It has emerged that Mr Blair is running up a bill of at least £2million a year for a police protection team larger than the Prime Minister's. He is of course not paying the bill. The rest of us are.

The former Premier, who is estimated to have earned £15 million on leaving office and hopes to be appointed first president of Europe has a 16-strong Scotland Yard close protection team which follows him around the world. This is a disgraceful waste of public money at a time when the less well off are asked to make sacrifices.

Police protection is a benefit enjoyed by politicians, members of the Royal family and others. As a benefit it should be treated like other benefits and be means tested.

Given the level of incomes and assets of those receiving protection there would be a considerable saving for the public purse.

A lovely story going the rounds is about a young attractive lady who attended last year's Tory Conference in Birmingham.

Ms Squire (for that was her name) of the Taxpayers Alliance was enjoying a round of evening receptions. At one, she was approached by a middle-aged delegate who told her: ‘You must come back to my room.’ Despite Ms Squire’s refusal, the man continued to press his case, eventually thrusting one of his room cards for the Birmingham Hyatt into her hand and saying: ‘Come to my room at 3.30am, when the parties are over, and I will give you the time of your life.’ Ms Squire accepted the key – but with no intention of taking him up on his offer.

She then went to another reception, where she was pestered by a second, younger man in similarly persistent terms. Exasperated, she eventually reached for the first man’s room card and smiled: ‘OK. Here is the key to my room. Come up at 3.30am and I’ll give you the time of your life.’

She was left in little doubt that her ploy to bring the two ardent men together had succeeded. She encountered one of them the following morning. He expressed his fury about his early-hours meeting. So Ms Squire might expect to be given a wide berth by her male fan club as the Tories meet in Manchester this week.

Last night Ms Squire refused to identify the delegates concerned or to comment on the story. A friend said: ‘A lady never tells.’

On the BBC Radio 4 program PM there has been a minor controversy involving Boris Johnson the London Mayor and the question of drinking and riding a bicycle.

On Lantau Island in Hong Kong private cars are banned and the usual method of conveyance on Lantau is by cycle, bus, taxi or golf buggy. A friend of a friend of mine allegedly has a conviction for being drunk in charge of one of the latter.

On Sunday we went to the Farmers Market at Winchester on the No 1 Bus Service from Southampton to Winchester courtesy of the free travel scheme offered to Pensioners. It is amazing how different the view sitting upstairs on a bus is to sitting in a car. When we arrived at the market there was no sign of a recession.

I had intended offering Maura lunch at a Winchester Restaurant. Instead we had a burger from the stand offering Water Buffalo Burgers and it was delicious. Subsequently we bought a special bread and some local cheese and enjoyed that at home.

There used to be a Farmers Market in Southampton but that seems to have disappeared. Pity.

I do like a good put down. For anyone who did not catch a recent letter in The Times I offer the following extract without comment.


"Sir, I was astounded to hear that Lord Myners is seeking God (report, Times Online, July 19). All the time I knew him at Marks & Spencer he seemed to think he was God.

Kevin Lomax
Former senior independent director of Marks & Spencer"

“I don’t care what the government does anymore. They can announce cuts, they can announce increases, they can set the whole thing to music and do a karaoke. I have completely lost faith, as has most of the country, in anything this government says. You can see it every week in PMQs when the Prime Minister stands up and says ‘black is white’.”

As a former member of the Labour Party (best part of forty years) and one whose instincts are still left of centre it gives me no satisfaction to endorse the comments above by the Leader of the Opposition. I am afraid that the Labour Party needs to clean out the stable occupied by the present MPs, reflect for a few years in opposition and come back with some sense of values other than self interest.

I have refrained from comment on the deplorable state of affairs about expenses claimed by Members of Parliament at Westminster. There is little I can add to the condemnation made by almost everyone who has an opinion and who has commented.

I am however also disgusted that the Speaker (it is said) appears to be making it a condition of his resignation that his son be selected by the Labour Party for the (currently) safe Glasgow seat the speaker currently represents. The Labour Party (or any other party for that matter) should not manipulate the system whereby a parliamentary seat is treated as part of some sort of fiefdom belonging to the present incumbent. There was a similar ploy recently in Hull for the seat to be vacated soon by John Presott. To the credit of the Labour Party members in that constituency the idea was rejected. I hope the Labour Party members in the Speaker's constituency will exercise similar sound judgement and the Labour Party machine will not be leaning on the local association to become party to such an arrangement.

That the Speaker will of course be 'rewarded' and take up a seat in the House of Lords is deplorable and to compound that calumny by manipulating the system to try and get the Speaker's son elected to the House of Commons would be a disgrace totally.

Mr Speaker is due to address parliament later today and one hopes he will retire immediately but I will not be rushing to the bookmakers.

Two days later -
For anticipating political events and betting advice I have awarded myself nul points.

Jack Kemp who at one time was a prospective United States Vice Presidential candidate and who served nine terms as a Congressman for Western New York, from 1971 to 1989 and who was Housing Secretary in the George H. W. Bush administration has died after a long battle with cancer.

He was fond of saying that President Kennedy in 1962 declared that

'It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut tax rates now. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.'

The idea is as relevant today as it was in 1962. A reduction in the basic rate of tax would benefit the less well off and give an economic stimulus to the ailing economy because the less well off would spend the tax reduction. The idea is not apparently attractive to either Mr Brown or Mr Darling or surprisingly Mr Cameron or Mr Osborne.

I have just been listening to some jazz on BBC and was struck by the insight in the lyrics of 'That's why the Lady is a Tramp'. I particularly liked the line 'She goes to Operas and stays awake'. I must have heard these particular lyrics a thousand times but cannot recall that particular line. Funny that!

Chancellor Alistair Darling is expected to announce some £15 billion of spending cuts over the next few years when he delivers his Budget statement this week. It is forecast that he will say the money can be found by making Whitehall more efficient and will announce that the Budget will reveal a public borrowing requirement potentially more than £160 billion.

When politicians are unable to match the expenditure with the income they always resort to mythical efficiency savings. It is a sure sign that they are unable to provide an answer to the problems they face.

What is surprising is that not only do the present administration resort to trying to find these mythical savings but we have similar promises from the present opposition that they will also discover this treasure trove when they become the Government

They say they will unearth this munificence that has eluded governments for decades. Some hope!

The item in the news that caught my attention the other day was headlined 'A glass of wine has as many calories as four fish fingers: Government to target drinkers in calorie counting campaign.'

I do wish that the 'I know what's best for you Brigade' would desist. They should leave us little old wine drinkers to our inoffensive and tax producing enjoyment. If they want to make a contribution to excessive drinking they might consider campaigning for the closure of the cheap booze bars in Parliament.

I offer the following from Mr Brown without comment

“I take full responsibility for what happens, that is why the person responsible went immediately.”

The G20 summit appears to have been a relative success. It will be interesting to see how Mr Brown's rating are affected. He has had on balance a good summit but will it have any long term effect on the prospects of the Labour Party winning the next election.

I suspect not.

Amongst all the incidents of misbehaviour of MPs there is a sense that not only have the Government allowed the situation to get out out of hand but they have also lost any sense of political judgement.

The Government have gone ahead with a modification of public service annual increases and agreed that MPs and the Armed Forces should have the full recommended increase. All that was required in the name of integrity and common sense was to declare that no one whether it be the banks controlled by the Government, Civil Servants or anyone in the public sector including MPs would receive a jot this year. The only exception would be the Armed Forces who have emerged as the one sector of British public life for whom we can have any respect. Will they ever learn?

The Prime Minister addressed the European Parliament this week and was subsequently savaged by Daniel Hannon a Tory MEP for the South East of England. It was a vitriolic and damming indictment of the PM and a video of Hannon's performance was carried widely in the blog sphere. The remarkable thing is that none of the traditional UK media carried the incident. I cannot believe if a member of say the Senate or House of Representatives was to commit a similar act when the President was visiting another country that it would go unnoticed and unreported. I cannot for the life of me understand the reluctance to report on, what by any standard, was a very newsworthy incident.

The world of finance continues it ostrich like course. It has just been announced that Insurance giant Legal & General is to half its dividend after plunging £1.13 billion into the red. What is remarkable is that a company continues to pay substantial dividends to shareholders when the company has lost money. It is surely a recipe for disaster.

We returned last Wednesday from a month in Hong Kong which included a four day visit to Beijing. A memorable trip and one we will never forget. I will probably bore people for years with my advocacy of China and how they are progressing by evolution and not revolution. For now suffice to say that we probably have much to learn from the Chinese.

The Local Government Association has advised Local Councils of 200 words that should not be used by councils in the interest of better communications and good English. I fear that many in local (and central) government will now be speechless.

I am off to Hong Kong tomorrow for a months stay with my youngest daughter. I enjoyed my last visit so much and I am really looking forward to this second visit. More racing at Happy Valley will be in order.

Another nail in the coffin of democracy as the system is brought into even greater disrepute. Well done Home Secretary you are a worthy member of the sleaze factory at Westminster.

Prince Charles was in the news last week voicing his opinions about slums. He of course is well qualified to do so given his great experience of living in them.

In the present world economic debacle everyone appears to advocate that we have to fund a recovery by throwing money we don't have at the problem. The only way we may be able to do this is by printing more money. I have wondered (although I have not so far blogged on the subject) whether this will inevitably lead to severe inflation down the line. It was interesting to come across a blog on the Financial Times that more or less addressed the same subject all be it more eloquently than I could do so.

Morgan Stanley’s Jocahcim Fels and Spyros Andreopoulos looked at the possibility of hyperinflation hitting the western shores of the UK, Europe and the US. They said one stark lesson from the ongoing financial and economic crisis is that so-called black swans — large-impact, hard-to-predict and seemingly rare events — can occur more frequently than generally believed. With policymakers around the world throwing massive conventional and unconventional monetary and fiscal stimuli at their economies they thought it is worth exploring the black swan event of very high inflation or even hyperinflation.

The risk of hyperinflation cannot be dismissed very easily any longer. The classification of hyperinflation is an episode where the inflation rate exceeds 50 per cent per month. In history this has occurred in the 1920s in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Russia. In 1923, for example, Germany experienced a 3.25m per cent inflation rate in a single month. Since the 1950s hyperinflation has been experienced in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

The root cause of hyperinflation is excessive money supply growth, usually caused by governments instructing their central banks to help finance expenditures through rapid money creation. It could possibly happen in Europe or the US under certain conditions.

Firstly, the rapid expansion of the monetary base by the Federal Reserve, The European Central Bank and the Bank of England would have to continue and feed into a more rapid and sustained expansion of money in the hands of the general public. Secondly, governments would have to face difficulties financing their bailout packages and funding their debt. Lastly, public confidence in the government’s ability to service debt without resorting to the printing press would have to disappear, as well as the government’s actual ability to withstand the pressure to do so in the first place.

And while all of the above is an extreme scenario the pundits Fels and Andreopoulus concluded that given the size of the current and prospective economic and financial problems, and given the size of the monetary and fiscal stimulus that central banks and governments are throwing at these problems, investors would be well advised not to ignore this tail risk, especially as markets are priced for the opposite outcome of lasting deflation in the next several years. Put differently, they believe that buying some insurance against the black swan event of high inflation or even hyperinflation makes sense and is relatively cheap currently. They add that when hyperinflation occurred in the eastern block countries towards the end of the communist era, most citizens hedged via significant purchases of black-market US dollars, the US dollar becoming the effective proxy store of value. This time round, that would not be an option.

My own view is that there may of course be an upside in hyperinflation. Given the vast amounts that need to be borrowed now the effect of high inflation might be to minimise in relative terms the cost of the present borrowings. But I do not have an answer and what is really worrying is that neither does anyone else.

At a time when we are heading for a 1930's type depression I wondered about the relevance and priority of providing for single sex wards.

Certainly in an ideal world they are desirable but hospitals after all are primarily for the curing of diseases and the mending of bodies. If in the process of achieving these priority objectives it means that some lady has a fleeting view of a male arse then I see no great problem. Given the multiplicity of problems we as a nation face one wonders whether Mr Johnson might not have postponed his latest great initiative.

There are some politicians who increasingly irritate me. To the list that comprises Paddy Ashdown, David Owens, Norman Lamont and Dennis Skinner there is another applicant by the name of David Miliband. I am not quite sure why he is so irritating but it may be because he is well dressed, articulate, urbane, educated and invariably wrong. He is a disaster as Foreign Secretary and upsetting our relationship with India (following his disastrous spat with Putin) is a feat that few could have achieved.

It is almost six months since I last blogged and I had intended to forego the self indulgence. However we are in such a disasterous situation that I feel obliged to add my twopenny contribution.

There were not many interested in politics who were surprised by the disclosures in yesterday's Sunday Times. The Lords is an anocronism and their Lordships totally irrelevent to a modern democracy. The one thing they possible had going for them was that unlike those in the House of Commons they possible had some integrity. Yesterdays allegations and todays disclosure of the actual recordings of conversation suggests that we were were totally wrong to give them the benfit of the doubt that somehow they were different to their colleagues in the lower house.

They draw up to £325 per day for signing in and out and have the benefit of the best and cheapest dining facilities in central London.

It is of some interest to me at least that The USA has a population of just over 300 million people and 100 Senators in their Upper House. In the UK we have 740 Peers, when we have a population of just over 60 million. Using the US standard we should need 20, not 740, in a reformed House of Lords.

Not only are their Lordships an irrelevance and probably corrupt but there are far too many of them.