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Tony Blair, in 1993, discusses the murder of James Bulger:

"We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions … These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name."

So that's another New Labour triumph, then.

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So it's two o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, and I'm beetling down the Bethnal Green Road to the Bethnal Green and Bow open primary to see which lucky scoundrel will get to be the Tory candidate at the next election.

I wonder who the hell's going to be there. We don't really have a blue rinse brigade in E2, so it'll probably be a few Asian businessmen and a token honkie like myself. The wife says there will be loads of IFE entryists. I shake my head. They've got better things to do than infiltrate the Tory party in a no-hope seat I explain.

I turn the corner into Club Row and there are dozens of Asian males ( 18-25 ) hanging out. I join the queue. No one is speaking English. Whatever happened to diversity, I wonder?

Eventually I get in and grab a seat near the front. The meeting starts ten minutes later.

First up is Kemal Butt, who, I like to think, has got to be one of the most unprepared candidates ever to put himself forward. He alone has neglected to have a leaflet printed. When asked about this, he says he must have deleted the email. Indeed, his searing honesty ( "No, I don't actually live here, but if elected I will visit a lot" ) was his most endearing attribute.

The format was talk for five to ten minutes, then field some questions. Asked the one trick question ( which they all really ought to have seen coming ) about what aspect of Tory policy he disagreed with. He seemed to disagree with the education policy. I didn't quite understand why.

He left to deafening silence.

Second up, was Ali Stow, a "posh bird from Kensington". I think I can call her that, because she did, three times at least. Unlike Mr. Butt, she loved and knew Bethnal Green backwards. She also loved Margaret Thatcher.

I'm not sure any of this was working. To my untrained eye, there were hardly any women in the room, and most of the yoof probably didn't even know who Margaret Thatcher was.

She too left to an empty silence.

Third in was Zakir Khan. He wasn't exactly mobbed on the way in, and none of the few ladies present took their underwear off and threw it at the stage, but this guy, evidently, was the star attraction. He played up to it too. Lots of rabble-rousing, appeals to the community, and how he was going to do everything for the community. Self-effacing gags too. He isn't educated, and went to the University of Life.

No matter that he came across as a bit of a thicko. Didn't seem to worry anyone. He left, not to a standing ovation, but as near as dammit.

There was then a ten minute break.

On resumption we had Claire Palmer. A twentysomething lawyer, she struck me as easily the best candidate. As in plausible. As in, if you watched her on Question Time, you wouldn't find yourself hiding behind the sofa embarrassed that you'd ever supported her. She even lived in the area, too.

For some reason she didn't get a standing ovation.

Fifth was Graeme Archer, a balding if not bald scotsman who lives in Hackney, and who writes for Conservative Home. I rather liked him. However, he did come across as a bit too hyped up and feisty. Asked if there was one Tory policy he disagreed with that he wanted to share with us, he replied that there were many, but he really hated the Iraq war. And that big slab of metal that's going up in Brick Lane. I wonder if he'll go far. His rebelliousness was charming, but he did seem very angry. Then again, he is Scottish.

Sixth, and by all means last, was a speak-your-weight machine candidate Maria Ioannou. There was nothing Mr. Cameron and his crew was doing that she disapproved of, apparently, so she chose instead to speak about how wonderful the Labour party had been at spreading diversity, trampling out intolerance, and spreading peace and love throughout the land.

But she still wanted them to lose the next election.

So there it was. We were then told that we would be have just one vote, and there would be a vote-off ( how between the top two, presumably ) if the winning candidate didn't score more than 50%.

It never came to that. Zakir Khan had walked it, and to be fair, he gave a pretty magnanimous and humble speech at the end. The vote had to be rubberstamped by all the genuine Tory members who were present. They did and it was unanimous. However, there didn't appear to be more than twenty of them, out of, three hundred, maybe.

Conclusions:

1. Open primaries are ridiculous. I'm not saying it was a stitch-up. The same rules applied to all candidates, and most of the losers didn't appear to have brought anyone along. Khan just rounded up a few of his mates, and the gig was his. Fair dos, really. But why would the Tory party want to have their candidate elected by a non-member? IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

2. Localism is key. All candidates are never happier than ambling down Columbia Road with a bunch of begonias bought for a fiver. It's a mere quirk of fate that has prevented them from actually buying a property here.

3. Greed is good. I think everyone was promising more bobbies on the beat, better schools, and better housing. No one mentioned the recession. It was all about what you can get from the government. Miss Palmer did promise a smaller state and lower taxes. It didn't seem to do her much good.

4. I'm really not sure I can bring myself to vote Tory at the next election. Still, others may have a different view.

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Jean Seaton, professor of media history at the University of Westminster and the official historian of the BBC:

"The BBC is for the nation and for the world. At a time when our banks and our politics look tarnished it is still a beacon admired and magnificent".

If you say so, love.

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"Reason is irrelevant: the water metaphors always win. Images of human tidal waves flooding the land with asylum seekers also swamp the facts. It hardly matters that 153,000 net immigration and asylum seekers do not "flood" 58 million people in this 92% white land. It's no use pointing out that the NHS wouldn't last the night without continuous immigration".

Announces an angry Polly Toynbee in April 7, 2004. Continueth the great dame:

"For this was never about objective facts in a time when all statistics are now dangerously disbelieved. This is about how people feel - both the migrants and the increasingly unwilling "hosts" (80% of whom are not in a hospitable mood). So No 10's summit yesterday was a necessary act of crisis-management. It will help for the National Audit Office to verify all immigration figures and for mini taskforces to check visa-issuing embassies. Of course registrars should query fishy weddings. But MigrationWatch, the Tories and their press will pour their poison over any figures. The hard political task is to calm the way people feel.

Borders are not "out of control", though with 90 million visitors, there will always be some illegals".

Yup, you get the picture. It's all been invented by the evil Tory Press. But, fast forward six years, an older, wiser, and equally despairing Polly Toynbee is throwing her hands in the air:

"How did it happen that the last decade saw the greatest inward migration the country has ever known – whichever estimates you choose? Unplanned, unwilled and only slightly controlled, "it just happened" is all you can get from experts and officials. Labour tried hard to prevent it, setting targets, being tough, angrily denouncing the wretched Home Office as "unfit for purpose". But the truth is more alarming – a lot of things these days seem beyond the power or nerve of government. No wonder trust in politics falls when grandiose promises, targets and "world class" boasting is matched by impotence".

I don't know, Poll. How did it all happen?

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What's amazing about Brown, among many things, is that no one has caught one of these temper tantrums on video. There must be some cabinet colleague with a mobile who's captured the whole thing. Unless it was a Nokia and Gordie threw it against a wall or somefink.

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I met the Devil's Kitchen the other night. What a charming young man he is, and considerably modest too, considering he could be forming a coalition government with Nick Clegg, George Galloway and other scuzzers in a few months' time. Power doesn't appear to have gone to his head.

Give it time.

Got me thinking, not for the first time, about this blogging lark. I think I got a bit fed up with it when Cameron revealed that he despised freedom of association as much as the rest of them. Who the hell was I going to vote for now? The Tories, clearly, couldn't be trusted. UKIP are nowhere when it comes to local elections too. And the LPUK, bless them, are a touch niche.
It's rather a special case this, what with living in Bethnal Green and Bow, as I may end up voting for the Respect Coalition just to keep the socialists out. There's a part of me that would like to vote Labour, just so that one day I can bore any grandchildren I have with the Story of That Time I Voted Labour. But frankly, as DK would say, they're cunts. So fuck them.
Respect it may be. At least they are against abortion ( or they were the last time I looked ), and they aren't going to screw the constitution. Sean Gabb makes a very persuasive case for voting Tory on this principle alone, which is all well and good if you live in a marginal. Well I do, but it's a Lab-Respect marginal. So Respect, who don't believe in postal voting in spite of the fact that they presumably benefit from it quite nicely, will be getting my vote.
Sure there are one or two policy issues I find problematic. But I like their curries, and I'm even in favour of the Hijab Gates . We need a permanent reminder that our culture has changed over the last decade, and this seems relatively less painful than honour killings and the cliteridectomies one routinely witnesses whilst strolling down Canrobert Street.
The question is, meanwhile, are we really heading for a coalition government? I found myself cheering in delight reading this post over at Political Betting. It reminded me that, even if I despair of the Tories so much, I do at least hate the Labour Party more. If I read this rightly, the opinion polls have been closing because so many erstwhile Labour voters who didn't vote in 2005 are coming back, merely to make sure the party doesn't get annihilated. Thankfully, though, they all live in poor areas where the Labour Party are going to win anyway. In the leafy suburbs that switched to Blair in 97 Brown is as hated as he always has been since he took over, and the Tory vote there is in the ascendent. Worcester Woman seems to like the toffee-nosed Cameroons, whatever my reservations.
The socialists may have tried to cook the books electorally these past 13 years by flooding the country with funny foreigners 90% of whom will vote Labour, but it's no good importing them if they all go and live in Labour areas. Bozos, eh? I mean if you're going to gerrymander, do it properly.
Still, I'll try and keep an open mind. There's an open primary for the Tory candidature here in a couple of weeks, and I've already got my ticket. Maybe I'll be dazzled by the wit and humility of which ever chinless wonder gets the nod. We shall see.

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Can it really be 13 months since the King of Compassion, Mr. Hopey Changey Thing got voted into power? As Rupert Cornwell in the Indy reports:

"He was a fresh face, eloquent, thoughtful, plainly intelligent. On Capitol Hill, his party had massive majorities. All of that remains true. Yet, just 13 months later, America is in about as foul a mood as when George W. Bush reached his nadir".

How surprising, not. The Obamaphiles were setting themselves up to fail. They had no justification for thinking he was up to it, and being a gang of anally-retentive liberaloids are no doubt quite relieved that he's as flaky and dithering as they are. As for all that hope and change stuff, that was just baloney. What they were really looking for was simplicity. They were just fed up with compromise and power-broking. They didn't really care what they decisions were, just so long as they were made.
Now Obama has spent a year trying to nationalise the health system, and is ready to compromise to get anything done, they're left scratching their heads, upset that Mrs. Palin of all people is the one pointing it out. She's a hill-billy, they're the sophisticates, after all.

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We will never see her like again.

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As predictable as snow in January, here it comes again.

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