A sense of proportion

There's not much that David Miliband and John Major agree on. But the total lack of proportion shown by the BBC in leading with the silly story about John Sawers' wife's Facebook site presented a rare show on unity on this morning's Marr show. One expects such faux-scandals to dominate the Sunday redtops. On a day of crisis in Iran and Afghanistan, it should not be leading the BBC TV and radio bulletins.

Transatlantic endorsements

William Hague is tut-tutting because Gordon Brown has penned an article - or, more likely, one of his political advisers has done so on his behalf - which praises Barack Obama for his "foreclosure prevention fund", whatever that may be.

According to the Shadow Foreign Secretary: "A responsible British prime minister needs to be ready to work with either presidential candidate after the US election, and should neither take sides nor be seen to be taking sides."

Quite. After all, Hague's former colleague John Major reportedly ordered the trawling of Home Office files for dirt on Bill Clinton's time as a student in the UK, during the 1992 Presidential election, and Douglas Hurd sent a message to Republican Secretary of State James Baker, "May you bring down every duck in the last flight of the shoot." (Tories sent messages like that then)

Clearly a mildly partisan article for Parliamentary Monitor is the more heinous offence.

How long can this man hold a grudge?

I know it must be intensely irritating to John Major (for younger readers, he was the British Prime Minister from 1990-1997) that he lost the 1997 general election, even if it was over ten years ago that it happened. It might be even more irritating to him if he could accept that he lost it because (a) he presided over one of the biggest economic disasters in recent decades - Black Wednesday (b) his parliamentary party was packed with liars and sleaze merchants and (c) he left the public services in a deplorable state of disrepair, with falling education budgets, soaring hospital waiting lists and the first stages of an immensely cack-handed privatisation of the railways. Or that he had any responsibility for the genocide of at least 80,000 Europeans because of his government's refusal to allow Bosnia to defend itself. Given this record, is this elder "statesman" really the best person to provide lectures on good governance? And is the Andrew Marr show really so short of guests that its highlight this weekend was giving the biggest grudge in politics since Ted Heath lost to Margaret Thatcher yet another airing?