Alistair Darling is like the slightly dim child at the back of the maths class.  He can cope with exercise 1.3, but when the added complexities of 1.4 come along, he’s suddenly out of his depth.  He looks around to his classmates, all of whom are pointedly staring at their own papers, and flounders.  How to deal with 1.4?  He fails the end of unit test, but pre-empts a telling-off from his teacher, Mr Brown, by complaining that he was never taught how to answer the more complex questions.  Instead, he complains about how unfairly difficult that exam was, and argues that his low mark reflects the test more than his abilities.  He quietly ignores the fact that his classmates, in equivalent jobs around the world, at least passed the test.

He is out of his depth, and is panicking.  No wonder he has come out against a reshuffle.

Today’s Democratic press release attacks the woman on leadership, oil and the salvage-fleeing-Clinton-supporters issue of abortion:

Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.

Clever stuff.  But something tells me they hope you will read it slightly differently:

Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heart attack away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.

Gordon Brown is about to begin his latest relaunch.  (Is this number 7?  8?)  But, as with all of his previous attempts in the last 15 months, a relaunch will be extremely costly for the public purse.  Joey Jones, on the Sky News Blog:

Imagine you’re Alistair Darling. Right now you’re need cash for all this…

-The anticipated u-turn on vehicle excise duty.

-The 10p tax compensation package (funded by borrowing for now, but that’s not a goer forever.)

-And now of course Gordon Brown’s make-or-break/last ditch/not a relaunch, honest/”we feel your pain” energy giveaway.

Now don’t forget, the Treasury is shorter of cash than it would have been having cancelled the 2p rise in fuel duty. And it’s widely understood other taxation revenue is drying up.

So how to pay for the splurge upon which Gordon Brown is pinning his hopes of remaining in Number Ten? Goodness only knows….

The government tried non doms…. then retreated. They tried capital gains tax reform…. retreated again….

So who else has got deep pockets?

Political parties ravaging the economy to protect their own backides is nothing new.  But in Brown’s case, the economy is being ravaged to keep his backside in the Cabinet Room despite most of its other occupants wishing it were not there.  Apart from being disgustingly selfish, this is simply bad government.  I do not begrudge paying tax, but I think it should be spent sensibly.  To see Brown borrowing money that my generation will be paying for, at inflated rates, just to stay in office for 18 months longer - that’s a disgraceful misuse of an election mandate.

If only I could believe that any of the opposition wouldn’t do the same…

In many ways, you have to admire Obama’s latest victory. Wanting to avoid a bloody battle with Clinton supporters, he has managed to persuade the DNC that a roll call vote from the floor of the Convention in Denver is a bad idea. I have two responses: first, that halting the vote at this stage will annoy Clinton supporters, and second that quite a lot of good could actually come from a vote.

PoliticalBetting’s Mike Smithson deals with the first in full:

All this will do is fan the flames of discontent and provide great material for the legions of journalists in the city who loathe being “managed”. They want copy that’s not from the official spin machine and this action will provide it.

All it requires is for a couple of highly emotional TV interviews with disgruntled Clinton backers and that becomes the defining “image” of Denver.

The second objection is simply that the roll call vote could be turned to Obama’s advantage.  In this period of being parodied by his opponent as a messianic figure, Obama has been slowly slipping in the polls.  He has suffered few major setbacks, aside from the well-publicised debate over his pastor’s outspoken comments.  The roll call is genuinely seen as a challenge to Obama, and it is a challenge he could do with right now.  Overcoming the odds at a partially hostile Convention, and being seen to win his side over, would boost his march to the White House.  By ignoring discontent with Clinton and trying to sweep her under the carpet, he is effectively accepting that there is a real threat from his defeated rival, and he is afraid to combat it in public.

What would I do if I were Obama?  Hold the roll call vote, and gauge the level of opposition felt towards him.  Then I would go out onto the stage in front of live national television and accept the challenge needed to win the X% of trenchant Clinton supporters over, and vow to persuade them and the rest of America that I was ready to lead, to deliver a better America for all.  It would, at least, prove that he is not afraid to meet challenges.

I usually refrain from a running commentary on Boris Johnson’s acts as mayor.  Some people have taken to follow his every move, and while it is a very valid exploit, I cannot hope to carry it out effectively*.

Today, though, I feel I must comment on the resignation of Johnson’s First Deputy Mayor.  Let’s not forget, this was a position that he created despite reasonable warnings at the time that such a position was against GLA rules (with good reason).  Tim Parker now, apparently, sees that the position was not a sensible one to inhabit, or indeed to exist to begin with.  This effectively sees the end of Johnson’s Deputy Mayor scheme.

Such an error in judgement in creating posts only to realise that there was a perfectly good reason why they did not exist to begin with is forgiveable.  To lose so many high-ranking members of your administration in a matter of months is shocking.

I hope for London’s sake that this is a repeat of the Winter, as Johnson’s campaign got a complete overhaul and turned from a joke to a highly successful operation.  If not, London will be mismanaged for the next 42 months.  With the Olympics approaching, the last thing we need is a lack of decent thinking at the top of London government.

As always, though, the Tory Troll has the most insightful comment on the subject:

But with ‘King Stooge’ out of the building, and with planning powers now passed back into the Mayor’s hands, we are now faced with the very real prospect of Boris Johnson actually doing his own job. These are scary times people.

- - -
*To see it done properly, see Tory Troll and Boris Watch.

At Tony Blair’s last party conference in 2006, he delivered a dead-straight attack on the Tories. It was a very fair comment then, and it remains very fair today. I just wonder whether Gordon will take note…

I have already made comment on the new Number 10 website.  It seems as if  the design was stolen from the Themes Database, and badly botched before being put online.  Full comment with outgoing links from the theme’s author.

This just goes to show how monumentally divorced the government is from the real world.  There is no excuse in hiring a company to make a website on an open source platform and then not declaring copyright disclaimers.  If the press released shouted “open source”, even the most technically unaware individual in the Number 10 office should stop and think “wait, that means we didn’t make it ourselves.  Maybe the copyright notice should reflect that”.  It is a disgrace.

It really gets to something when government cannot even deliver a simple Wordpress website without messing up.  I have used loads of Wordpress themes in the past, all with appropriate copyright notices.  It was with a slight smile on my face that the latest theme for this website went live with my name at the bottom, not anyone else’s - I built it from scratch, line by line.  Apparently the Number 10 website cost £100,000, but it is no more technically advanced than this site, and whoever put it together could not be bothered to design it, or even steal a design properly.  I am obviously wasting my time, when I could be making government websites for ludicrous sums.

Sometimes I am so glad that satire exists.  In this case, because the boundaries of satire demonstrate clearly that this video is far, far beyond them.

Via Mike Rouse.  It’s a couple of months old, too, but who’s complaining?

As a wannabe web nerd, I spend some time browsing professional Wordpress theme designs.  Today I spent some time mocking up a design for my own website, which I will begin building in the next few days.  It was with interest, then, to find that the much-trumpeted Number10 website has been unveiled - built on Wordpress!  Get Gordon, all trendy and open source!  Just today I read an article by a blogger on the problems with pushing Wordpress too far beyond a simple blog format, trying to decide whether the platform can really cope with uses beyond those which it was designed for.  In short, I love Wordpress and am happy to mould it to suit any purpose, but the kind of site at Number10 should really be on a more robust content management system.

(I suspect at this point that most readers will not care greatly about the intricacies of Wordpress as a publishing system, so I shall leave the issue aside.)

The visual identity of the site is remarkably different to the old one.  What was once a practical website that looked as if it was created by a team of civil servants with solid scripting knowledge, but little eye for design, is now reasonably professional but not remotely official-looking.  It feels like the website for a small business, not the gateway to the seat of power.  But the simplicity and closeness is not necessarily a bad thing.  The colour scheme works well, and the use of white space is a stark contrast to the overbearing mass of information dumped by the previous incarnation.

This is genuinely web2.0.  Not only is it open source in software, it fully integrates feeds from Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.  This is, really, everything that WebCameron is not.  Where WebCameron is lacking, Number10 shows the Tories how it is done.  But where WebCameron works, this is too poor a comparison to look like an imitation.  There is no original blog content from the PM himself - why use easy-as-pie Wordpress if nobody is actually blogging?  And why on earth is all of the video contained in a TelegraphTV-style media centre instead of being embedded into articles?  Fundamentally, though, why use blogging software if there is no facility to comment?

This could have been a great break for government to reach into new media.  To get the public’s attention where it is of most value - on the internet.  I have long argued for the internet as being massively more important for government than any other media source, including television and newspapers, and this site relaunch was the perfect opportunity for government to wake up.  But they are still slumbering.

The gesture of using Wordpress is thoroughly unnecessary.  There is no good reason for using a blogging platform for the kind of content the Number10 website hosts.  If the website were to contain blogs, or even comments under articles, Wordpress would be perfect.  But for the kind of use Number10 has, Wordpress is simply the wrong package to choose (even from the open source options available).  The (surely deliberate) attempt to look hip and trendy by straying into WebCameron territory is pointless unless the great benefits of WebCameron are realised.  Most argue that Cameron’s site did not go quite far enough towards interaction, and, fundamentally, failed to keep moving forwards.  Instead, it has stagnated.  The new Number10 has a ready stream of content to keep it fresh, but it is simply press releases and speech transcripts.  I want to see short video clips of Gordon behind his desk telling us “I’ve just got off the phone with Putin, discussing South Ossetia.  We are agreed on…”.  Such content can be put up within minutes, and would give the public at least a nudge towards believing that Gordon is actually serving a purpose behind that shiny black door.

This is a typical government Emperor’s New Clothes phenomenon.  You know the story: the Emperor is really proud of his new outfit and shows it off to everyone.  Blinded by the Emperor’s presence and the fact that everyone is enamoured by the outfit, everyone is amazed by this most brilliant set of clothes ever produced.  Until one thoughtful person points out that the Emperor is, in fact, stark naked.  Here is a blog: it’s built on Wordpress, it looks like a blog, it feels like a blog, it quacks like a blog… etc. In fact, though, it is nothing of the sort.  It uses blogging software where a traditional CMS would be more appropriate.  It integrates photos via Flickr instead of directly though the site simply because Flickr sounds trendy.  Likewise video is pumped via YouTube on the front page, because of brand association, and then via a different out-of-the-box system on a the video page because YouTube isn’t actually the best way to show video after all.  As for the use of Twitter: a nonsense gesture, and transparently vacuous.  Everything that makes this website look like a blog is inefficient and wrong: in short, only there to make it look like a blog!

They don’t seem to get it.  The Number 10 website could easily have become a fantastic blog-based hub of accessible government.  It could have featured regular minute-long video pieces from the prime minister, with comment facilities below.  It could have hosted the ability to discuss the vast number of press releases and speeches archived on the site.  It should, at the very least, have hosted a blog from Gordon Brown.  He need not have pretended he had time to log into Wordpress and hit “publish” five times a day, but if he can squeeze out three books while Chancellor and Prime Minister, he can knock off a few blog posts each week.

I do not regularly comment on new government website builds, but this one was different.  It was built up in the press as the dawn of a new era in prime ministerial closeness.  Instead, it is a perfect exercise in appearing to be everything that you want, but actually turning out to be nothing at all.  I am severely disappointed in this squandered opportunity: the Emperor’s clothes may be new, but they are not actually clothes at all.

It looks like I am holding the fort here at Scribo Ergo Sum while my esteemed co-writers are variously engaged away from broadband connections.  Only through such experience can I consider Harriet Harman’s plight at the moment.  Stuck in London while her boss is practicing pilates in a jacket and tie somewhere in East Anglia, Harman is the only senior Cabinet member at home.  Poor woman; I almost feel pity.

To avoid an embarrassing croquet-at-Dorneywood incident, Harman has been cleverly concealed away from the prying eyes of the press.  Smart.  The media machine rumbles on, slowly losing steam over the will-he/won’t-he of a Miliband coup.  The news channels are full of Olympics, taking up as much as half of each bulletin.  The Conservatives are continuing to drip out press releases each day, policy by policy, quietly preparing the ground for an all-out assault at Party Conference.  And we are all blissfully oblivious to the fact that nobody is actually running the country.

The government’s response to South Ossetia is beginning to cause a bit of a stir (proving that journalists will literally write about nothing in August!) in the blogosphere and beyond.  But the problem extends far beyond foreign policy.  The SATs debacle is still on the agenda, and mercifully nobody is trying to brush it under the carpet.  The sad fact is that nobody is even in the building to pick up a broom to begin with!  Ed Balls is nowhere to be seen.  Nobody has adequately explained how the mess was allowed to come about to begin with, nobody is dealing with the consequences, and nobody is taking the flak.

Or take the economy.  Inflation is up to 4.4% today: well above double the government’s own target.  Alistair Darling’s attempt to reassure the public that he was “considering several options” last week was a resounding failure, not least because he indicated that people ought to wait until the Autumn for a better picture of the government’s plans for the housing market.  The result: people decide to sell in a few months, further hitting the ailing industry.  He appeared on radio with no policy to announce or explain, and no timetable for action to set out.  He wanted simply to show people that he was there, doing his best.  But his best was to speed up the property slump: a shocking failure.  After that miserable performance, it seems as if some wise advisers suggested that he should keep quiet for a few weeks, leaving all official Treasury business to be fronted by Yvette Cooper.  Who has done nothing but muddy the waters further.

I must admit to finding Silly Season a little refreshing.  One is not being constantly bombarded with suit-clad ministers running from studio to studio rubbishing the other guy’s latest lightbulb-above-head moment.  Sport and celebrity weddings take the place of reports and committees.  But there is a catch.

I like to see MPs as like police officers.  When all is well with the world, I don’t want to see them at all.  If the presence of police on a tube platform is slightly unnerving, the sight of MPs in summer is deeply concerning.  But if an attacker is approaching me 100 feet under Central London, I would dearly love a whole battalion of burly hi-vis-wearing coppers to march to my rescue.  Likewise, if everything is going up the spout, I expect to be lead by my government.  They were elected to govern, not have seaside photo-ops in a cat and mouse game of “I’m on a proper holiday”, “No, I’m on a more proper holiday. Look, I’m even wearing a T-shirt!”.  If some idiot contractor has screwed up exam result processing, I want someone to say “sorry: here’s our plan to avoid repeating this farce next year”.  If some idiot Chancellor has screwed up not trying to fix the economy until the Autumn, I expect him to either apoligise and announce a solid plan to save the economy, or to apologise and state firmly that there won’t ever be a plan to save the economy.  And if some idiot not-really-a-deputy prime minister cannot be seen to be taking control of government for fear of looking like she is positioning herself to depose her leader, then the whole sorry Labour party is far too fragile to be allowed anywhere near the corridors of power.

Giving the impression that you are on holiday, and letting the nation take a breather, is a fantastic skill in otherwise driven politicians.  But if you are the captain of a pleasure cruiser, currently heading for some rocks, you don’t grab a poolside sun lounger on the upper deck.  This government is cruising, rudderless, towards a whole series of crises at home an abroad.  And whilst they ostentatiously jump from the diving board boasting about who is on the most “normal” holiday, the cabin is empty and the warning lights are going unheeded.