I signed up for the ballot.

You know, the ballot.

Yes. I have put my name forward to be witness to what will almost certainly be one of the least interesting, least revealing conversations ever to take place on the subject of utterly crucial decisions and the lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

I’ve sent off my application to see Tony Blair testify to the Iraq Inquiry, in the hope that they may do more than offer him a lemon cream.

Paranoia

I always feel when I do the lottery – which I don’t any more since a friend of mine accurately summed it up as a tax on those who have poor mathematical skills – that I’m putting myself forward to be noticed. Random events of all sorts, it seems to me, share the list of suckers who are willing to engage with them, and dole out rewards and horrors. For example, if you play the lottery, you are also entering the ‘struck by a frozen turkey falling from an executive jet’ tombola and the ‘eaten by an escaped panther’ lucky dip.

Clearly.

In this instance, that sense of alarm is doubled because it seems to me entirely plausible that everyone who applies will go on a list of dangerously alert and radical democrats who should clearly be thought of as possible extremists. I know it’s ridiculous, but at the same time, it’s not. We’ve got ourselves into a real old panopticon society these days, and I have no doubt that the applicants really will be scrutinised for signs of all sorts of things before ever the winners are admitted to the sacred viewing gallery of the Chilcot Inquiry. (The irony is that I’ll probably have a better idea of what’s happening if I read the Channel 4 twitter feed, @iraqinquiryblog. Incidentally, if it’s ever in your mind to ask why the world is rubbish, the clue is in the fact that the feed has, at the time of writing, a grand total of 713 followers. That’s people informing themselves about the issues, then.)