A Week is a Long Time in Politics

Harold Wilson said that. I've heard the expression repeated a lot on the radio recently by knowing correspondents, who always add, "...as someone once said." I often wonder, when I hear those words, whether they actually know it was Harold Wilson, or whether they think they're tipping a wink to their audience many of whom won't even have been born when Wilson was Prime Ministrone.

So. How long has Tony Blair got? My opinion, he's already gone past the point of no return, past his sell-by, etc. etc. Political pundits all talk about Blair wanting a "legacy" to leave behind, but there's nothing on the horizon that remotely resembles that. They talk about this anti-terror legislation as being the thing, but it's so obviously a badly thought-out hotchpotch of knee-jerk illiberal measures, that it hasn't a hope of being a lasting legacy.

It strikes me as being similar in nature to the dangerous dog panic a few years ago: hasty legislation (4 months on from the July bombings) that doesn't do anything to address the real problem.

90 days detention, for example. Yesterday, the spin merchants were trying to tell us that the maximum 14-day period had only been used on 11 occasions this past year, and in every case a charge had then been brought. Which is the wrong argument to make, because they're trying to convince us that a mere 14 days sees too many potential terrorists being released without charge. Where was the evidence for that?

Instead of extending the period, the legislators should be looking at the current practice of ceasing to investigate once a charge has been brought. It's clearly some legal loophole that forces upon us the convention of investigate-then-charge-then-incarcerate. What we want is an ongoing investigation overseen by an independent judiciary (but not just one judge) and immune from political interference.

My contradictory impulse is that I'd like to think we had a security service with balls, some extreme sanctions and dirty, secret fighting. Not a bunch of civil servants pushing paper, but some James Bond-style action, with real intelligence, and some black ops that we only get to hear about in 50 years time. Follow the fucking money, the trail of weapons and explosives - who is buying what and for whom, and blow the fuckers off the face of the planet. Expose the filth who are supplying all these crateloads of semtex.

But I digress.

Tony Blair: he's lost the dressing room, hasn't he? First Premier to be sacked this season, I reckon. Gone before the end of the month.