For the fame, not the many

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the TalkRadio website about Kezia Dugdale's ill-advised decision to take part in I'm a Celebrity.  You can read it HERE.

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It was statistically inevitable that the SNP's extraordinary run of being ahead in twenty-one consecutive subsamples would eventually be brought to an end, and it finally happened earlier this week with the publication of Kantar's first poll since the general election.  It's a weird poll all round - not only are the Tories several points ahead across Britain (a finding that is completely out of line with what all other firms have been showing for the last two months), but there's also a substantial Tory lead in the Scottish subsample.  As this is the most recent poll to be conducted, we can't completely exclude the possibility that it's picking up something new, but it's probably more likely that it'll prove to be a freakish result.  I'd be a little more concerned if the Scottish subsample had put Labour substantially ahead, but a Tory surge in Scotland just doesn't have the smell of truth at the moment.

Bizarrely, Kantar appear to be unaware of the change in Scottish Labour leadership.  According to their datasets, one of the voting intention options they offered to respondents in Scotland was "Labour party (led by Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Kezia Dugdale in Scotland)".

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We should get more of a clue of the state of public opinion overnight, because there are two important local by-elections in Scotland today - one in Perth City South, and one in Rutherglen Central & North.  On paper, the SNP should have a decent chance of gaining the seat in Rutherglen, because they topped the poll in the ward in May, with an 8% margin over Labour.  However, the ward is in one of the six parliamentary constituencies that Labour gained in the general election, and the arithmetic also looks very similar to a seat that the SNP failed to win in a Glasgow by-election a couple of months ago.  In practice I'd say Labour are slight favourites - which obviously means it would be a huge psychological boost if the SNP were to pull it off.

The Perth contest looks much tougher for the SNP - they were nine points behind the Lib Dems (of all parties) back in May.  Although it's perfectly possible the Lib Dem vote will prove to be soft, you'd think those people would be more likely to break for the Tories rather than the SNP.  But you never know - Pete Wishart famously defied gravity in Perth at the general election, so let's hope history repeats itself.

If by any chance you live in either ward, don't forget to vote over the next few hours!

Wisdom on Wednesday : The housemates up for eviction this year are...

"A Yes for independence, Michelle Mone leaves. A No for independence, I leave. Vote wan of us oot! What's it to be?"

'Still Game' star Greg Hemphill, presenting the choice we're faced with this September in its starkest form yet. I'll need to take 0.000000000000000000000000001 microseconds to think about this one.

(And please don't feel guilty. When the inevitable happens, an excitable host will be on hand to reassuringly whisper in Michelle's ear "It's just pantomime booing, babes".)

YouGov poll : Livingstone back in the hunt

Of the many, many innocuous comments of mine that were randomly deleted by the Tory moderators at Political Betting in the 48 hours prior to me finally taking the hint, one was in response to regular poster Antifrank, who clearly felt he was saying something deeply controversial (he probably was in PB terms) when he observed : "In my judgement, Nicolas Sarkozy has less chance of winning the French presidential election than Ken Livingstone has of being elected Mayor of London". I can't remember exactly how I replied (or tried to reply), but the gist of it was "well, yes, obviously". That sentiment has now been borne out by the latest YouGov poll on the London mayoral race, which shows a virtual dead heat -

First round

Boris Johnson (Conservative) 43% (-2)
Ken Livingstone (Labour) 41% (+1)
Brian Paddick (Liberal Democrat) 8% (+1)
Lawrence Webb (UKIP) 3% (-)
Siobhan Benita (Independent) 3% (+1)
Jenny Jones (Green) 2% (-)
Carlos Cortiglia (BNP) 1% (-)

Second round

Boris Johnson (Conservative) 51% (-2)
Ken Livingstone (Labour) 49% (+2)

Ir remains to be seen whether the closing of the gap is real or an artifact of the margin of error. One thing is clear, however - Alan Sugar's delusional attempt to 'instruct' his Twitter followers to desert Livingstone has had zero effect, as always seemed likely. If the power of celebrity was in itself enough to decide elections, Robert Kilroy-Silk would by now be well into his second term at the helm of a Veritas government.

Labour should take heed of that truth, because it seems to be Sugar's celebrity that saved him from the fate that would befall any other Labour parliamentarian who recommended that Labour voters should vote against the party - instant withdrawal of the whip. Why he's seen as an indispensable asset when he has a crazy-paving history of past political endorsements that makes Jim Sillars look (almost) consistent is beyond me. As for Sugar's Apprentice sidekick Karren Brady, she went down several notches in my estimation with her absurd 'sporting analogy' intervention in the AV referendum last year (on behalf of the No side, naturally).

Turning to the French election, one thing that came out of the BBC coverage last night is that, astonishingly, the US has nothing on France when it comes to feverish election rallies. I may want Sarkozy to lose, but it was hard not to feel a tingle down the spine as his supporters chanted his name and waved flags. And I kind of understood for the first time why he won five years ago - he did a disarming "Da da!" hand gesture as he took to the stage, as if he'd just performed an amazing conjuring trick, as opposed to becoming the first incumbent President not to top the first round poll. His perfect showmanship continued as he pushed all the right buttons with his speech, and whipped the crowd up into an even more frenzied state. But thankfully for France and for Europe it looks as if, this time round, stardust will be his enemy and not his friend.

Hoey's howler

Whatever anyone might think about the wisdom of the Speaker's wife taking part in Celebrity Big Brother, it has to be said that the intervention of rent-a-quote Labour MP Kate Hoey on the subject was extremely poorly-judged. She demanded that Sally Bercow hand a portion of her appearance fee to "the taxpayer" - but as I understand it Ms Bercow has already announced that she is donating her entire £100,000 fee to an autism charity.

Are autistic people the wrong kind of taxpayers in Kate Hoey's eyes?

How Strictly Come Dancing teaches us that AV would be a mildly good thing

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame has written an article for the New York Times about what he sees as the flaws in the voting system used by Dancing with the Stars (the American carbon-copy of Strictly Come Dancing). It's quite an amusing piece for its earnestness and attention to the finest detail, although given my devotion to the Eurovision Song Contest I may not be in the best position to make that observation! But if you've ever wondered how Ann Widdecombe finds it so easy to survive in Strictly despite being placed bottom by the judges week after week, Nate has the answer for you -

"Suppose, for instance, that late in the season, when there are five couples left, four of the five teams receive 9’s across the board from the judges, and the final couple instead receives straight 7’s. In terms of the way the judges normally vote, that is a rather clear verdict: the low-scoring couple has had an inferior performance, and should be eliminated.

But in reality the low-scoring team would need to receive only 24 percent of the votes from the home audience — just barely better than the 20 percent they would get if the audience voted completely at random — to be guaranteed passage into the next round. It doesn’t matter if 24 percent of the audience thought they were the best-performing couple — and the other 76 percent thought they were the worst one! They would still advance to the next episode."

On the latter point, isn't that one of the obvious fatal flaws with any first-past-the-post voting system? Perhaps that irony wouldn't seem so obvious to an American political commentator more used to two-horse races, but it just so happens that is precisely the problem with FPTP that a 'Yes' to AV would remedy, even if it wouldn't address the far greater problem of disproportionality.

Silver goes on to make a series of detailed suggestions about how the voting arrangements on Dancing with the Stars could be improved, such as encouraging the judges to use the full range of possible scores between 1 and 10, rather than clustering most of the contestants between 6 and 10. That's fine in theory, but if the American show is anything like Strictly, the studio audience would probably start a riot if the weakest couples were routinely being given 1s and 2s.

The real problem with the show's voting system has always been the phenonemon of a couple placed in the middle of the leaderboard by the judges finding themselves being abruptly eliminated, simply because the public have a greater incentive to vote for couples at the bottom of the pile who are perceived to be in greater danger. At least this year with the scrapping of the dance-off we've been spared the tedious weekly ritual of the judges sanctimoniously announcing that "it is a travesty that you're in the bottom two, rather than X, Y or Z", neatly ignoring the fact it was partly the said judges' over-the-top criticisms of X, Y and Z that motivated the public to pick up the phone and save them. The obvious solution to this problem is surely to withhold the judges' scores until after the public have voted. I can't see that would detract from the show very much - The X Factor gets by quite happily without the judges scoring each performance out of 10.

But Strictly is just such a peculiar programme. Whatever the horrors of X Factor, at least it's a talent show in the truest sense of people being there on the basis of their talent. The Strictly philosophy is to randomly round up a group of people who for the most part, quite naturally, can't dance - and then get a smug Australian expert to scream abuse at them for weeks on end about their inability to dance. The producers pick contestants for their fame and popularity, not their dancing potential - and then the judges and the show's more humourless devotees work themselves into apoplexy because other people mysteriously treat it as a popularity contest, not as a "serious dancing competition". Bizarre.

UPDATE : Having thought about this some more, I've realised that either the American show must have a slightly different voting system, or else Silver must have misunderstood it. In Strictly, only the judges' rankings of the couples matter, not the raw scores. If anything, that makes it even easier for Widdecombe to survive.

Want to choose the Queen? You may be missing the point here...

So the tedious issue of whether Camilla could one day be Queen has been reignited by Prince Charles' slip in an American TV interview.  I tend to think the people questioning whether a woman they don't happen to like very much "should" become Queen are a bit like the outraged TV talent show viewers who think that Wagner "shouldn't" win The X Factor just because he can't sing very well, or that Ann Widdecombe "shouldn't" win Strictly Come Dancing just because she can't dance very well.  What, you mean that in a public phone vote, the person with the most votes wins?  What, you mean that in a hereditary monarchy, the wife of the heir to the throne gets to become Queen?  Who'd have thunk it?

If Camilla does become Queen (or indeed if Wagner wins The X Factor) it's the sign of a system working exactly as it's supposed to.  If you don't like that system, let me suggest the remedy has been staring you in the face all along...

Firing speaks louder than outrage

I'm slightly bemused to see newspapers still devoting serious analysis to the ramifications for women in the business world of the catfight on last week's episode of The Apprentice. The controversy started with Karren Brady's boardroom outburst at the candidates "letting themselves down" as role models for their gender - but that anger might have seemed a tad less synthetic if Alan Sugar hadn't then gone on to fire just about the only person who hadn't significantly contributed to the stooshie (specifically for remaining too quiet), and had Brady not gone on to back that decision to the hilt. It seemed even more perverse given that the 'project manager' Laura had made a key mistake that was clearly decisive in her team's defeat (refusing to grant exclusivity on their product to Boots), but had been subsequently let off the hook by Sugar solely on the grounds that her team had been unmanageable. How, then, could he possibly justify his decision not to fire someone who had actually been responsible for the arguments?

In truth, if the candidates hadn't been tearing each other's hair out in the boardroom, Sugar would have been goading them to do just that - as we've seen on many, many previous occasions. For all the going-through-the-motions of piously branding the catfight "outrageous", it's clear that as far as actual firing offences in Sugar-world is concerned, being relatively polite and civilised is the far graver sin. There's no mystery as to where the women were taking their cue from.

The Sun? Hypocritical? Perish the thought...

Not that I particularly want to give Simon Cowell praise for anything (even when it's due) but I'm very pleasantly surprised to see that X Factor contestant Chloe Mafia will not be axed from the show simply because of allegations that she worked as a "£160-an-hour escort" (is our knowledge of the exact price supposed to make it worse somehow?). I read the original article on The Sun website a couple of days ago, and it was utterly breathtaking to see that publication - of all publications - taking an implied judgemental stance on matters of sexual morality. I shouldn't have been surprised of course, because it's hardly the first time - tabloid journalists have a remarkable knack of seamlessly switching back and forth between 'laddish' mode and 'outraged evangelical preacher' mode. The most nauseating part of the article was the account of an undercover reporter who was "repeatedly invited" onto a double bed by Ms. Mafia, but instead "made his excuses and left". Well, how terribly noble of him. But does anyone doubt for a moment that The Sun would have been perfectly content for their reporter to go ahead and do the deed (on expenses, naturally) if they had calculated it would sell more papers? Of course, the main reason that couldn't happen was that it would have been incongruent with the pious subtext of the piece - namely that if the story could be substantiated, it was a complete no-brainer that Mafia's involvement in X Factor was untenable.

Now I may be missing something here, but as far as I'm aware what Mafia allegedly does for a living is perfectly legal in the UK (there may be some grey areas over the advertising of escort services on the internet, but as things stand the work itself is legal). So why should her participation in the show ever have been thought to be in jeopardy? Yes, she's done something that a certain portion of the population finds morally objectionable, but the same would apply to anyone who has ever had an abortion, eaten meat or had an affair - all also legal activities. Why is it taken as read that certain types of intolerance will always be pandered to, but not others? Regardless of personal moral values, it's always a good start to view every individual as first and foremost a human being, rather than as some kind of walking embodiment of one particular choice they've made in their life.

Big Brother : Some formats can't be left alone

Probably the most peculiar thing about Big Brother this year is that it's taking place at all. The decision was made a full twelve months ago that the format has well and truly had its day - so, bearing that in mind, what was the case for effectively cramming no fewer than three more series of the show (celebrity, regular, and "ultimate") into the last eight months? The obvious conclusion to draw is that the concept still has legs, and that we're probably not witnessing the final series at all - just the last one before a very long pause. Big Brother may not be a conventional game show, but it's worth noting that virtually every hit game show of the past has been resurrected eventually, sometimes after more than a decade - witness Mastermind, The Generation Game, and The Krypton Factor. Actually, Mastermind is a very good example, because the producers imagined they had definitively brought the show to an end with a "last ever series" to coincide with a significant anniversary (the 25th) - sound familiar? But its demise turned out to be merely a very temporary deep freeze. Another iconic show that tempted fate (and tried the audience's patience) with a supposed "last ever episode" was Top of the Pops - and yet it was easily predictable that the Christmas specials would be revived soon enough. Some formats just can't be left alone.

But, nevertheless, this is the end for the time being - so, to that extent, where did it all go wrong? 'Nasty' Nick Bateman wrote an article on that very subject before (rather hypocritically, it has to be said) returning to the house himself, and although he seems absurdly prudish about the "depraved" antics in Series 6, I think he hits the nail on the head on one point - the near-universal panning of Series 4, won by Orcadian Cameron Stout, was a huge defining moment. That series had, after all, been a worthy attempt to get "back to basics" and simply allow a group of relatively normal people to interact naturally, without the interference of too many gimmicks. But from Series 5 onwards, the integrity of the game (symbolised by the "you decide" catchphrase) was routinely sacrificed in favour of increasingly contrived - and sometimes downright cruel - "twists" to keep things interesting at all costs. The nadir arrived with Series 7 - up till then, at least the integrity of the public vote had been considered sacrosanct, but no more. The producers wanted "boring" Susie out at the end of the penultimate week, but Mikey was inconveniently topping the public vote by a country mile. What was to be done? No problem - it was simply casually announced midway through the vote that it was going to be a double eviction instead. The disrespect for the public's verdict was then compounded by Davina McCall fawning over Mikey and assuring him that he'd been a "brilliant housemate", while Susie was sternly asked why she'd wasted everyone's time by taking part.

And the trend continues right to the present. The "you decide" principle would have meant the most popular housemates from the past taking part in the "ultimate" finale - ie. the winner from each previous series, or if they had refused their place, the highest-ranking runner-up available. Instead we're presented with a selection of the allegedly "most memorable", like...er, Coolio and Preston. With her ready-made back-story of heartbreak, and as one of the few genuinely nice people in the house, it seems inevitable that Preston's ex-wife Chantelle will now emerge as a very popular winner, but I have a feeling she'll be scratching her head as much as anyone about how it was even possible for her to wind up as the 'champion of champions'.

Where are the good guys?

I'm slightly wondering if I'll become as hooked on The Apprentice as I have in previous years. I know the general loathsomeness of the candidates is all part of the fun, but you need at least one or two good guys to cheer on. By this stage last year, I seem to recall I'd already become an instant die-hard Lucinda Ledgerwood fan, but her equivalent this time round isn't leaping out at me. The only one who shows a little bit of encouraging eccentricity is the American, who I fully expected to despise until she suggested calling the girls' team something like "Shazaam!". Ah, she's doomed, a touch of imagination and wit never gets you anywhere in the business world (not that Sir Alan Sugar's opinion has got anything to do with the business world).

Morality tales in Marrakech

Snooker is one thing, but why do I suddenly also find myself hooked on The Apprentice, a programme whose central world view I utterly loathe and despise? (That world view being not so much that backstabbing and ruthless ambition are desirable qualities, but more that Sir Alan Sugar is some sort of top bloke who we should all be in awe of, and perhaps even have a secret crush on.) I'm going to be generous to myself and believe that the reason must be that I'm a hopeless idealist who yearns to see a little bit of justice done in the least promising places. And, if the rumours are true, I'm at least temporarily going to get my wish - the resident bullies Jenny C and Jenny M are going to get their comeuppance on Wednesday's episode after making the innovative tactical decision to bribe a street-trader in Marrakech. For one week only, The Apprentice reinvents itself as Christian morality tale.