We frequently decry this government for making us perhaps the most spied-on nation on earth, ever. And having got hold of our extremely valuable information, they have then managed to use it to put us at risk - which as Nick said in his speech in Liverpool last Sunday, if it weren’t so serious would be laughable from a government that at the same time was advising us all to buy personal home shredders to protect our personal information.

But the ways in which they’ve put our information at risk are not only through their own actions - but also by allowing other people, who are even more cavalier with it than they are, to insist that we give it to them too.

I’ve highlighted before (George Bush knows your credit card number) the large amount of information which the American government insists on knowing about anyone before they can travel to the USA - as well as the fact that they have no real grasp of the concept of protecting that information once they’ve got it.

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Over the last few weeks there’s been a fair bit of heat generated by the suggestion that Tony Blair is interested in trying to become the first occupant of the post of President of the European Council, created by the Lisbon Treaty.

A lot of people seem very opposed to this - there appear to be no fewer than eight different Facebook groups of people opposing it (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), a website and a petition for you to sign.

Personally I can’t get too excited about fighting Blair on this. It may well be that, particularly following his actions on Iraq, he is not the person to take on such an important role on behalf of the EU’s 27 national governments - and that does seem to be the view of a good many of them at the moment. But I think there would also be some benefits (not only to Britain but to the EU as a whole) in having a Brit in that role - not least because it might help the British public to see the EU as a useful way of helping to achieve objectives that the British public (and those of other European countries) want to see achieved, rather than just of creating endless pointless interfering bureaucracies, which is what they largely seem to think it is there for at the moment.

I am more struck by some of the ironies of Blair going for this position.

Firstly, this is a post that will exist at all largely because Blair’s government argued for it, through the Convention. There is clearly some irony (which I have not seen picked up that widely recently) in the main proposer of this role becoming its first occupant - even if this seemed to some of us a distinct possibility at the time. Indeed I wrote here in March 2002 of this role when it was first proposed that its “working title [is] ‘the Tony Blair job’”.

A second irony is that Blair only wants this job if it can be made to be sufficiently important and powerful (and he is going round saying so, much as Paddy Ashdown did with his prospective Afghan job - in this case there may well be several prospective Karzais around the place willing to use their veto). This is consistent with his desire to create a powerful European Council President in the first place, and with his apparent view that government in general, and the EU in particular, needs someone who is in a genuinely powerful position to lead it if it is to achieve things.

But the man now arguing that there should be such a genuinely powerful President of the European Council is the very same person who, when Prime Minister of the UK, consistently fought against almost any extension of the ability of the EU to act effectively together - what he now wants this person to do.

If someone had demanded a few years ago the sort of powers that prospective President Blair is now insisting on for this role, then Prime Minister Blair would have had a fit.

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I’m passionate that our local public services, such as the health service, should be as much part of their local community as possible – and indeed accountable to them.

So when the Whittington hospital started asking people to sign up as ‘members’ of it, as part of its bid to become an NHS Foundation Trust, I signed up. And when they invited local people to put themselves forward potentially to be on their ‘Council of Governors’, I submitted a nomination for that too. With about 3,500 members of the trust (excluding staff), and a huge area, containing the whole of Islington, Camden and Hackney, as well as parts of the City and Westminster, electing just six people to the Council, it was fairly obviously going to be a quite hotly contested election. But I was keen to be involved and play my part in ensuring that the hospital’s management are responsive to local people, and so I resolved to give it a try. And if you were one of the, er, one or two local residents that I asked to sign up as members too, thanks very much for doing so.

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It’s a year now since I first started blogging, so I felt it was more than time to move away from one of the Wordpress standard templates - so here is my new and more customised design! I’d always found the single column of text down the middle of the page, leaving lots of space at the sides of the page, somewhat strange, so I’ve ensured that I now use it all with most of the page used for text, as well as various other new features. Several friends I’ve talked about my blog too have said they struggle to catch up with websites but if you could sign up to receive blogposts by email then they’d do that, and there is now the chance to do that in the sidebar on the right hand side.

I’ve also used the opportunity to link up the design of the blog page with the other pages on the site (and put the whole lot into Wordpress, saying goodbye to my old friend MovableType).

With a little help I’ve come up with a design I’m pleased with and I hope you like it.

It’s become commonplace for people writing about the loss of our leader last autumn to refer casually to “the Lib Dems ditching Ming Campbell as Leader because he was too old”.

This is fast becoming accepted as the official history of what happened at the start of October 2007.

But in fact this is not what happened.

Yes, Ming was forced into a position where he felt he had to resign because there was a perception that he was too old.

But who was it who made this into an issue?

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On Friday the Conservatives launched a major advertising campaign and I think it’s quite an interesting milestone for showing where they have now got to in the development of “Cameron’s Conservatives”.

The top slogan for the campaign is “You can get it if you really want”, with ten individual promises in specific areas: health, schools, immigration etc.

This structure has taken some flak, for example from the Guardian, for emphasising different messages to different groups of people: so for example the immigration ad has gone in the Daily Mail, crime in the Sun and the education one in the Guardian.

This has been picked up by some (though not quite as explicitly as this by the Guardian) as further evidence that Cameron is willing to be all things to all men.

This doesn’t seem to me to be quite the right analysis.

Firstly, all political parties - indeed all of us all the time - say different things to different groups of people, without that meaning that we are inconsistent. It is hardly unreasonable for a party seeking to win votes to emphasise to particular groupings, their policies that they think will be of particular interest to that group. When this becomes a problem is when these messages are either explicitly or implicitly contradictory to each other, or (to a lesser degree) when it’s not possible to discern a linking thread between them.

Secondly it’s all very well to dismiss, for example, talking about education to Guardian-readers - but the actual messages they are putting across there are not the stereotypical messages you would expect Guardian-readers to love: the first headline here talks about splitting children up by ability (not quite the comprehensive ideal) and the second one emphasises discipline. These ideas may be right or they may be wrong - and the Conservatives obviously think they will appeal to Guardian-readers - but they cannot be dismissed as simply pandering to the lefty prejudices which this group of people are commonly supposed to have.

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