Python for President

Having dipped my toes in the festering waters of US politics, I feel duty bound to offer a Republican comment by way of balance. Luckily, John McCain has actually managed to do something surprising enough to get a bit of notice in the press. He has named his own Vice-Presidential candidate. Her name is Sarah Palin, the niece of the famous Monty Python satirist Eric Idle. With a firm grounding in the 1960s satire boom and a successful television and movie career before writing one of the most successful musicals to hit Broadway in decades, Sarah makes a welcome addition to the Republican ticket. She would surely be the best qualified Vice President since internet-inventor Al Gore. There is no truth in the rumour that celebrity non-Vice Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has exploded.

Meanwhile, back in Blighty, nothing much has changed. The Foreign Secretary David Milliband has been in the Ukraine, trying to find somebody who has heard of him. Gordon Brown, meanwhile, has wisely been keeping well clear of the Russian Business and has instead been enjoying the delights of China, hobnobbing with gold medal winning Olympians and hoping that some of the Boris Johnston magic will rub off on him.

My contacts tell me that he has a new plan for regaining the political initiative. He hopes to acquire one of those big booming microphones that make Barak Obama's emptiest platitudes sound deeply profound. This would allow Gordon to win the next election without going to the trouble of thinking up any policies. I fear, however, that this his plan is doomed to failure – Cameron has already got there before him! Ah well, as Sarah Palin would say - "Always look on the bright side of life!"

VP?

I normally refrain from commenting on American politics – not my area of expertise, you know – but I see that young Barak Obama has picked an old acquaintance of mine as his running mate for the Presidency. I remember meeting Joe Biden back in'87 when I was visiting America and he was running his own Presidential campaign. He asked me if I had any good ideas for a speech. I was a bit jetlagged, I must admit, and I fobbed him off with some piece of guff I'd heard from Neil Kinnock – well, I wasn't going to give him any of the good stuff, was I? I never heard how that speech went for Joe.

Kinnock, of course, went on to lose the unloseable election. I'm sure it won't be an omen, though. In adding Joe to the ticket, Barak has recruited a man who is so electorally popular that ,when the votes in the Iowa Caucuses were counted, he managed to poll almost a whole percent.

Meanwhile, the Olympic Games are bound for Great Britain! And what a fine display the British Olympic Association put on during the closing ceremony in Beijing! It was a stroke of genius – who better to sum up Britain's youthful energy and creativity than that young popular musician Jimmy Page? And who better to sum up British sporting prowess than the celebrity 'footballer' David Beckham whose performance in watching the European Championships from his home in LA was so impressive during the summer? And to think that some people are worried about London's ability to live up to Beijing!

As the credit crunch continues to bite, I have decided to offer a few more tips as to how to weather the storm.

1) Have an accident at work; fall off a ladder or fall over a piece of carelessly discarded packaging for example. Then you can sue your employer for a few hundred grand. You needn't feel guilty – it is your right and they'll be driven out of business before long by the high oil price anyway. I recommend my son's new law firm. If you are a home owner, he can also arrange you a no-questions asked loan should you want to take a holiday, fill your tank with petrol or pay off all the other loans that you got even though you couldn't afford to pay it back.

2) Open a law firm specializing in convincing people to sue their employers over insignificant accidents that were nobody's fault.

3) Start offering dodgy loans to people who can't afford them – even if things go tits-up the government will bail you out for the good of the economy.

4) Get elected as an MEP – there is no money in being at Westminster any more. If you are Labour and in favour of keeping the John Lewis list then you've only got a few months till you're voted out and if you're a Tory then Cameron is going to make you give up your expenses! And just because that's what the taxpayers want! I really don't know what has happened to this country. If you are in the European Parliament the everyone knows you are corrupt but nobody can muster the enthusiasm to give a stuff so you are on the pig's back!

The Labour View

Hello loyal readers! Let me introduce myself – Harry Collar, great-nephew of the great Sir Bingham. When I decided to follow the family profession and go into politics in the nineties, Bing (or uncle Sir Bingham KBE, as I know him) wisely advised me to join the Labour party, having seen which way the wind was blowing ie. Ineffectually, from the mouth of Norman Lamont. As a result of following this wise advice, I have enjoyed a long career at the heart of power as a Special Adviser (spin doctor to you) to various Labour ministers. I could have been a minister myself but decided that I wanted to be able to wield some actual power.

Anyhow, Sir Bingham, in the interests of fairness (something we take very seriously here in the UK), has asked me to offer a few thoughts about the current political landsacpe. Well, it has been a very difficult few months for those of us who work for the Labour Party – although obviously none of it is our fault. The irresponsible news media we now have has been blaming us for things over which we have no control. Take Ed Balls' problems over the SATS tests which has been entirely blamed on Ed just because he is the minister responsible for schools.

This really is most unfair - Ed has had to take the blame for something which is clearly the fault of ETS - the private company contracted to do the marking. The whole point of such outsourcing responsibility to whatever bunch of gangsters produces the glossiest brochure is so that ministers don't have to take the blame! But do the press understand that? No. They want to blame the government just because we were elected to run the country and it was our idea to sell the contract in the first place. And, as a result, Ed will not be in a good position to succeed to the leadership should Gordon have to stand down – robbing the country of one of the finest political leaders of his generation. However, I believe the British people won't be fooled and will continue to support Gordon. I have already suggested the slogan for our next general election campaign - “Labour got us into this mess, Labour will get us out of it!”

It is true that, thanks to the childishness of the press, the leadership has become an issue. There is no denying it. Sir Bingham has asked me to run the rule over the contenders now that Balls is out of the running; Miliband, Harman, Straw and Johnson. Once I had looked them up in 'Who's Who' I came to the conclusion that any of them would make an equally fine leader and I have been diligent in contacting each of them to let them know, as well as e-mailing the PM's office to reassure them that this in no way contradicts my belief that Gordon is one of the finest leaders this country has had since Tony Blair; one who could continue in high office for many years yet. That said, I have been particularly impressed by Miliband's performance on the world stage as he has visited numerous countrys on Britain's behalf to meet foreign dignitaries and tell them who he is. Once I had looked him up, I also remembered that I once had the pleasure of accompanying Alan Johnson on a visit to my local hospital where he met some nurses and told them who he was. Harriet Harman, meanwhile, seems just lovely and Jack Straw wears glasses, which always makes someone look impressively intelligent, I think. Any one of them could be a terrific Prime Minister – as good as Gordon Brown, in fact. Yes, the future looks bright! Things can only get better!

holidays

Gordon Brown is off on holiday, sensibly showing how in touch with the common man he is by remaining in Britain instead of swanning off to stay at some sun-drenched luxury villa owned by Silvio Burlosconi or Cliff Richard or one of the Bee Gees like Tony Blair used to. Unfortunately this only serves to remind everyone that they are now too poor to be able to holiday overseas and are having to put up with Margate or Bognor Regis. What Gordon doesn't understand is that people in this country want their leaders to be aspirational – even if all they aspire to is to live like a king at someone else's expense.

I discussed this today over lunch with my old friend Ted, a stalwart of the Labour Party in the great days of the seventies when he wouldn't have been seen dead having lunch anywhere other than a greasy spoon which served tea in mugs – this being how one displayed one's connection with the common man in the old days. Luckily, a few years as a New Labour Peer has done wonders for his taste. Incidentally, I once asked him about the irony of an old socialist like him being an unelected member of parliament but he stoutly defended his position, arguing that by replacing the hereditary peerage with a system of patronage for sale the Labour Party had successfully dragged the House of Lords out of the middle ages and into the eighteenth century – an excellent example of modernization! He takes the same position towards outsourcing and PFI. Selling off the right to run prisons and so on worked perfectly well when Walpole was Prime Minister, he says, so why not now? Besides, if you don't let the private sector run things then you have to let ministers do it, and most of them couldn't run a bath. You can't argue with reasoning like that, can you?

I took the opportunity to ask him who he thought would be the next leader of the Labour Party; Milliband, Harman, Johnson or Straw? Once I had reminded him who each of them is, he offered the opinion that it didn't matter who it was so long as the Labour Party won. “After all,” he said, “Labour is the party of the poor and there are a lot more of them about now!”