Wristbands and stars

Julia Heartless-Sewer ridicules the parallels between making refugees wear bright red wristbands and the yellow star of the Holocaust in her awful “I have controversial opinions for money” column.

What she (intentionally) misses is that the Shoah didn’t start bang on 30 January 1933. It arrived slowly, with even Jewish people thinking badges were the end, not the start.

The biggest thing I notice about this is that the people who say the wristbands are fine and dismiss the parallels with the Holocaust are more dismissing the Holocaust itself than anything else.

The foul stench of antisemitism can always be found hiding behind the polite but equally disgusting dislike of refugees.

The only good fascist is a dead fascist

The “Britannia Ball” compared to a Mosley rally, from Stuartsorensen’s Blog

The fascist “Britain First”, which while tiny are still fucking dangerous, have decided to go quiet during the general election campaign so as not to distract from UKIP’s campaign.

That tells you more about UKIP than it does about Joshua Bonehead’s Paul Golding & Jayda Fransen’s pathetic BF rabble.

I know you think UKIP are anti-politics and will give the Establishment a kick up the arse and so forth, but what you get for voting for UKIP’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Fascism is… fascism.

Remember, fascism doesn’t arrive in jackboots and smash windows. Fascism arrives via the ballot box, pretending to be your friend. Then it puts on the jackboots and starts smashing windows when it’s too late to do anything.

If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas. If you lie down with UKIP, you get screwed.

The wrong answer

Image by Coventry City Council – CC-BY-NC-ND

Amidst a low turnout, the people of the English cities have largely rejected adopting a London-style Mayorality system.

The basic reason for introducing such a system is that local government is broken in England. Councils have either got permanent, unmovable majorities on one hand or shifting, unstable coalitions on the other. Neither is working well: permanent majorities lead to a lack of dynanism in councillors and stodgy, slow-to-react councils.

Shifting coalitions and their cousins – councils swinging between one party and another each election – mean that councillors spend their time fighting (sometimes literally), backstabbing, playing to the gallery and otherwise being very insular and political. This results in council policy forever changing and the council services being disrupted.

The Mayoral system is meant to stop that. Instead of such poor extremes, you get one man (almost always a man, alas) with the power concentrated in his hands for four years and the councillors act as the check and balance on him. This sounds great in theory but in practice it’s the same again – either it’s permanently the same man or it swings back and for between two wildly opposing men, albeit only once every 4 years rather than every May.

The solution is obvious to all politicians at all levels, but they don’t like it. They don’t want to let the solution in through the door because when people discover how well it works, they start wanting it for everything. The solution is the supervote, also known as the single transferrable vote (STV).

The supervote put all of the power in the hands of the electorate. The parties no longer have the power of patronage; there is no longer a need to vote for someone you dislike in order to avoid electing someone you dislike more; there are no permanent majorities; there are no dramatic swings. And above all there’s no tactical voting. Because of that, the need to punish or reward the distant national government in London via a local election disappears.

What the individual votes for, the council gets. Your party’s candidates are all elected together but you get to chose between them. Suddenly you have all the power over the parties and the councillors. If you’re on the left of Labour, you can vote to push Labour locally to the left. Ditto if you’re on the right of the Tories.

Supervote does result in more coaltions, but they are more stable – councillors don’t have to guess what people want, they already know. Political infighting doesn’t work because the public will use the supervote to punish it. We get more responsive councillors and a more responsive council. Turnout goes up because the vote means something. If your councillor is rubbish, you have another one to turn to. If they’re all rubbish, you have the power to remove them – even without changing what party you vote for.

The power of the supervote is truly awesome. And that’s why the politicians don’t want you to have it.

We wake up, we go out, smoke a fag, put it out

I’m a smoker.

I have been since my early teens. Smoking and me were made for each other. I love the taste. I love the smell. I love the sophistication that I feel with a fag between my fingers. Each cigarette is something I look forward to, enjoy lighting, enjoy drawing the fumes into my asthmatic lungs and enjoy stubbing out at the end. Smoking and me were made for each other. When I’m not smoking a cigarette, something is missing from my hand.

I’m an anti-smoker.

I don’t like other people’s smoke. As much as I would really enjoy a ciggy with a pint, I’d rather not share my pint with other people’s smoke. I love a cigarette between courses of food but don’t want someone smoking during my meal. A very long train journey is a nightmare for me without the gaspers. I’d rather not share a carriage with a single person puffing on a fag – let alone sit in a (now long forgotten) smoking carriage.

Perhaps that lets me make the following comment about current government policy on cigarettes.

Cigarettes are expensive. This is A Good Thing. The cost deters people from starting and makes the insane cost of nicotine replacement therapy seem reasonable. (Yes, a full weekly course of NRT costs less than a week of cigs, but smokers discount the cost of the daily packet as if it was background voices and inflate the cost of NRT because it seems so upfront).

The latest wheeze (ho ho) is to put cigarettes out of sight. You go to buy them and they’re not there. The shop assistant unlocks a door, fishes them out and sells them to you blind.

I have my preferred brand – Silk Cut Silver, if you must know. It’s low tar and low nicotine. Of course this is worse than not smoking at all, and I agree it it’s probably no better than smoking Capstan Full Strength. But as I queue at the kiosk, if they don’t have my brand, what do I do? Write off the queue time or buy something else? I’m human. I’ll buy something else. And it’ll be stronger. So for the next 24-48 hours, I’ll be smoking something that tastes stronger, has higher tar and has higher nicotine. That’ll help when the day comes to give up.

But the worst part of this stupid idea is that it makes the price of fags completely discountable. Yes, us smokers will choose by price to a degree, despite what I said above. But if prices continue to rise above inflation, the motivation for stopping increases. Poorer smokers – and I’ve been a poor smoker, even whilst in the arms of the welfare state – will buy a packet of 10 and eke them out when the price gets too much. Eventually, they’ll turn to their GP and ask to be enrolled on the humiliation-and-hectoring course the NHS does free to help you quit (that would *so* not work for me – the words “who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” would bubble up uncontrollably).

What has happened here is that the price of cigarettes has now been hidden. Not the packets, not the subtle advertising, not the craving – just the price. As the cupboard doors appear over the fags, so the connection between price and the cost of smoking disappear. Already WHSmith do this – their railway station outlets put a £1 premium on the cost of 20 fags. The shop assistants usually warn you. “They’re £8.10 here and there’s a real shop down the street”. When they don’t warn you, you’re faced with paying £8.10 there and then. And you do, because you’ve queued and because you’re gasping and because you don’t want to shop elsewhere and you don’t want to annoy the shoppie… So you pay.

And so it will be when all the cigarettes are covered up. The supermarket hegemony will jack the prices because you can’t see them. The local shops will undercut them, but only by a few pence. The NHS’s major weapon against smoking, the control of the price, will be broken and the rewards will be taken by the large retailers and the tobacco companies who are about to get a cigarette-based bonanza of cash.

And the losers? Well, the slow but steady rise in the cost of fags has benefited the NHS via the Treasury for 30 or more years. It has also pealed off the more casual smoker who choses to give up on Budget Day. The forthcoming free-for-all in prices will benefit neither. Smokers will be quickly immunised to the prices. But the retailers and the tobacco companies will be minting it.

The only loser will be the NHS. But then we’re under a Liberal-Conservative government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, that believes that the NHS is for losers only anyway. So it hardly matters.

 

Tear down this Bill, Mr Lansley

The government’s epetitions website is meant to be a place that we subjects can blow off a little steam without actually bothering our lords and masters.

That, however, isn’t to say it isn’t useful for those of us who want to take back parliament from the vested interests that are now running the show. When 100,000 people sign a petition, MPs have to look into having a debate about it – getting our voice into parliament, something many MPs (my own, Fester McVague, in particular) feel they were elected to prevent.

So here’s a petition that can make a difference, even if the result is only to bolster the ineffective opposition parties and shake the smug, self-satisfied consciences of the Liberal Democrat MPs who have let power go to their heads and their hearts.

If you’re a British resident, visit the Drop the NHS Reforms Bill epetition now – at the time of writing, it’s agonisingly close to the 100,000 signatures needed to force a debate, most of which were gained today.

Whatever you vote, and I don’t presume to know what goes on between you and a (secret) ballot box, if you’re British you have reason to be grateful for our NHS. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s ours and it’s run by people who are doing it for love not money, for people regardless of what they can or should be asked to pay. And it is ours, not the government’s, not big business’s, not Lansley’s, not anyone’s. The NHS is ours and we need to stop it being privatised by stealth.

I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more

It must be really easy to be right wing and reactionary. Toss a subject at a committed Tory and they’ve got an instant, knee-jerk answer that they didn’t even need to think about. Immigrants? Coming over here to do jobs white people aren’t prepared to do – send them back! Gays? They’re just trying to make their unnatural sodomy as acceptable as my heterosexual sodomy. The poor? Why do they expect handouts – can’t they pull themselves up like I did with my free education, free university and free healthcare? Taxes? Why should I pay a portion of the salary I earn in my job in insurance into a system that I probably will never claim from?

Being left wing and progressive is far harder. With every issue, you have to sit down and actually expend mental calories on deciding what the best course of action is, weighing the greater social good against your own upbringing and class. Burkas? Well, I deplore the circumstances that would force them on to women, but I’m loathe to dictate what someone can and can’t wear. Overthrowing dictators in far off countries? In principle there’s something to be said for not allowing murderous scum to run a country, but in practice overthrowing them always makes life worse for everybody and smacks of colonialism. Religion? I don’t have one and I don’t appreciate having religion – any religion – thrust down my throat, but if I’m entitled to be an atheist, then others are entitled not to be.

See what I mean?

Today I came face-to-face with one of these dilemmas. As I went into the supermarket, a bunch of holy-looking do-gooders stopped me and pressed a shopping list into my hands. It seems that Wirral has now got a ‘foodbank’ and they’d quite like me to donate to it. I took the list and spent around half an hour standing in an aisle having a mental debate as to whether this is a good idea or not.

There are several problems with foodbanks. First and foremost, since the Second World War, society and government have agreed that it’s the state’s responsibility that no one in the UK should ever starve. Successive governments have tried to shake free of this basic, humane commitment but we’ve never let them. Until now. Now, with the country suffering from the wastrel ways of obscenely rich bankers, we’ve decided to cut the poorest loose to go hungry and die. This is wrong. But if I donate to a foodbank, am I not doing ‘Dave’ Cameron’s job for him? Shouldn’t he be finding the money to prevent people dying of hunger in a first-world nation rather than wasting it on selling nationalised banks at a loss?

Then there’s the problem of foodbank schemes being run by churches. There’s an element of “sing for your supper” implicit in the leaflet they handed me. If you claim from a foodbank, the church is likely to be highly involved – you go there to collect the food, you have a talk with a god-botherer spouting Jesus, you get pressured to start coming on Sundays and pretending you believe. You may be financially bankrupt, but churchgoers are often the first to believe that others are morally bankrupt as well. Your food is going to come with a side order of Jesus and a desert of condemnation and pity. This type of crap was one of the reasons Attlee’s 1945-1951 government took poor relief out of the hands of local vicars and brought it into the machinery of the state – nobody should be forced to pray for their supper, let alone be judged for it as well.

Then there’s the taking away of people’s choice. Yes, that’s a very right wing thing to say, but bear with me. When you get your Family Allowance and Income Support and the other meagre crumbs from the LibCon table, it comes as cash. This lets you choose what you do with it: shoes for little Johnny this week, an extra pint of milk for me tomorrow, a bus ride to his mum’s so she can look after the kids for a few hours… all tiny, but all very important. When you’re poor – and I’ve been poor – your world shrinks. The giro is the only thing that expands your horizons, even if only slightly. Instead, we’re now routinely leaving the least able to cope with no money at all; they go to a foodbank and they get… a bag full of food. Chosen by a middle-class shopper, handed to them pre-packed by a middle-class do-gooder, that tiny horizon is slapped shut – you’ll get what you’re given.

Also, I doubted what the middle-class shoppers of the Wirral would choose for their poorer brethren. And I was right: as I left the store, the modest pile of groceries was all “Value” items – inedible “Value” cornflakes, “Value” packet soups so thin can see the bottom of your cup when you’ve made them, “Value” toilet paper that will tear you a new one. The middle classes of Wirral had spoken: you foodbank users, look at our largess – nasty crap we wouldn’t give house room to, awful shite we would never eat ourselves. Gee, how generous of my fellow man.

So, what did I decide? After half an hour standing there, completely unable to decide whether these points outweighed my general humanity, I decided that the socialist thing to do would be to donate to the foodbank and get angry about it later. So I did. And I bought brand names, stuff that I would choose for myself, not stuff I would choose for others, because that idea stinks. Heinz soups; Colgate toothpaste; Lynx shower gel and so forth – stuff that people, that I, would want.

But now I’m angry. I’m very very angry. THIS IS WRONG. Foodbanks shouldn’t exist because they shouldn’t be necessary. We MUST get these awful, nasty, cruel Liberals and Conservatives out of government next time. And we must send a message to Labour: look to Beveridge. Look to Attlee. It’s time to roll back Thatcherism. We’re as mad as hell, and we’re not going to take this any more.

The Prime Minister displays his common touch

Let them fail

If you listen to the business news on the Today programme or read the inside pages of the Financial Times, you may have spotted something called "LIBOR".

LIBOR is the interest rate banks charge to each other. Because banks are big and have vaults stuffed with money, it's a low-risk deal to lend money to other banks and the rates are therefore only slightly more than the base rate of the central bank in question. A few years ago the rate rose significantly as the risk of the money a European bank was lending would go to an insolvent US bank increased. It wasn't possible to say with confidence which US bank was insolvent. If I presented you with a bowl of strawberries and said "one of these is rotten but the rest are fine", you'd likely reject the entire bowl. The markets did the same: they stopped lending money to the US banks because one of them was rotten. We called it the "credit crunch", and ultimately it brought down a number of banks and then the economy itself.

This rate has started to rise again, this time propelled from the other direction: the US banks are frightened that a European bank is secretly insolvent. There are a number to pick from: many large multi-purpose banks in France and Germany have heavy investments in Spain, Greece and Italy. If any of those countries defaults or if any banks in those country go bankrupt, there will be a domino effect that eventually will hit the US banks. So the liquidity in the markets starts to dry up again.

Last time round we pumped money into the system. We underwrote the losses of the banks, encouraged weak banks to merge into strong banks, even bought capital in the failing banks to keep them afloat. The reason was stark: the crisis wasn't anticipated. If allowed to play out, the next morning that cash machines would empty and not be refilled. Shops would not get a float delivery from Securicor. People paid in cash would go unpaid. People paid by BACS would be unable to access the money. The world as we knew it would've stopped.

This time, I suggest, things are different. If we see this happen again, we must let the banks fail.

Not, of course, an undisciplined collapse — more like controlled demolition. It should be easy, with forewarning, to protect the money of ordinary savers and the loans of ordinary mortgage payers. It should be easy to transfer these assets and liabilities to one of the state-owned banks we got last time round. If governments move quickly, they can take the ordinary accounts, the current and mortgage accounts, the savings accounts, the stuff people in the street like us have and move them to a safer place. The remaining sick bank left behind should be allowed to fail and take the bad debts with it.

To a degree we did this last time, especially with Northern Rock, but we made the startling error of taking on the bad debts with the good and leaving that badness on the government's books. We even facilitated Northern Rock taking the most profitable part of its business and moving it off-shore, out of the reach of the government. Last time we paid for the banks' mistakes. This time we must seek to profit from them in some way.

It's odd to hear such words coming from the keyboard of an old-fashioned socialist like me. But as long as the savings and houses of the ordinary people are protected, I don't give a stuff what happens next. The banks and the markets are not the real enemy anyway: the real enemy is and always has been unemployment. Rescuing the banks ruined the economy. This increased unemployment. I'm willing to bet that letting them fail won't be as bad. If it costs nothing to the government and sweeps away a lot of unsound debt, the increase in unemployment should be less than what it would've been with another rescue. It'll also be quicker to bounce back from.

Why is unemployment the enemy? Because unemployment, any unemployment, is a very bad thing. It's bad for the unemployed person, left almost penniless and subject the humiliation of claiming Jobseeker's Allowance. It's bad for the unemployed person's spouse, left working harder or scrimping further. It's bad for the unemployed person's children, left hungry and uncertain. It's bad for the unemployed person's community, as ordinary transactions dry up and more businesses fail leading to more unemployment. It's bad for the unemployed person's region, struggling to get investment as potential employers would rather invest were there is less??depravation. It's bad for the the unemployed person's country, because high unemployment goes hand in hand with rich people getting richer and poor people getting poorer; eventually, you have riots and looting.

In a land with total employment, the workers have power. You're difficult to replace; the company wants to keep you and will invest in your skills and raise your wages and generally try to be seen as benevolent to keep you in your job.

In a land with high unemployment, the companies have power. You're easy to replace; the company doesn't care if you leave and can hire someone with skills rather than training you. The company knows you won't ask for high wages because you fear replacement by someone cheaper. They don't have to appear to be benevolent — they can act like bastards to extract more work from you. If you don't like it: go and be unemployed instead.

Of course, there was a flip-side to this. Full employment in Britain brought real power to the workers and we misused it. We tried to use it to bring down governments (succeeding twice). We tried to use it to screw fantasy money and non-productive jobs out of employers who then went bankrupt. We tried to use it to force the government to buy the failed businesses to keep us in work (and succeeded: think British Leyland). But the answer to this was not what Thatcher did — deliberately create unemployment, foster it to destroy the workers' power and then stigmatise the unemployed to keep the fear of unemployment high. There were many, many other ways that wouldn't've destroyed so much of urbanised Britain without creating a permanent hard-core of unemployable people, whose children and grandchildren are now on our streets, equally unemployable.

But the idea is still in the minds of economists and politicians. If unemployment is over 2 million, the workers will remain powerless and the corporations will make more money faster. They rescued the banks last time knowing that it would push unemployment up. Next time, they should let the banks fail gracefully, otherwise we're going to keep rescuing them again and again and each time we'll push unemployment up more.

I predict a riot

A third night of rioting, now mainly based around the concept of looting stores then setting them on fire. It's a new thing for Great Britain, something not seen since the (more politically justifiable) riots of the 1980s.

Three years ago, a chain of events previous thought impossible occurred. The banks had become reckless, spending money they didn't have on schemes they didn't understand. Lined up like dominoes, exposed to each other's risk, they started to teeter and then fall. Each bank that fell took the next one along with it. The good times, the boom we'd got used to under Labour, turned to a bust. The government staggered on but lost the following general election and in came the Tories with Liberal support.

What happened next was predictable. Senior Tories are very friendly with senior bankers. Indeed, senior bankers are the senior Tories. Members of the Tory front bench gave up lucrative jobs in investment banks to take their seats in parliament. The new government had an emergency budget where they made it clear to everyone that the collapse of the banks had to be paid for. And it was to be paid for by the poor. Taxes on the poorest rose whilst tax on the rich (the "wealth generators" in Reaganism's discredited "trickle-down" theory) was cut. The tax on bankers' bonuses was removed as was access to welfare for the sick and disabled. Cuts were made across the board, except in the most leafiest of the Tory Shires, where more money was made available. And the bankers would not pay for their mistakes: we would, as they were rewarded by further showers of unearned cash.

We all saw this and most of us were appalled. It was unfair, even disgusting. The students and the "feckless" public service workers took to the streets, but mostly we shrugged and thought "well, that's the price to be paid" or "well, that's what Tories do".

But we forgot that there was a class of people who saw this but were unable to vocalise the scandal they felt. A class of kids from the fourth or fifth generation of poverty, with no aspirations because we'd given up on them and forgotten them. A class who were to be hit hardest by the foolishness of the super-rich. A class who didn't protest about student fees because they were never going to university in the first place.

What that class saw was the same as we saw: the rich getting richer as the poor paid. They saw the middle classes queuing outside the Apple store for the latest glass-and-aluminium trifle while their parents couldn't get Jobcentre Plus to pay for tonight's dinner. They saw this deep inequality. A spark — another murder by armed policemen but it could've been anything — and the place was on fire. This class, however, saw an opportunity. They saw that they had been shafted by society, by the bankers, by the Tories and they did what our consumer culture should have expected: they took supermarket trollies and looted. They stole the trainers they're heavily sold but can't afford. They stole the games consoles they see advertised everywhere that they didn't have. They stole the posh frocks and the expensive food, the carpets and the furnishings, the things they didn't have but we'd continued to make them want.

Of course, it spread wider than that – the looters included people from further up the social scale who wanted their slice of the freebies. It spread beyond the worst places in London to the nicer suburbs and then to the country's other cities as people all wanted what they'd been promised but couldn't have. Our leaders sat in their luxury villas in Tuscany and the like, enjoying the foreign holidays this class will never get. And back home, the shopping streets burned.

None of this provides an excuse. Looting and rioting achieve nothing and invariably make the social, political and economic situation in the areas affected far, far worse. There was zero chance of this right-wing Liberal/Conservative government pouring jobs and investment into these areas before; there's zero chance now. Rioting destroys the very homes and jobs the rioters are concerned about; it is the ultimate in self-defeating action.

Meanwhile, it has thrown up something interesting. At a recent royal wedding, 5000 police were available to keep the pampered couple safe from the rest of us. As London burnt, the Met could only find 1500 officers to do anything and said they were powerless to stop it. At the wedding, the police happily rounded up any elements that didn't fit the picture postcard image the Tories wanted us to see; the homeless and the republicans and the people having a party dressed as zombies all went into the cells. As London burnt, the police said they were powerless to stop it. During the protests over Liberal??hypocrisy??on student fees, thousands of officers 'kettled' peaceful women and children for hours whilst politicians talked about how 'violent' they'd been. As London burnt, the police said they were powerless to stop it.

'Dave' Cameron flew home overnight. He needs to be visible but not let anyone see how tanned and well-fed he is (Crisis? What crisis?). He needs to be seen to be in control whilst continuing his streak of doing nothing. He needs to tell everyone it will get better whilst??pursuing??policies that he knows, truly knows, will make everything worse. And in the midst of this active inaction, he needs to remember that while the looters are responsible for what they've stupidly done, he is also responsible for goading them into it.

PM in a bubble

I'm a news junkie. I have been for years, quite possibly since the miners' strike, certainly since the Brighton bomb. It's just in me: I love news. It should come as no surprise that the News of the World phone hacking scandal (that was – it's now hundreds of times larger than that) has had me transfixed like no story since the Coalition??negotiations??or September 11.

It's not just the shear inevitability of the story as it unfolds – albeit with some surprises in the detail – but the fact that it has proved something those of us on the left have been saying for years: Murdoch has power and influence on government that is truly terrifying. We all knew this, we all said it regularly, but nobody did anything about. When people like me shouted that Murdoch having Christmas dinner with Cameron was a bad thing, most people shrugged and said "so?". Certainly the politicians chose to ignore the disquiet, even politicians on the left.

But now it stands revealed: Murdoch has Cameron's balls in a drawer, as he had Blair's before him. That he failed to get Brown's balls was why he destroyed the man (Gordon didn't help by being useless as PM, of course). So when Murdoch announced he wanted to take full control of Sky, Cameron squeaked his approval and the opposition merely murmured, if they said anything at all. The government couldn't object, didn't want to object, because Murdoch had more than the Prime Minister's ear: he had (or was??perceived??to have) the power to destroy Cameron and his shoddy little government.

Adding Andy Coulson, a Murdoch favourite of the past, to the Downing Street staff helped Cameron keep Murdoch on side. It also helped Cameron with one of his biggest problems: the man doesn't have the common touch. Yeah, sure, Cameron has enough of Blair's earnestness and Clinton's empathy to make people believe that he's one of us. But he isn't. He's the rich son of a very rich father, he went to a private school and married a millionaire's daughter. He lives with other millionaires and has staff to look after his house. Whether or not he knows the price of a loaf of bread is unimportant – he's never even considered the idea of looking. It just gets put on his American Express Centurion Card and it gets paid by his accountant the moment the bill is due.

Cameron has no experience of small change or ??5 notes. He's never had a mortgage, he's never paid his own car tax. He's never arranged for a plumber to come nor tried to start the boiler. That was why he needed Coulson: someone who had done all those things but also was comfortable with the posh knobs like Cameron and Osborne that he was going to have to knock about with. Coulson could provide the common touch, slipping him details on basic things we all do for ourselves that Cameron had never done – never even conceived that people would do for themselves.??In Cameron's bubble, there was nobody who could provide this experience and expertise so hiring someone from outside was the way to go. It could only be a bonus that Murdoch himself provided a reference.

I'd assume Cameron thought he was buying himself some peace from Murdoch. The PM-in-a-bubble had no way of knowing how bad things were at News International. Indeed, he didn't want to know; it wouldn't matter anyway as it was never going to come out; and his close circle saw it – still sees it – as their job to keep their isolated, otherworldly PM-in-a-bubble in his bubble where he wants to be. When Ashdown and Rusbridger and others went to his advisors and tried to tip them off, they nodded, agreed and didn't pass the message on: the PM's bubble was not to be burst for a pair of lefties, or indeed anyone else.

People have disbelieved Cameron for saying that, while he asked Coulson for "reassurances" that he wasn't bringing baggage with him, he never pressed the matter and asked the natural follow-up questions. I do believe him. Why would he? In his Club, he never asks follow-up questions, rich gentlemen never do. With his colleagues he never asks follow-up questions, rich gentlemen won't answer. It would be a wrenching break with his character to even think of asking the basic questions you or I would ask. It'd be like asking the plumber how much he charged per hour: you and I would want to know that; Cameron might be mildly interested to see the invoice but really it doesn't concern him.

The problem with being the PM-in-a-bubble is that it has left him horribly exposed. Exposed as out-of-touch, yes, but also exposed to the popular backwash for the whole??sordid??News International affair. As a rich gentleman, he must be aware that he has implicitly at least given a handshake contract – the strongest kind – to Murdoch that the government will facilitate his takeover of BSkyB. That's now politically impossible, so it's been kicked successively further into the long grass in the hope that by the time the decision is made and Cameron is called to honour his handshake, the public will have forgotten the matter and the deal can proceed.

All this is why people on Twitter and in the non-Murdoch papers have been playing "Where's Dave?" today. The news conference he gave last week was designed to draw a line under the affair; when it became clear that a line could not be drawn and his association with Coulson directly, the poison of (and poisonous) Rebekah Brooks indirectly and Murdoch from afar was doing him real damage and he couldn't talk his way out of it nor just blame the previous government, he had to go to ground. If nothing else, the PM-in-a-bubble doesn't have someone to whisper in his ear the magic formula that the public would accept. He needs Coulson; and that's where the problems began.