Madness.

Sheer, hectic, furniture-moving, crib-unpacking, hospital-bag-packing, book-finishing madness.

In all of which I’ve had little or no time to blog. Sorry ’bout that. By way of excuse: I have just finished my third book, a slightly different beast to the first two, and somewhat shorter, but still odd and – I hope – enjoyable. I’m not saying any more about that, because I want your attention focused on the one I am about to edit, provisionally titled “Angelmaker”, although that will inevitably change.

I say I am about to edit it. That conceals a multitude of sins; I have an incredibly small amount of time to work before my daughter enters the world and my life becomes one long parade of sleepless nights and paternal pride, comingled with a rumoured drop in IQ which will make reworking trickier. Wish me luck.

What else…? Well, yes, the Labour Party…

I was an Ed guy. Granted, I have recently been a Lib Dem voter, but I’m basically fuzzy-centrist, and I’ve voted Labour in the past (by which I mean: before Tony climbed into bed with George, took us to war on false pretences, and to my eye tried to abrogate the Geneva Convention, never mind all the other stuff I’ve whinged about here before now) so I have an opinion. And that opinion was: Ed.

Several things occur to me about the outcome. The first is that David’s subsequent display of petulance made me more certain than ever that he would have been the wrong choice, even if I did not feel that he was compromised personally by the FCO’s stance on torture, the Binyam Mohamed case, and Diego Garcia, even before we get to the war in Iraq. (Incidentally, if you haven’t seen the moment where he demands of Harriet Harman why she’s clapping at Ed’s remarks on the war, you must. It looks ill-tempered and dazzlingly inappropriate to me, but you may believe otherwise.)

The second thing is that Labour’s funding comes in large measure from the unions, and the claim that David would have been independent of them is baloney. (Also, why is this necessarily a good thing?)

Third – and this is the one I wanted to play with – is that the press is principally cross because Labour elected the less pretty one. David would have been so much sexier, so much more photogenic. He’s got that Aikidoka stare and that resolved brow. He’s hawt. He’s smooth. He talks like Blair. David would have been more fun. The fact that Ed might be more interesting as a candidate seems not to matter very much. It’s all about David being sad,. and how upset his wife apparently is with Ed.

Fourth: Ed needs a new scriptwriter, eftsoons and right speedily.

Fifth: I want to see a really serious Labour internal truth commission on the stuff which went wrong, with public results. Labour should be the party crying out for justice and for human rights, not angrily trying to get torture evidence accepted in British courts. If Labour has no moral courage, it has nothing at all.

Sixth: I really wanted to do a spoof news article called: Labour Elects Minger! because I am a terrible human being.

More mundanely…

I interviewed Andrew Robinson of the Pirate Party UK earlier this year, or at least, partially interviewed him. Summer caught up with us and I didn’t get his responses to my follow-ups before he was replaced by Loz Kaye, who has kindly said he will try to fill in the blanks. The interview pro-tem is up at FutureBook.

And finally…

My ongoing quest to make good bread is still on track. I’ve just bought some rye flour to see whether it takes me in a direction I want to go.