Gordon Brown waits for Birnam Wood

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Nice Guardian piece by Jonathan Freedland.

As for personal ambition, the virus that brought down Macbeth, those looking kindly on Brown said he was cured of it. "I'm past caring," he mused privately on Friday, when asked about his own position. They point to his statement accepting that Clegg talk to Cameron first, all statesmanlike and above the fray, as if he had made the emotional shift from combatant to referee.

Others see the weekend’s events rather differently. The less charitable version pictures Brown in the No 10 bunker, scheming to cling on. It cites the late-night calls to Clegg – although those who heard them insist they were calm and businesslike – imagining a fevered Brown stabbing jotting pads with his thick pen, totting up the assorted minor parties to see if he could somehow reach the magic number that spelled power.

That the PM saw Clegg again today, in a clandestine meeting at the Foreign Office, confirmed Brown was far from ready to surrender. Instead, this man of uncanny resilience was clearly planning one more resurrection.

Which version is true? Is Brown now the becalmed statesman, planning his exit, or the bloodied survivor, determined to fight on? The likelihood is that, when it comes to Brown – the most psychologically complex figure to inhabit Downing Street since Winston Churchill – the answer is both.

It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.

Quote of the day

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“The voting system and the electorate have botched this election. Reality, as it sometimes helpfully does, offers a metaphor for what we’ve done. In Chingford, an Independent candidate decided to do something frightfully amusing and changed his name to ‘None of the Above’. But because of the way names were presented, he appeared as ‘Above, None of the’ – at the top of the ballot.”

John Lanchester, writing in the London Review Blog.

Why Twitter is different

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This morning’s Observer column.

One of the most intriguing and useful features in Twitter is the "retweet" facility. If you see something in your tweetstream that you think might interest others, then you can click a button to make it visible to the people who are following you. Retweeting has become so commonplace that its conventions have already been the subject of a serious study by the anthropologist Danah Boyd and her colleagues at Microsoft Research. But it turns out that retweeting is not just interesting in terms of discourse analysis; it's also the key to understanding why Twitter is a radically different form of social networking.

We know this because of a remarkable study conducted by some researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and published last week at a major academic conference…

Politics: the state of play

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BBC Political Editor, Nick Robinson has this helpful summary.

No party has enough seats to win votes in parliament without the support of members of other parties.

The Conservatives are the largest party with a total of 306 seats in the Commons – which would go up to 307 — if they win the delayed election in Thirsk and Molton – until now, at least, a safe Conservative seat.

If they tried to govern alone they would, in theory, face a combined opposition of 343 MPs.

In reality it’s somewhat different. Sinn Fein won 5 seats – and they don’t take their seats in the House of Commons – so the opposition benches reduce to 338.

A Con/Lib Dem coalition would give them a total of 364 – enough to govern comfortably.

A looser arrangement in which the Lib Dems agreed not to vote against a Tory Budget or the Queen’s Speech would mean 306 or 307 Tories facing a depleted opposition of 281 (that’s 338 – 57 Lib Dems)

If a Lib Dem/Conservative deal fails, Gordon Brown will try to form a government.

If Labour and the Lib Dems joined forces – the extra 57 votes are not enough to make them the biggest force even with the support of the Northern Irish SDLP (who sat on the government benches in the last parliament) and the one new Alliance MP who is allied to the Lib Dems. Together that’s 319 votes.

With the support of the nationalists from Scotland and Wales they would reach 330.

If the DUP joined too and the independent unionist and the new Green MP this alliance would have 338 votes in the Commons.

The BBC’s Ship of Fools

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Watching the BBC’s election night coverage one wondered if the Corporation’s executives had been gripped with a death wish. If ever there was a way of illustrating the Murdoch ratpack’s caricature of the BBC as an overmighty, taxpayer-featherbedded Quango, then the idea of chartering (for £30k, I understand) a Thames party barge and loading it up with drunken celebs, most of whom know zilch about politics, was a pretty good way of doing it. And the election studio, a cross between the bridge of a starship and a design-student’s diploma portfolio submission, seemingly required so much processing power that it couldn’t keep up with a simple RSS feed. All hat and no cattle, as LBJ might have said. These and other points were nicely made by Neil Midgley in his Telegraph review. Sample:

Unlike her exemplary [leaders’] debate production, Auntie did not shine on election night. Yes, it was a lovely big studio with the potential for lots of sweeping long shots, and far nicer – despite all the computer enhancement ITV could muster – than the ITN basement in Grays Inn Road. But a big chunk of the BBC’s graphics wall failed within the first five minutes, leading to a hurried close-up of Dimbleby that was no whizzier than ITV’s presentation of Alastair Stewart.

As they promised, ITV seemed faster with the results than either the BBC or Sky. Detail matters: unlike the BBC, ITV’s on-screen presentation of each constituency’s result gave us the crucial fact – the swing – from the get-go.

ITV made much better use of social media and citizen reporting, with Phil Reay-Smith getting genuine insight from bloggers Guido Fawkes and Will Straw. (Meanwhile, the BBC was on the boat with Bruce Forsyth.) As stories of voting irregularities started to dominate proceedings in the absence of concrete results, ITV had YouTube footage of frustrated voting queues in Manchester. (Meanwhile, the BBC was on the boat with Joan Collins.)

Downfall lives!

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Amazing stuff from Brandon Hardesty. Now let’s see how the IP lawyers will address this challenge. Infringement of the scriptwriter’s copyright, perhaps?

It’s had over 93,000 views already.

What iPads did to one techie’s family

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Apple has announced that the iPad will be on sale in the UK from May 28 and is enabling pre-ordering from next Monday (May 10). Already members of my family are eyeing me in a meaningful way. All of which makes this blog post by Chuck Hollis, Vice-President and Global Marketing CTO of EMC Corporation, such a sobering read. He relates how he bought an iPad and then left it at home for a week while he went away on a business trip.

I get home and there’s always a certain level of chaos at that time.

But there was a new theme this week.

“Who forgot to charge the iPad?”

“Hey, if you’re going to eat pizza and use the iPad, at least wipe it! How gross!”

“You already used the iPad this afternoon, it’s my turn!”.

“How do I print from this thing?” “Can we download some more games?”. “Check out this cool video”.

Tap, tap, tap.

All the PCs and laptops are basically not being used. All the Macs are not being used. All have been powered off.

Everyone in the family is waiting for their turn at the iPad.

My wife asserted her rightful place in the hierarchy later that evening, and took it upstairs to the bedroom to relax while watching TV. Tap, tap, tap. Occasionally, she showed me something interesting she found online. And smiling.

It All Flashed Through My Eyes

I don’t think I’ll be buying any more desktops going forward. I don’t think I’ll even be buying any more laptops going forward.

They’ve all been largely obsoleted (at least at my home) by a sleek $499 device that doesn’t really have any right to be called a ‘computer’ in the traditional sense.

Sure, there’s a handful of tasks that I still would prefer a real computer, but — amazingly — that list has now shrunk dramatically. In less than a week.

The members of my family immediately gravitated to the new shiny thing — no prompting, no encouragement, no migration, etc. They are drawn to it like a moth to flame.

I now have this strange love/hate relationship with Apple. And I think it won’t be long before I’m forced to make another trip back to the Apple store.

Hmmm…..

Be careful what you wish for

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That adage has been much in my mind in the last 24 hours. For decades the LibDems (and the Liberals and SDP before them) have dreamed about being the king-makers who could force the two big parties to accept proportional representation.

Now Nick Clegg is a king-maker; well, sort of. I’ve been reading today’s newspapers, and they’re stuffed with contradictory advice and analysis. The Beast (i.e. the British electorate) has inadvertently given itself a taste of what Cabinetformatie (as the Dutch call it) would be like in a fairer voting system.

It looks as though all of Clegg’s options are unpalatable. So the only thing to do is to try and work out some general principles. If I were advising the LibDems, this is what I would say:

  • What matters is the long-term renewal of our political system. PR is only a part of that. A more important part is the renewal of the political parties.
  • A formal alliance, coalition or power-sharing with either Cameron or Brown is a non-starter. Either would destroy the LibDems.
  • There will be another election soon. The party that forms the government will be savagely punished by the electorate for the cuts it will have imposed to placate the markets. So a priority for Clegg should be to distance his party as much as possible from active responsibility for the cuts.
  • The temptation to support Labour under Brown should be resisted, despite the argument that the Labour+LibDem combination got more than 50% of the national vote and the deathbed conversion of Labour to PR. Apart from anything else, the Parliamentary arithmetic would leave a Labour-LibDem pact short of an overall majority. It would be a one-way ticket to oblivion for the LibDems. And probably couldn’t even be sure of delivering a referendum on PR

    • So…

  • Cameron should be told that a minority government led by him will get LibDem support on an issue-by-issue basis. In other words, he should be given enough rope to hang himself. And while he is doing so the Tories will tear themselves apart as the pressures of governing bring their visceral ideological fissures to the surface.
  • In the end, two Tory mini-parties will emerge from the fracas: a deeply reactionary, xenophobic faction, akin to the current US Republican party, supported by an hysterical (but declining) cohort of print newspapers; and a relatively liberal, progressive party of the kind Cameron fantasises about. The former will decline into noisy marginality; hopefully, the latter will mature into a sensible and formidable centre-right party.
  • Meanwhile, the shock of defeat will eventually lead to the removal of Gordon Brown and may trigger a renewal of the Labour party into a more liberal, less-authoritarian, reform-minded, progressive political force. (Note, I say “may”.)

    • Er, that’s it. My consulting rates for political advice are quite reasonable, btw.