t think he’s done that yet, but I really think he needs to watch his step, and handle things very carefully and delicately.

Honesty may well be the best policy second time around.

You may have been wondering if your tax money is well spent. You’ll be reassured to know that vast amounts of it (goodness knows how much) have gone in to producing videos like this.

Particular favourite parts for me were the house which was “trashed” by knocking over a single wooden chair, and the fact that headteachers can “manage loo roll” online. That’s a real boon.

On top of this, the wonderful people at the Home Office have launched ads promoting their “Think U Know” website. Yes, that’s radio ads. Reading out the address thinkuknow.co.uk. They’ve now been withdrawn, after it took someone to complain that thinkuknow.co.uk sound exactly like thinkyouknow.co.uk, which is a different website altogether.

Yes, it took a listener to tell the ASA that Think U Know and Think You Know sound the same on radio. Nobody from John Reid to the person doing the recording managed to notice. The ad’s now in the bin.

This government promised to cut waste. Something tells me it’s failing.

Update: As if you weren’t already convinced that the video was a waste of time, I can’t even show it any more!  It’s been withdrawn on the basis that it breached Government copyright. Despite being posted by the Government. Well done.

It can’t have escaped your attention that, yesterday, John Reid seemed to be doing the job of the Prime Minister. In Tony’s absence, Dr Reid took his position chairing COBRA. Whilst the good people of the USA were addressed by their President, our glorious leader was tanning himself on holiday, so we were addressed by Dr Reid. In fact, Mr Prescott didn’t really do any of the duties of the Prime Minister in his absence – so why his title is Deputy Prime Minister, and quite what his day-to-day job is supposed to be, I’m not sure.

Guido appears to have discovered that the reason Mr Prescott wasn’t available to lead the country through a national crisis is that he was responding to an article called ‘Prescott really is in the hotseat’ from Wednesday’s Daily Express. Fantastic leadership.

In other news, would it be cynical to suggest that the airlines would quite like the cabin baggage restrictions to continue? Suddenly, they’ve got a whole new revenue stream, as they can realistically offer novels and newspapers at highly inflated prices, reasoning that people will buy them on board if not allowed to take them on board. Furthermore, the advertising rates in their in-flight magazines can shoot up, because they suddenly have a captive audience that largely ignored their offerings forty-eight hours ago. And without big, bulky bags, boarding becomes much quicker, and hence turn-around shorter. In the longer-term, the overhead lockers could be done away with, saving a huge amount of weight, and cutting fuel prices too. This could be highly, highly profitable for airlines… even if it does scupper Ryanair’s latest plan to offer mobile phone calls on-board. I imagine the newly-created market would be more profitable than that one anyway.

As I write this morning, news is just reaching sjhoward.co.uk towers of a foiled terror plot to blow up planes in mid-flight. In response to this, hand baggage has been banned on aircraft departing from the UK – all that is now allowed is a clear plastic bag containing travel documents. And medications. And glasses. But that’s it. Except for baby food. Oh, and wallets. But not much, really, no. Forgot to mention keys – they’re still allowed. Oh, and ‘small personal items’. Which I guess doesn’t include small personal explosives. And everybody’s being hand searched, and the clear plastic bags are being X-rayed for reasons that aren’t clear to me. US flights are having two searches, just to make sure, and you’re not allowed to take liquids on board. Except the baby milk, but you have to taste that to proove it’s safe. Books and newspapers are too dangerous to take on board, because you could give someone a pretty nasty paper cut. It’s beyond parody.

Really, this is quite a wonderful idea. Everybody is carrying an identical clear plastic bag containing identical passports and tickets. How long before everybody ends up with somebody else’s passport and tickets? That’ll complicate things a bit.

The terror threat level has been raised to ‘Critical’ – the highest possible level. Or at least, it has in some places. The MI5 website says it’s ‘Critical’, but the new exciting important Intelligence.gov.uk reckons it’s only ‘Severe’. Good to see a unified approach. And the police have just been ‘explaining’ the threat level. ‘Critical’ means that an attack is expected imminently. The police say they’ve foiled this plot, aren’t aware of another, but it’s possible. So they’ve raised the level from ‘Severe’, where an attack is ‘Highly likely’, to one where an attack is ‘expected imminently’. Even though threre’s apparently no specific threat. Yup, this is the new intelligence logic.

Why any organised group of terrorists would bother trying to smuggle bombs in hand luggage anyway, I really don’t understand. It’s far too risky. It only takes one of them to be discovered for an organised security response to prevent the others happening. There are many ways of getting explosives on to an aircraft that stand less chance of being discovered, as shown in Whistleblower a couple of years back (and I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting those loopholes have all been closed). Why go with the riskiest option? Organsied terrorists wouldn’t.

Perhaps the new security’s a good thing. I got on a flight last Friday – and off at the other end – without having my ID checked once. My passport never left my pocket from entering the airport to leaving at the other end. There’s a lot of tightening to be done, if you ask me. But then, I flew with an airline that charged extra for hold baggage – they’ll be rubbing their hands with glee today…

The Labour government were, just four months ago, caught changing transcripts to say what they wanted them to say, rather than what was actually said. In that last case, Tony Blair’s words magically changed on two occasions: First he unadmitted a mistake, then he suddenly didn’t want to say his MPs supported him, so used some more magical speech Tipp-Ex.

This time, he seems to have passed a bottle of the enchanted correction fluid to his Foreign Secretary. More4 News have discovered that part of a Channel 4 News interview with Margaret Beckett has disappeared from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office transcipt. The offending piece, spoken and yet apparently not heard:

JON SNOW: Foreign Secretary, are you happy to discover that bombs and rockets and missiles are being sent through Prestwick Airport from the United States to Israel?

MARGARET BECKETT: No I’m not happy about it, not least because it appears that insofar as there are procedures for handling that kind of hazardous cargo – irrespective of what they are – it does appear that they were not followed. I’ve already let the United States know that this is an issue that appears to be seriously at fault, that we will be making a formal protest if it appears that that is what has happened. We’re still looking into the facts but I have already notified the United States that we are not happy about it.

Is it now official government policy to delete from the archives anything which, in retrospect, is a bit politcally awkward?

For the best part of the last academic year, some friends and I have had a running joke that the best excuse ever is, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that, I’ve shit myself” (due credit to Charlie Brooker). It really works in any given situation. However, I’ve found a new pretender to the crown.

You may remember that one of the most esteemed weekly news journals of our time – the News of the World – found that Mr Mark Oaten MP, a dedicated husband and father, had been having a relationship with a rent boy. Oopsie. But, according to this, he had a great excuse:

In an article for the Sunday Times, Mr Oaten said his fall from grace was prompted by a mid-life crisis brought on by his rapid hair loss.

“I slept with a rent boy because my hair fell out”. It could be taken straight from the cover of Chat or Pick Me Up. I should know, I unashamedly read these magazines when they’re lying about the hospital…

But the real question here: With a killer excuse like that, why did he have to resign? I can’t imagine. But he obviously never consulted Prentiss McCabe. He should have said he was a fellow urban fox-spotter.

The Observer reports today that a leaked report shows that the NHS is ‘failing our children’ through a lack of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAHMS). And how.

One quarter of the country does not have crisis teams for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. That is beyond belief. If the report was that we didn’t have ambulances to pick up children in 25% of the country, nobody would accept it, because we know children would die. Newsflash: The lack of crisis teams means children are dying.

Imagine for a second that, god forbid, your child is standing on your roof and threatening to jump and kill himself. Who do you call? In 25% of the country, there’s no-one to help. Imagine your teenager suddenly has horrific hallucinations of millions of spiders coming to kill him. In 25% of the country, there’s no-one to help. Both of these children might kill themselves, because in 25% of the country, there’s no-one to help – and all because we’re pulling funding from such services to serve the less common but more palatable diseases like cancer.

We’re awful at providing mental health services in general, because we don’t like to talk about them. We like to imagine that the ‘crazy’ people are locked up, and brand every criminal going as having some mental health problem – usually schizophrenia – because we can’t accept that some people are just evil. Poor mental health and criminality become inextricably linked, and who wants to spend money helping criminals?

This is an utterly ludicrous situation. 9 million people in this country – one in six – has a mental health disorder right now. More than 1 in 3 of us will have a mental health disorder at some point – more than will experience cancer. Yet we’re cutting the amount spent on mental health services. Where’s the logic?

The situation is worse for children, because as repulsive as society finds the idea of an adult with mental illness, the idea of a child with it is far worse. When was the last time some do-good charity collecter asked you for money for children with cancer? And when the last time they asked you for money for children with serious mental health problems requiring treatment? The latter is 56 times more common. Yet in some parts of the country, there are no Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services at all.

We need to get over ourselves and face these issues, otherwise our own children will continue to suffer. And there’s a pretty huge chance it will be yours next.

You may remember from last week that a new terror alerts system is to be introduced in response to the London bombing of 7th July. Clearly, it’s important that the public know the terror level at all times, because if we’d known that it was lowered from ‘severe’ to ‘substantial’ just before the attacks then we would’ve been more vigilant. Apparently. No, I don’t understand either.

Anyway, the new system does away with ‘Negligible’, because, durr, we’re always facing the biggest threat we’ve ever faced – otherwise we wouldn’t vote for policies which restrict our everyday lives (like ID cards or House Arrest). They’ve also combined ‘Severe Defined’ and ‘Severe General’ into ‘Severe’, because we can never be sure whether we’ve received intelligence about an attack anyway until after the attack takes place. And no-one really knows whether the intelligence is ‘patchy’ or ‘clear and authoritative’ anyway.

So how will the new system work? Well, I reckon the levels of threat will be determined much like this:

• Low: Oh my god, there’s a terrorist with a big nuclear bomb sat with a detonator in the centre of London. Best not panic the public, let’s keep the alert level down.
• Moderate: Hmm, some planes seem to be heading off course and towards some tall public buildings. Probably not worth calming the public completely, they might not accept draconian control measures, but let’s reassure them a bit.
• Substantial: The Daily Mail, that most reliable intelligence source, says someone who once passed Prince Charles’s butler’s cousin twice removed on Oxford Street made a comment that the Monarchy should be abolished! Clearly a terrorist plotting to kill the Queen!
• Severe: Someone seen calmly walking into a tube station wearing a light denim jacket. Shoot!
• Critical: Save our good Christian souls, a Muslim family has moved into a quaint village in Middle England! We don’t want those people here! Deport them!

So there you go! In fact, the official definitions are worse:

• Low: “An attack is unlikely”
  Which presumably means it’s not likely, but it is possible. See also ‘moderate’.
• Moderate: “An attack is possible but not likely”
  Which presumably means an attack is, erm, unlikely. See also ‘low’.
• Substantial: “Strong possibility of an attack”
  Presumably meaning an attack is quite likely. See also ‘severe’.
• Severe: “An attack is highly likely”
  Or, there is a strong possibility of an attack. See also ‘substantial’.
• Critical: “An attack is expected imminently”
  But we’re not going to tell you where or when. Bwwaaaahaahaaa!

I feel safer already!

The Right Honourable John Leslie Prescott is to have his wrists slapped for staying at Philip Anschutz’s ranch and failing to declare an interest (until bullied into it, of course). My question: Who’s going to do the slapping? Given Mr Prescott’s history of, err, hands-on politics (and no, not hands on that!), who is going to stand there and give him a good slapping?

Those unfamiliar with Westminster disciplinary proceedings may be somewhat lost, assuming ‘slapped wrists’ is merely a figure of speech. They would be wrong. The system works thusly:

• Horrendous, intolerable offences, like taking a two-week part time job whilst not in cabinet without consulting the correct committee are punishable with immediate sacking.
• Major offences like disagreeing with the Prime Minister is treated to a humiliating ‘You’ve let me down, you’ve let the Party down, and most of all, you’ve let yourself down’ speech until eventually you feel forced out of the clique and out of the cabinet.
• If you’re a little bit naughty and abuse your power by sleeping with your secretary, you go over the PM’s knee and have a couple of departments taken off you, but keep your job, salary, and perks.
• If you do something minor, like accepting gifts and holidays from someone before then giving them governmental support (let’s just call it being generally corrupt), then you get a quick slap on the wrist.
• If you do something barely worth mentioning, like, y’know, lying to Parliament or starting an illegal war, then that’s just brushed under the carpet.

See, it all makes perfect sense. All we need now is someone good at ducking!

A health select committee report out today says that the current system of NHS charges should be revamped. They’re talking about phone costs, eye tests, prescriptions, dental care, and – crucially – car park charges.

The current proposal is that people who have to attend hospital daily for treatment should get free parking. Not wanting to sound selfish here, I have to ask: What about me?

I’m a medical student. I go to the hospital every day, pay over £1,000 per year for the privelege, and often spent late nights there effectively working for the hospital for free. And yet I have to pay over £2 per day for car parking charges. Over the course of the last few months, that’s £343.20*.

Now, it might be argued that, hey, I’m young and fit, I can park away from the hospital car park. Well, no, not really, because not only does that drive local residents absolutely mad, and it’s potentially dangerous to go walking round these very quiet, poorly lit areas at 10pm.

*In fact it isn’t, because I don’t park there. Understandably.