I know I’ve asked this of other people before, but just how is John Prescott still in office? He’s lost his job yet kept his salary and perks, slept with his secretary, puched a voter, done allegedly dodgy political deals without declaring an interest, been photographed playing croquet when he should have been working, been roundly mocked for having two jags, and yet still appears to be quite happy in office. People said Tony was made of Teflon because nothing every stuck: Well this is one Slippery Johnny, with no-one ever quite able to pin him down long enough for him to lost his job.

Even if, as it is rumoured, he has some good dirt on Tony Blair and so can’t be fired, he must be able to see the damage he’s doing the government and the Labour party, and want to resign in the best interests of a turbulent, troubled party which needs less scandal not more. Surely he can’t be seriously thinking about disrupting the smooth and orderly transition by running for PM himself, because there’s far too much dirt on him already.

He can’t keep on going like this forever: Johnny must split from the government soon, if only so the party gives an appearance that it’s doing something. Or is this the greater problem with New Labourites, as we saw with Charles Clarke? They’re so obsessed with themselves that they won’t resign for the greater good, they have to be pulled off the government scene in a most undignified way?

FactCheck, Channel 4’s despinning, debunking, delightful website crafted to help with coverage of the General Election and inspited by the US’s factcheck.org, is back after a 14 month hiatus. Here’s what I said when it launched first time around:

This is an excellent idea – an independent website which will check the facts spouted by the politicians between now and the general election. Perhaps it will encourage our party leaders to be more honest in their speeches, instead of making false claims in order to scare voters into voting for them above the opposition parties. Perhaps it will mean that the leaders can no longer hide from the truth about their past performance behind some dodgily compiled selective statistics. Perhaps it will even stop the politicians from telling outright lies.

Of course, it never actually did any of those things, but it was still fun to read, and hence got a reasonable amount of coverage on this blog. My only complaint thus far is that the logo’s been replaced with an uninspiring red box with the Channel 4 font surrounded by compression artefacts (see picture), and each article is split over several pages. A disappointment. But the actual content still seems to be up-to-scratch.

I, for one, am glad to see it back.

The NHS is now in £521,000,000 debt. That’s quite a lot. More than twice as much as this time last year, in fact.

When responding to the last set of figures last December, Patricia Hewitt, our esteemed Health Secretary, announced that she would have the debt down to £250,000,000 by April. It’s now June, and she’s nowhere near – in fact, she’s heading in the wrong direction altogether, despite firing 12,000 people, cancelling countless operations, and reducing the quality of patient care. Yet today in Mad Pat world…

The NHS is now stabilising this financial problem while counting to improve services for patients.

Doubling of debt equals ‘stabilising this financial problem’. This new definition is very handy. Blood pressure doubled in 12 months? Don’t bother treating it, it’s stable! Tumour size doubled? Don’t worry about that cancelled op, your tumour’s stable! Think of the savings that can be made!

Doctors can see what’s wrong here. The BMA Consultants Committee said

Yes, bad management is a problem in some places, but the biggest cause is the interference from government. Something is going badly wrong and it is demoralising for staff.

We know the nurses are against her following the extraordinary action at their conference.

This demonstrates that even medical students, not yet employed by the NHS, aren’t fans:

And, hey-ho, the Confederation of the managers Mad Pat was so criticised for introducing in the first place is even against her:

It is all too easy to blame individual managers, but the financial problems often relate to systemic issues.

And, surprise surprise, the Opposition knows what’s wrong:

Policy is failing.

So who’s backing Mad Pat? Well, apparently, Mr Blair. Despite her coming out with meaningless misjudged announcement after meaningless misjudged announcement, even after missing her own targets by miles, there’s still no suggestion that she might be unfit for the position.

Nobody in the NHS likes her, she polls badly, and she doesn’t meet targets. Why on Earth is she still in office?

On the Today programme this morning, some Labour official or other insisted that the pension reforms they’d come up with were designed to be ‘non-partisan’ and they hoped to reach a ‘cross-party consensus’, not play party-political games. The claim was repeated on The World at One, and quite possibly on many other news broadcasts throughout the course of the day. Of course, making such claims simply sets up clear criticism of any party who dares to point out flaws in the White Paper, so really it’s a good strategy. If only they stuck to it.

Unforunately, they didn’t. Tonight, I received an email from the Labour Party (much like those I’ve received in the past):

The proposals we are publishing today represent the greatest renewal of our pensions system since the post-war reforms implemented by Clement Attlee’s government… Since 1997, we have made real progress in tackling the appalling legacy of pensioner poverty we inherited from the Tories, so far helping a million pensioners out of poverty.

Non-partisan? I think not. Why is it that even when they think they’re doing the right thing, the Labour spin machine just can’t help pumping out lies? And how can they say they’ve had ‘real progress on pensioner poverty’ when Council Tax has soared, and OAPs imprisoned for failing to pay? I just don’t get it.

Mr Hutton’s changes mean that I will be working until I’m 68. That’s fine, I have nothing against working into old age. I mean, most 68-year-olds can’t set a video recorder, and I’ll no doubt have a similar incompetence when it comes to the medical breakthroughs and technologies of the 2050s, but I’m sure that won’t be a problem. And when I’m taking your blood or excising some growth, I’m sure you won’t be too worried about my small tremour. And at the end of a twelve-hour shift, I’m sure you’ll forgive my aging brain for prescribing a drug that just happens to react with something else someone else gave you.

Of course, working to 68 will allow me to earn the money to cover the student debts that Labour have given me – otherwise my net income over my working career would be reduced.

Not that much of it matters anyway: Predictions are that there will be 3,000 junior doctors unable to find suitable training posts by the time I qualify. If I never get a job, I’ll never have to retire. Now there’s a cheery thought 😉

So Blair has come third in the local elections. That’s not good for him. In response to this, and the scandals surround the Labour party for last fortnight, he’s performed a reshuffle so huge that it begins to feel like he’s got a whole new deck. Charles Clarke has been unceremoniously sacked, saying that he disagrees with Blair, and Prescott is angry too at the prospect of losing the bigger part of his responsibility whilst retaining his title and his salary. If that happened to me, I certainly wouldn’t be angry, I’d probably be cheering, but that’s Prescott for you.

Patricia Hewitt has retained her post, despite the service that she is trying to reform revolting against her, and losing all faith in her abilities. And Jack Straw, who’s seemingly done nothing wrong, gets demoted. Sensible.

Earlier in the week, I couldn’t understand why Clarke hadn’t resigned. It would now appear that he genuinely beleived he could carry on. This was actually good news for Mr Blair, because it meant he had a big headline-grabber for election results day, so the fact that Labour have performed appallingly could be buried.

Yesterday, I was unsure whether he’d pulled off something incredible, and made a fantastic political play, or whether this really would be the beginning of the end. But the news today that in a week’s time, seventy-five backbench MPs are to deliver a letter telling him to resgin or he will be challenged changes everything. This simply isn’t how Blair wanted to go.

Blair and Brown are holding talks this weekend about the future of the party. Basically, it’s pretty clear that they’re talking about when Blair should go. On Monday, Blair has a press conference at which this topic surely can’t be ignored. But what can Blair do now? If he resigned next week, he’d look pressured into it, which isn’t what he wants to do – he wants to go according to his own timetable. If he leaves it much longer, he will be forced out by his own party. If he announces a future resignation date, perhaps there’s scope for a few headlines now about him being forced out, but at the time of the transition of power, perhaps that will be more forgotten.

Could he announce that he’ll stand down on his tenth anniversary as Prime Minister? That would give about a year for the transition to take place, satisfy most of the party, and make it look like he was going according to his own timetable. It would also allow him the honour of making an official ‘final’ conference speech without plotters murmuring in the background. If backbenchers are more insistent, he could always announce that he’ll leave at the end of the year, which would have similar advantages.

But, of course, announcing in advance makes him a true lame duck, something that he and the party would probably object to over such a long period. So what can he do? Probably very little. He’s been greedy, and left the transition too long for it to happen in any symbolic, pretty way.

The idea that he won’t get his last wish after nearly a decade of leadership almost makes me feel sorry for him. Almost.

Charles Clarke’s department allowed 1,023 criminals who should have been considered for deportation to roam free around the country, with some of them committing further offences.

He knew about this for three weeks before he bothered to let the Prime Minister know about it, let alone the Police who need to track these people down.

Even after three weeks, he still didn’t even know the scale of the problem, or whether any of the prisoners had reconvicted.

And yet, he’s stayed in office thus far on the basis that he’s the best person to fix a problem he created. And the longer he stays, the more reports continue to trickle out, and the more damage it does to a Labour government already facing a grim local elections result.

What is he doing? And why hasn’t he been unceremoniously sacrificed?

He clearly can’t stay as Home Secretary. That’s now absolutely obvious, and as clear as clear can be. But in any reshuffle, there’s really no cabinet position of equal power to that of Home Secretary. Foreign Secretary or Chancellor would be a promotion, which would make Mr Blair look arrogant beyond belief. Anything less than those two positions would be a demotion, which Clarke would never agree to. So what’s going on?

If Clarke resigns tomorrow, it’ll hit the papers on Wednesday, the day before the local elections. That’s not satisfactory. He could resign at the point of a reshuffle, but he’s a clever guy – why hang on that long and keep the bad press coming? If he was going to go, from a political point of view he should have done it by now.

So what’s missing? There’s an outside chance that Tony Blair could use the local election result to announce a date for his departure, and relieve Gordon Brown of his Chancellorship to concentrate on the handover of power. Charles Clarke could sneak in and be caretaker Chancellor, which would techincally be a promotion, but no-one would care because the story would be eclipsed. Patricia Hewitt could be shuffled out of Health at the same time.

Prescott’s a stickier problem, because Deputy Leader isn’t a job Mr Blair gets to play with – it’s elected by the Labour Party at large, but again the announcement of Blair’s departure would overshadow any news about Prescott’s pants anyway.

It all seems a bit unlikely, but there’s something that doesn’t add up here.

It seems increasingly clear that, with all the current bad press Labour’s been getting, someone – probably Charles Clarke – needs to resign to reassure voters before Thursday’s local elections. Logic says that the most likely day for this to happen is today, because no-one wants it to drag on till Tuesday, when everything’s a bit close. But leaving it till Tuesday does have its advantages, as it makes Labour look responsive right before the election – it just doesn’t give campaigners the boost they need on the doorsteps over the Bank Holiday weekend.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see an announcement today. But let’s face it, I’m usually very wrong…

Clarke, Hewitt, and Prescott – the newest terrible threesome.

Clarke’s under pressure after freeing over 1000 prisoners who should have been considered for deportation. With more and more such people being found every day, and the story just dripping on, there’s little chance of him surviving for much longer if this continues to drip.

Patricia Hewitt has been heckled at the RCN conference – the second time she’s been heckled in three days. For the first time, she actually seemed to come close to breaking today, complaining that whatever she said she’d be shouted at. That’s not good, and isn’t a ministerial response. Which must increase the odds of my prediction from January.

Prescott’s had an affair with a secretary, which has been very much buried. All-in-all, Labour’s been lucky – three potentially big stories all released on the same day, meaning each one will get less than its fair share of coverage in the news cycle.

But still, the headlines are looking bad for Labour right now.

And the future isn’t looking bright, either: The local elections in May will bring bad news for Labour, the by-election also in May will likely bring bad press, and then the Education Bill follows shortly afterwards, which is so controversial that it can only bring bad press – particularly with the ongoing police investigation into peerages being sold.

But bad news for Labour is bad news for us all. There’s no chance of Blair going until calm political waters present themselves for Brown’s succession to be as smooth and positive as possible – so it looks like we’ll be waiting for a while longer yet.

Following a discussion on the subject of student funding, I thought it time to get in touch with Mr Borrow again, knowing how well he represents my views. And so, I placed this in the big red shiny postbox today:

Dear Mr Borrow,

The average student has sixteen hours of formal teaching time each week. As a medical student, I have thirty-five hours of formal teaching time each week. Where is the logic in providing the same level of student support to all, despite clear disparity in the time available to supplement this support through paid employment?

I look forward to reading your response.

Yours sincerely,

It’ll be interesting to see whether he actually answers the question, as previous experience has shown that he, erm, doesn’t. I’ll let you know the response either way.

Just as an aside… Last time I wrote to the guy to ask him to support an EDM, he said he wasn’t going to sign any whilst acting as a PPS. In fact, I have the very letter on file:

I am currently the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Higher Education Minister, Kim Howells MP. When I was appointed I took the decision that as I was a member of the government, albeit at a very junior level, I would not sign EDM’s.

Strange, then, that during his PPS-ship, his signature appeared on 111 EDM’s. What’s all that about?

Update: 8th July 2006
To his credit, my MP did get in touch with Alan Johnson on my behalf. I was forwarded the reply from Bill Rammell, Minister of State for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education:

Dear David

Thank you for your letter of 24 May, addressed to Alan Johnson, enclosing correspondence from Mr Simon Howard of (address removed) about the student support arrangements. I am replying as Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education.

I appreciate Mr Howard’s concerns about the difference in the number of contact hours medical students receive in tuition, compared to those on standard degree courses and appreciate why he feels the financial support should depend on the hours of study per week. However, time spent with lecturers will differ for individual students, depending on the type of course they undertake. Mr Howard may not realise that in addition to time spent in lectures and in tuition/contact time, students are also expected to undertake different types of activity. These include a personal study time, working with other students, research and project work. This is to enable students to develop and build upon the work carried out in lecture time and is part of the educational experience and development. As autonomous bodies, institutions are responsible for the service they provide for their students, including the level of contact time.

Nevertheless, I am aware that it is not always possible for some students to supplement their income from part-time employment. That is one of the reasons which we provide additional help through the Access to Learning Funds (sic) to those experiencing financial difficulties during their course. The Fund is administered directly by students’ individual institutions which are best placed to assess students’ circumstances. If Mr Howard has not already done so, he can obtain further information about the application process from the student services at his institution.

I do hope this clarifies the position for Mr Howard.

Yours sincerely

Bill Rammell MP

So he did quite well, and did seek out an answer to the question.

Thanks, Dave!

David Miliband has a blog. A blog that cost the taxpayer £6,000. And isn’t allowed to contain political comments.

Question one: How on earth did it cost £6,000 to set up? That’s hundreds times more than this blog has cost in it’s entire lifespan, and there are a great many tools out there (WordPress.com and Blogger, for example) that would have allowed him to do the same for nothing.

Question two: What’s the point? A politician sets up a blog that can’t have political comments on it?

Question three: Can I have my money back, please?

To be fair, he does attempt to answer one of the above three questions in his blurb:

This blog is my attempt to help bridge the gap – the growing and potentially dangerous gap – between politicians and the public. It will show some of what I’m doing, what I’m thinking about, and what I’ve read, heard or seen for myself which has sparked interest or influenced my ideas.

I’m not entirely sure who Mr Miliband thinks will read his blog, and I’m slightly scared that the fact I’ve visited it will be one more hit towards the definition of success. And quite how he’s going to tell us what he’s thinking as a politician without making political comments is unclear. But I’m sure this is a good use of taxpayer’s money…!

Even Boris can do it better…