Over the summer I was thinking about getting myself an iPod nano (one of the old slim ones, before it got a bigger screen in the most recent re-launch, making it look far less cool).

But then I realised the only reason I really wanted it was because it looked cool - and that since I hate headphones it would only really be any use with some speakers attached.

And then I realised there was a far better solution: my phone (Nokia 6233) has some perfectly good speakers built in to it, it’s very small and portable, and once a colleague had pointed out that I could get a 2Gb card for it for under a tenner on Amazon, I was away.

So as a result in various bits of travelling I’ve been doing over the summer I’ve been able to listen anywhere to entire albums, symphonies, you name it, all from my phone.

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Last night was a good night for Highbury Grove school!

In the first part of the evening we had a very useful meeting about the latest plans for the school to be replaced under the Building Schools for the Future programme. At the end of this month we have an important meeting to make the final decision as the governing body to proceed with the project, so it’s good to see that so much work on all the details is going in, by the people at the school, CEA and the Council.

And then later in the evening the relevant Council planning sub-committee agreed to give planning permission for the new buildings. The new school will be completely new buildings, built on the same site but around the existing ones (which will then be demolished). It is a huge building project so this was a crucial step.

Roll on the new school!

As part of preparing something last week about politics online, I looked up David Cameron’s website for his TV clips, WebCameron, and I must say that I was very impressed with it.

It was set up with the intention of helping people get to know him better, and I think it does an excellent job of making people feel that. Clearly what is shown is pretty carefully selected, but when formal appearances by politicians are so carefully staged and scripted, it does give a better picture of who someone really is through how they speak relatively off the cuff, and in formats other than just standing up making a big speech or in an interview.

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Recently I spent two days in Bulgaria, hosted by the British Council and the British Embassy, to launch their New Politician’s Toolkit to Bulgarian political parties and media. The Toolkit arose out of the UK-South East Europe Forum, a project run over the last couple of years and in which I had been one of the participants, which is how I came be invited to launch it.

The UK-South East Europe Forum was an interesting project, bringing together, in different strands, people from the creative industries, or young people, from the region together with some from the UK. The third strand was the one that I was involved with, entitled “people and politics”, and I spent a very interesting time talking with politicians and officials from Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia, about how policy is made and how it can involve both party members and the broader public.

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Right, so I should have kept my nerve, obviously, in saying he’d never actually do it.

But this must surely mark the end of people’s trust for Gordon, big time. The latest turn of events just makes it even more plain that he’s been playing games with us all - and once he’s been revealed as the casino gambler, he’s going to find it very difficult to go back in our minds to being the dour Scottish bank manager again.

Throughout I’ve been convinced that Mr Brown is working to a plan, but I confess that if today’s developments are part of one, then I for one can’t work out what it is.

One thing the delay does do is to give Cameron another chance - see my post earlier - but even with the new circumstances, I still think he’s going to find it very difficult to take advantage of it.

I found this week’s Conservative conference very interesting to observe - not because I thought they managed to establish a new position and momentum for themselves, but in fact because of the very opposite. For the position they were groping towards setting out is all too consistent with what the Conservative party has been saying really ever since Thatcher.

Let me explain.

The developing wisdom seems to be that Osborne’s proposal to restrict Inheritance Tax (IHT) was very clever in winning back more public support, and that alongside a reasonably strong performance from Cameron, they have therefore together re-established the Conservatives somewhere near back where they were before the departure of Blair.

In fact I don’t share the general consensus that the IHT proposal puts the Tories back into the game of winning support from the mainstream: it remains a fact that even at the moment 94% of the public don’t pay IHT, and while aspiration means that something more than just 6% of people are interested in it, cutting the proportion who pay it to just 2% seems to me a very long way from the really ambitious and radically different policies that Cameron knows he needs to win votes form the centre ground.

But more generally I don’t share the analysis that the unstoppable Cameron bandwagon of last year is now back on the rails - for several reasons.

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I suffered a sentimental pang this week when I read that Lonely Planet has been sold and is being bought by BBC Worldwide.

When I went off round the world a few years ago, Lonely Planet guides were my constant companion - without them I would have been completely lost (indeed until I did find them, I was lost!). Their books, at least the ones I was using, had a very distinctive backpacker style and ethos - they were definitely much more than just a guidebook. No doubt some of this was just good marketing to their audience, but I certainly felt a lot of affinity with them.

I can remember well at one point somewhere in India someone having a different brand of guide (Rough Guide, I think), and among the group of people I was with at the time, this causing some slight bemusement - why would you use any guide other than Lonely Planet? Was it perhaps better? No, he said, he had just chosen Rough Guide to make a change from LP, he said, which, like everyone else, he had used all the rest of the time.

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The author list of Liberator magazine is a shifting cast of people mostly associated with the party, and the diversity of its contributors is one of the things that make it most interesting and valuable.

But one person seems to have an article in almost every edition, and it’s always very interesting to see the sometimes awkward challenges that Simon Titley poses.

In the conference edition, he takes a look at the party itself, and his headline is that party members should stop complaining about our leader. One of his key points is one I have made here - that those complaining do not have any idea what their attacks would achieve other than making themselves feel better - what he describes as “attack[ing] your own leader in public with little thought for the consequences and no coherent idea of what might be done instead’.

But he goes on from the leadership issue to make the case, which I broadly (if not in every element) agree with, that the party generally needs to be much more effective in, and give a higher priority to, engaging in the battle of ideas. Read the rest of this entry »