Telegraph: "Why we need Ming Campbell"

I know I am a bit late, but this is from the Commons sketch in the Telegraph on PMQs this week:

In a second round of questions, Mr Cameron attacked Mr Brown for failing to hold a referendum on the European treaty, and Mr Brown attacked Mr Cameron for reverting to "the old agenda". But what's so wrong with the old agenda? Mr Brown went on to deliver a statement in which, with sly deliberation, he advanced the case for locking up British subjects for 56 days without charge. Mr Cameron replied cautiously to this poisonous suggestion, wary of being accused of being soft on terror. It was left to Sir Menzies Campbell to defend our ancient liberties with proper passion.

He reminded us that far from making us safer, internment can fan the flames of extremism, and he asked why we need more repressive laws than Australia.

Many people cannot see the point of Sir Menzies, but his point is to uphold liberty against a control-freak prime minister at the head of an overmighty state.

Marvellous!

Damp squibgate

Well done to Vince Cable for brilliantly performing on the World at One (WATO - or I what I really want to call it - WHAT HO!) yesterday.

Whereas Cameron on Today on Tuesday made his internal divisions worse by attacking his detractors, Vince very carefully applied the political equivalent of halon gas* to the situation.

The Linda Jack story has really taken off. Apart from the BBC's initial online story it is covered in.........er........one media outlet, the East Anglian Daily Times, which describes Linda, quite rightly, as a "TOP LIB DEM".

In comparison, Lembit Opik considering for one and a half nano seconds that he might run for London Mayor, then rejecting the idea, is covered in 44 places.

* For the unanoraked, halon gas is "a compound in which the hydrogen atoms of a hydrocarbon have been replaced by bromine and other halogen atoms; very stable." It's used in computer rooms when there is a fire. It just waps in like a gas blanket and sucks all the oxygen out of the air, killing off the flames. There has to be a system to ensure everyone is out of the computer room before the gas is released, because it would kill you - you couldn't breathe.

Those few precious sunny hours!

We've had a lovely warm day today. But such days have been few and far between this year. So everytime we go for a walk I have taken my camera. Taking photos is a way of "pinching oneself" to reassure oneself that the brief spates of nice weather are real and not a mirage.

Above, here's a photo of the Newbury Waterways Festival and our favourite pub, the Blackbird at Bagnor.

Silly Season romps ahead #497

Wacky races? For a brief time London had the prospect of Lembit vs Boris vs Ken

So says a special little box on BBC News Online. In fact there is a photo of Lembit, and then another box with another similar story with another photo of Lembit.

In fact, I have calculated that Lembit is taking up 16.8% of the space of the BBC News Online politics page (top bit as shown on the average-sized monitor - see screenshot above).

This is all because someone's room mate casually suggested when questioned that their room mate might make a good Mayor. Then a couple hours later the bloke mentioned said he wasn't running for Mayor.

And this justifies 16.8% of the BBC Politics page.

Is it August, by any chance?

Griff Rhys Jones secures his pension

We've just caught up on Mountain presented by Griff Rhys Jones (originally shown last Sunday on BBC1).

The whole programme was stunning. The photography of the mountains and the views from them was heart-stopping. The climb up Suilven (pictured left) and the view from it was just out of this world. What a staggering piece of geology!

For some reason, the very north of Scotland and the Highlands don't get a lot of publicity. So, this programme gave us a view of a relatively unknown part of the British Isles.

Rhys Jones is a brilliant presenter and met some fascinating people along the way.

Whatever happened to the Stop Press space in newspapers

It's just an idle question. I used to be "newspaper monitor" at our family home when I was around ten years old. I used to run to the front door to pick up the bundle of papers delivered by Michael from Weys newsagents. Thursday was particularly exciting because we got all sorts of magazines also delivered on that day - "Bumper Bundle" day.

I started to take an interest in the look and shape of newspapers. I even had a collection of notable papers at one point (First man on the moon, first tabloid Daily Mail, Last old Sun, first new Sun etc) but they seem to have evaporated.

One of the things which used to particularly interest me was looking at the "Stop Press" columns. These were the spaces left at the bottom of the front page for last minute "breaking news" (as they didn't used to call it then) to be printed in what looked like a "John Bull" printing set - sort of "stamped" on.

I can vividly remember what the "Stop Press" spaces looked like in the Daily Telegraph, the Western Morning News and the Western Evening Herald. (The latter was particularly exciting because I had to run to Tremeers newsagents at the end of the Strand in my home town, to buy it and I used to see it arriving in the van! Thrillsville!). I used to check them to see if they were left blank or had a news item on them - often the cricket score or closing stocks and shares prices.

On a sombre note, on one occasion I noticed that the Stop Press space in the Western Morning News reported the death of a child in my home town. My father quickly took the paper from me and hid it out of arms' reach. It turned out, tragically, that the child in question was a family friend.

Anyway, I haven't seen a "Stop Press" space on a newspaper for donkeys' years. I am not quite sure when they stopped having them. Presumably it is something to do with modern technology, which allows last minute items to be incorporated with the normal text. In my childhood days, they used "hot metal" so such incorporation of last minute items was not easy, presumably.

Which brings me to my childhood visit to my local paper - The Cornish and Devon Post - to see them setting the type in individual cast metal letters. I still have my name in such cast type. I also visited the Financial Times press in Fleet Street when I was a child. Ah! Fleet Street! The actual Fleet Street with newspapers in it. I remember that! We walked down and saw all the newspaper signs along the street.

Those were the days! When you entered a newspaper building you could smell the ink. That smell seems to have vanished altogether from newspaper offices these days, especially as most of the editorial offices are scores or even hundreds of miles from the printing works.

My love of newspapers was fuelled by a book I was given by my parents called "Discovering Newspapers" by Roy Perrot. Also, there was a television series on called "Adventure Weekly" on BBC TV which featured a gang of children who ran their own newspaper. I was glued to that. It had Joan Hickson in it.

There's bound to be an autumn election - Martin Salter says so. Oh well, that's a cast iron certainty then

The Times and others are reporting that we are likely to have an autumn "snap" General Election. The reports are based on a quote from Martin Salter MP.

So, given that priceless imprimatur there isn't a remote chance of getting that story confused with other typical August stories about the Cornish "JAWS 2", Crop Circles, the Loch Ness monster, the Beast of Bodmin etc is there?