Prescott in Parliament

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John Prescott, the sexually-challenged Deputy Prime Minister, took Parliamentary Questions for the first time since news of his carnal adventures broke. Simon Hoggart was there…

He tried hard. He repeatedly told us how much work he was doing in his new job. “The prime minister felt I was able to play a role … ” (Role, roll, get it?) At this the Tories collapsed in heaps of fake laughter. Or, more worryingly, genuine laughter.

Rob Wilton pushed them towards hysteria when he asked: “What steps will you be taking to ensure that staff working under you are not subject to sexual harassment?” “Yeah!” they cried, like Texans at a rodeo. “Keep the door closed next time!” a familiar voice shouted. It turned out to be my old chum Michael Fabricant, who has clearly put his attempt to become a serious, highly regarded statesman on hold.

Labour MPs had been told to provide relief. Anne Snelgrove said the party and the country felt “pride” at the role Mr Prescott was playing. This is not, perhaps, the first response when you ask the public about him. Your average punter does not look you in the eye and say: “I’ll tell you what I feel about John Prescott. Pride! Like any right-thinking Briton!”

Mr Prescott thanked Ms Snelgrove for her supportive remarks. “Any more would be very welcome,” he said with a grin that was not just rueful but rue-sodden. But he seemed to be clawing his way to safety. His language began to disintegrate. Doctors would take this as a sign of recovery. Then it all went horribly, terribly wrong.

Dari Taylor, a Welsh Labour MP who – tragically – was only trying to help, praised his work renewing neighbourhoods. “Is he still going to have a hands-on in these areas?” she piped, and as the Tories began to collapse and wheeze, and hug themselves as if being attacked by anacondas, his smile became grimmer. The Speaker had to shut them all up….

Decline of the turkey twizzler

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At last, some really good news…

The catering company that brought the infamous Turkey Twizzler into Britain’s school kitchens yesterday admitted that Jamie Oliver’s campaign against sub-standard school dinners had taken a healthy bite out of its earnings, wiping £10m off sales in six months.

The celebrity chef’s Channel 4 television series School Dinners has shaken the contact catering industry to the core, leaving steadily retreating revenues and a number of multimillion pound contracts that have failed to attract bidders – despite the promise of more money from the government.

Brand news

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According to the Guardian‘s report of a survey of what people think of various brands, the winners and losers are:

Top six best loved brands (percentage of vote):
1 Google (31.6)
2 Tesco (28.6)
3 Nokia (21.9)
4 eBay (19.2)
5 Persil (18)
6 Dell (17.4)

Top six most hated brands (percentage of vote):
1 Pot Noodle (20.6)
2 QVC (19.2)
3 Novon washing powder (15.2)
4 McDonald’s (14.8)
5 Tiny (14.7)
6 Fiat (13.6)

Just thought you’d like to know. Er, I’d never heard of Novon. And what, pray, is Tiny?

The survey measured “consumers’ emotional attachment to brands rather than their buying habits”.

Let’s Not Talk

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Deliciously icy comment by the Guardian’s resident Ice Queen, Marina Hyde, on New Labour’s latest fatuous idea. Sample:

In TS Eliot’s poetry, “the moment in the rose garden” came to symbolise a sublimely rare instant of visionary experience, that fleeting moment in which the eternal and the temporal meet, and the universe and one’s place in it seem to make intensely profound, intuitive sense.

Tony Blair had a moment in the rose garden the other day. Or rather what is tactfully known, in the parlance of our times, as a “moment”.

According to Downing Street insiders, it was in the No 10 rose garden that the PM chose to break the news to Charles Clarke that his desk was in the lift. Not only were Blair’s eyes said to be “red and tearful” as he escorted the former home secretary back to the house, but at one point – according to these curtain-twitching insiders – he was forced to break away from Clarke and go into a corner of the garden with his “head in his hands”.

Now, I do not dispute the import of this moment. But if I found my lachrymose self taking refuge in the shrubbery to hide my anguish at having to lose an overpromoted, incompetent bully like Charles Clarke, I feel sure I would suddenly, in a moment quite blinding in its profundity, be struck with the sense that it would not be long before my political (and probably psychological) number was up, and I would be shunted off to the great borrowed villa in the sky. …

As things stand, however, one suspects the prime minister understood his moment in the rose garden rather less fully than Eliot did his. Yesterday, he launched a new initiative that is designed to seize back control of the domestic policy agenda, with a new pledge to rescue public services, notably the criminal justice system. The name of this drive? Let’s Talk.

Let’s Not and Say We Did.

It is difficult to conceive of another name that would reflect so totally the lack of ideas left in the Blairite locker. In fact, Let’s Talk sounds like nothing so much as the ITV2 spin-off show to that earlier triumph of public badinage, The Big Conversation (which anyway nicked its name off a management-consultant-inspired BBC away-day)…

eBay 1, patent trolls nil

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

EBay started off the week on a high note this morning when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with it in its long-running patent scuffle with MercExchange …. Saying a permanent injunction against the use of infringing technology need not be automatically issued once it is determined that a patent has been infringed, the high court unanimously set aside a ruling that would have barred eBay from using patented technology owned by MercExchange and ordered a lower court to reconsider the matter. The ruling is a victory not just for eBay, but for any tech company accosted by a patent troll hoping that the threat of a court injunction will win it an easy settlement…

Diebold: that security hole is a feature, not a bug

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From GMSV…

Are electronic voting machines ever held to any baseline computer security standards? It certainly doesn’t seem so. To wit, the discovery of a security hole in Diebold Election Systems’ touch-screen voting machines that experts are calling the “worst ever” in a voting system. Discovered by Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer expert who was working at the request of Black Box Voting, the vulnerable technology is intended as a means of quickly upgrading the machines’ boot loader, operating system and application program. But it can be easily exploited to load almost any software without a password or proof of authenticity, potentially without leaving any signs the machines have been tampered with. “It’s worse than a hole,” Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told the Associated Press. “It’s a deliberate feature that was added by Diebold that we all believe is unwise.” Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who first cast doubt on the reliability of Diebold’s systems in a 2003 report, agreed. The machines are “much, much easier to attack than anything we’ve previously said,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “On a scale of one to 10, if the problems we found before were a six, this is a 10. It’s a totally different ballgame.”

Er, it was Diebold machines that decided the outcome of the last Presidential election, wasn’t it?

The invisible war

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Interesting Washington Post piece which helps to explain why Bush’s poll ratings aren’t even lower.

After three years, there are at least 550,000 veterans of the Iraq war. The Washington Post interviewed 100 of them — many of whom were still in the service, others who weren’t — to hear about what their war was like and how the transition home has been.

Their answers were as varied as their experiences. But a constant theme through the interviews was that the American public is largely unaffected by the war, and, despite round-the-clock television and Internet exposure, doesn’t understand what it’s like…