It Is Now

The waiting's over. Our collective breath is unbaited. My colleagues in the printed media and satellite news can muzzles the hounds they let loose to savage Gordon Brown.

For all their efforts, they left him bloodied, but unbowed. I doubt Labour ever really contemplated an alliance with the Liberal Democrats. The very prospect was a car crash waiting to happen.

As it is, Labour are now well-placed as spectators of the crash, rather than passengers. On Europe, expect divisons. All the Liberals in all the phone boxes in the world won't be able to protect public services. Inflation and interest rates are almost certainly set to rise. George Osborne, as Chancellor, will be in the driving seat. Heaven help us.

Ten Days That Shook The World

Hovering on a precipice is never an easy thing to do, at the best of times. When you're a newspaper editor faced with day after day of imminent financial apocalypse, however, it must seem near-impossible.

Staring into the abyss can get a bit monotonous when it's a daily feature of life. After all, there are only so many times readers want to know that their savings in some obscure Icelandic bank have gone down the plug hole. When we've already been told that we're on the brink of disaster, only the actual disaster is 'news'. It must all start to feel as if you're one of those chaps who used to parade our town centres carrying billboards proclaiming that 'The End is Nigh'.

For most of us mere mortals, it's easier to just switch off and watch The X Factor than to try to understand the intricate details of multi-billion pound bail-outs of our financial institutions. Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is demonstrating the kind of firm leadership we all wished he'd shown from the day he became PM. Anyone who was around during the last big market collapse (under the Tories) might be forgiven for feeling more reassured that we have a dour Scot at the helm in these difficult times. I know I am.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Brown seems to have an instinctive grasp of economics, even if his political judgement hasn't always been what it might be - witness his dithering over any number of issues over the past year. Well, now that the chips are down, he's rising to the challenge. I suppose a decade or more of privatisation and deregulation has taught us that the market doesn't always know best and, suddenly, nationalisation doesn't make us feel dirty any more. Still, I can't help feeling that £50billion of taxpayers money shouldn't really be 'injected' into institutions that have hardly demonstrated they can use money wisely. Far better to invest it in some decent, green, infrastructure.

It's not all doom and gloom, however. There are an awful lot of estate agents out there getting very good at Solitaire, I hear. After years of making a mint by doing err... not a great deal, really ... their chickens have finally come home to roost. According to the Daily Telegraph, they're now selling, on average, just one house a week. Such a shame.

Peace, Bread, Land

Having eulogised of late about the reasonable price being charged by Sainsbury’s for Dove’s Farm Organic Wholemeal Flour, it came as something of a shock when I went to stock up on supplies this evening.

After months perfecting my artisan bread-making techniques, I’d grown accustomed to paying just 60p for 1.5kg of the stuff, pleased to be able to make a decent loaf of bread for little more than 25p a go. I was hardly prepared, therefore, for the price-hike that faced me tonight. The same product has all but doubled in price, and now retails at £1.19 for a 1.5kg bag.

That’s why I’ve dusted the flour off my Bill Blunt Blast accolade, to award it to whoever it was at Sainsbury’s who has sanctioned this crippling price increase. Did they give a moment’s thought to the poor pensioner, eking out their pittance of an income, when they authorised this calamitous price rise? I doubt it.

If I were Gordon Brown, I’d be sleeping a little more uneasily in my bed tonight (and it’s worth stressing that no earthquakes are anticipated). His Government has failed to deliver peace in Iraq, and now the price of home-made bread has doubled. As for land, that’s a subject we might want to studiously avoid, lest we re-awaken Bolshevik instincts in the British population.

I’ll be writing to Sainsbury’s about this outrageous matter, I can tell you. Anyone tempted to add their voice to my campaign can do so by e-mailing their Customer Services people, here.

A New Day Dawns

It's not often that we awake, in the UK, to a new Prime Minister running our country. In the last 25 years, it's happened only 3 times, after all (and that's including today!). So, the occasion should give us pause to reflect, perhaps, on what the future might hold under Gordon Brown.

There are those who would dismiss Bill Blunt as someone who skips lightly across the pond of life, and ducks the hard political issues. Not so. I'm as much at ease discussing the future prospects for the nation as I am the Eurovision Song Contest. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at the list of topics covered by my blog will see that I cast my net widely.

And so, what of this Brownian future?

Expect a big announcement on something major, soon. Just as he stunned the world by handing over responsibility for setting interest rates to the Bank of England on his first day as Chancellor, so he'll want to stamp his mark on the history books with some dramatic change. It's Gordon's way. He's a man of substance to Blair's style. He's a thinker with a rigorous, intellectual mind, where Blair was an instinctive popularist. I doubt he'll be so easily pulled into the role of lapdog to the American President in quite the way that Blair was.

For what it's worth (and I have never held a brief for the man) I think he will be good for Britain.

Dander

When my dander is up, I don’t mind saying it is not a time to be a visitor at Blunt Mansions. I am normally an equable enough chap – slow to form hasty judgement, and equally swift in taking my time when responding to a crisis.

But certain things seem to get my dander up.

I’m not a doctor, so I cannot even tell you with any certainty where my, or anyone else’s, dander is located. I imagine it to be somewhere between the small intestine and the liver. I am sure someone with medical knowledge will enlighten me.

One thing I do know, however: a dander’s natural state is to be down. It is happiest when immotile, snuggled away not doing anyone the slightest harm. For the most part, we go about our day-to-day life without the slightest awareness of its workings.

When provoked, however, the dander can easily grow to four or five times its normal size, fuelled by gall, ire and bile. It can be prodded into life by the front page headline of any edition of the Daily Express, particularly if the words ‘asylum seeker’, ‘rising interest rates’ or ‘immigration’ are mentioned.

Most recently, I have found my dander stirring whenever I witness the attempts to canonise Tony Blair, our ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ prime minister. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of these rabid anti-Blairites you sometimes see popping up on the TV every now and again to have a go at the PM. But nor would I pretend to be one of Tony’s staunchest defenders.

I am, at heart, a man of balance. That doesn’t mean I have any truck with liberals, of course. Rather, I err towards the words of the late, lamented Aneurin Bevan, the firebrand Ebbw Vale MP who warned us that ‘People who stay in the middle of the road get run over’. I steer my course through life more as the drunk who makes his way home late at night, having squandered the few quid he’d put by for a taxi on one last drink. I stagger to the left, then I stagger to the right – but I never follow the white lines.

For the most part, I find this keeps my dander well in check. But Britain’s apparent willingness to jump into bed with our American cousins at the slightest invitation – whether this be the first Gulf War or the current one, brings my dander out in all its fearsome glory. I cannot (and will not) believe that the best interests of the British people are served by this ‘special’ relationship.

And Tony Blair’s lasting legacy will, I’m afraid, be precisely that he fed this same relationship with a slavishness bordering on sycophancy. I heartily hope that Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, will steer a different course in seeking out a ‘special friend’. But I’m not holding my breath.