First day of unemployment

Has been very nice indeed. I went swimming this morning at about 9.30. The pool is extremely delapidated but they're tarting it up to look like a cheap Fitness First. I really just wanted to go for a swim but got the invevitable desultory tour of the gym. I feel like I've done that tour a hundred times, always with gym staff who point out the machines as though they're slightly embarrassed by them. The pool was huge, the deep end impressively deep, so you have a sense of swimming on top of a vast empty space. School children were being dipped in groups of twenty while I was there, but this didn't bother me as much as I thought it would.

Anyway, hem, politics. Pandora, of The Independent runs a story on Home Office spending an annual £1,000,000 (six, count'em, noughts) on refreshments. In 1997 they managed to get by on a mere £300,000. How can this happen? Are they subsidising the Home Office dining room? In which case we are paying for their refreshments twice, both as wages for the civil servants and subsidies to make their ginster's pasties cheaper. It surely can't mean bottled mineral water and sandwiches for meetings. Can it?

Blair obviously (see below) will not cave into pressure from his MPs to announce a timetable for departure. I wonder if his defiance does in fact extend to continuing in office in the face of widespread unpopularity. But then he was only voted in a year ago, so can still, fairly reasonably, claim to have the mandate of the British Public. It does make Brown seem awful, hanging around impatiently - no one likes impatience, it is too common a flaw.

Went to Tesco's at around 1.00pm. It seems that no-one round here has a job. I was beginning to think ungenerous things about state benefit, when it occurred to me that I didn't have a job either.

Question: do state benefits actually create positive change in people's lives, or is the change merely cosmetic?

Who wants to work in advertising anyway?

The post before last seems spookily prescient now as I was in fact given a week’s notice on Friday. Can’t say it was a complete surprise as Colin’s attitude to towards me had been unusually frosty of late. Interestingly I think my career here might have lasted longer if I had drunk more, and it’s not often you can say that. Anyway, I will have plenty of time to write this blog.

Was quoted by Guido about half way down the page or rather, I quoted Prescott, haranguing Hague on his sense judgment, and was in turn quoted by Guido.

I find it hard to believe that the shitstorm going on at the moment has not been coordinated in some way. The press has already turned against Blair, it seems quite clear, and now wants to flex its muscle by convincing everyone else he has to go. I would cite The Economist cover and ad campaign that went with the cover, and also the advert for The Week, which I think is published by Murdoch (I think). This shows a man on the escalators at Canary Wharf (which somehow never look so monumental in pictures c.f. The Quiet Gardener as they do when you go down them in the evening when they serve as an effective vision of the gates of hell, for me anyway) who stands, staring blankly, with his hands in his pockets, while his fellow commuters, occupying each alternate step on the escalator around his, all read the copy of The Week which shows a cartoon of Blair hanging over a precipice on a thread of a frayed rope. The headline reads “Do you know what’s going on around you” while the title of the issue of The Week is “Is it the end for Blair?” or something like that. If you travel on The Underground in London you will have seen this ad.

It seems to be as much an advert for Blair leaving, as it does for the publication. Since the magazine is shown as in a pack shot in the corner, as well as being held up by the four clued up commuters who stand around the sad-sap non-reader, the magazine’s title, “Is it the end for Blair?” is repeated four or five times within in the ad. It also implies, that anyone who knows anything, thinks that Blair is about to leave.

I can only assume that the dead-tree press loves this because it sells lots of papers. Dan had bought all the papers this weekend, as had someone I spoke to at the meeting. They like change, because it makes news. Also to show that no Prime Minister can stand without a press consensus.

Cameron, on the other hand, seems to be getting a very easy ride. He appeared on the inside cover of the News of the World in an article promoting GQ. Am I right in think that GQ ran the interview with Hague, in which he claimed to have drunk 8 pints a day. The Cameron piece was surprisingly colourless – under the headline “A model leader” – the article mentioned how he’d be appearing the magazine wearing a £3000 designer suit. I think that must be a Saville Row number. Cameron is Saville Row. Blair is Paul Smith off the peg.

Going to vote this evening. K. was annoyed at not being able to find any info on Hammersmith and Fulham candidates anywhere, so voted green, in protest I think.

Labour are running on lower taxes and no tram, not Labour policies at all then. Opportunist fuckers.