As the Queen starts making her own Windsor wine, the industry enjoys a record year

✒ It's been a tremendous year for English wine with our vineyards producing an amazing 4m bottles, a record. And it turns out that the Queen is going to start making her own wine at Windsor, though you won't be able to buy it for three years and will, of course, have to wear a ridiculous hat while drinking it.

I popped along to English wine's annual show this week and tried as many as I could without falling down. The days when a French vigneron could say to me "yurr English wine, eet tastes of rain" are long gone, and some of the sparklers are now quite exceptional – far better than champagnes selling at the same £20-24 mark. In fact, some, such as Camel Valley, Ridgeview and Nyetimber, strike me as being just as good as the premium brands from famous names being sold to footballers and rock stars for more than £100 in shops and at even sillier prices in clubs and restaurants.

It's a matter of prestige. People still feel that for really special occasions, the wine must have the word "champagne" on the label. Soon, however, I'm sure people will say: "We're laying this aside for our daughter's engagement; it's from Cornwall…"

✒ I really enjoyed the royal wedding. I know most people didn't – the viewing figures were comfortably less than half the population – but I saw no point in leaving the country as some did. You could always keep the telly switched off.

But here are the seven worst things about it, aspects of the event that were actually quite annoying:

• Tony Blair and Gordon Brown not being invited. Whether Blair "cashed in" on Princess Diana's death (he didn't), or because Cherie refused to curtsey, or because Blair's memoirs said too much about his dealings with the royals, the snub was to all of us and to democracy. And it gave what should have been a national celebration a nasty, class-bound, party political tinge.

• Beatrice's fascinator, or "repulser" as it should have been called. As if Medusa had gone to Nicky Clarke.

• The fly-past. A miserable six planes! A real, eardrum-rattling, fly-past would have looked like an RAF raid on Schwenningen.

• Prince Harry's speech. Obviously we only have press reports, but a proper, traditional best man's speech would have been packed with disgusting jokes and filthy allusions to the groom's previous girlfriends. That is Prince Harry's role in life and he let us all down.

• John Rutter's specially composed anthem. Sounded like Coldplay.

• Elton John's hissy fit when he asked to be moved to a more prominent seat. Calm down, dear, as we say these days.

• The kiss. Call that a kiss? A bit of tongue, please, Will.

✒ Why does the BBC insist on calling the soldiers and police employed by various tyrants in the Middle East and north Africa "security forces"? For example: "In Syria, security forces are said to have killed up to 60 demonstrators…" Security is the last thing these people provide. The Beeb wouldn't say: "A bomb planted by IRA freedom fighters has caused at least 10 deaths…" Just say, "government troops".

✒ I've been watching some of the host of new cop shows on TV. (The BBC says it has scrubbed Zen because it wants more women detectives. Well, many of the women I know think that Rufus Sewell is quite all right to be going to on with. You might as well say: "Men aren't interested in watching Scarlett Johansson. They want to see burly chaps pouting on TV…")

The new crop of women detectives are real people, damaged and with problems. If they get on well with their male deputies, then they have a terrible relationship with their male superiors. As my colleagues in the Guardian have pointed out, the more realistic the cops, the more fanciful and improbable the murders. And the cliches remain the same, whether in Vera, Lewis or Case Sensitive.

Here are some more recent ones I've spotted: the first murder is usually the weirdest and is unexplained at the end. Any group of children having a boisterous outing will always stumble on a body. All mobile phone calls come at the worst possible moment. When the sidekick searches for a crucial clue on the internet, he invariably finds it immediately, usually with a cry of "bingo, boss!"

✒ Labels and notices, continued: Suzan Carter bought a pack of "whole almonds" from Sainsbury's: "allergy advice – contains nuts". David Voas also went to Sainsbury's, for a steak. The label gives instructions for cooking rare: "2 ½ to 4 minutes each side… Always check that the product is cooked throughout, and no pink colour remains." Thanks, paranoid lawyers!

Les Herbert bought some fish in his local posh supermarket, the one that pushes up house prices by just existing: "plaice fillets in a bespoke Waitrose crumb". A bespoke crumb? Sounds like a very annoying tailor's assistant in Jermyn Street.

Vic McLellan photographed a sign mounted on a fence by a stream near his home: "Kew Angling Society. Strictly No Fishing."

A reader who requested anonymity to spare his wife encloses a leaflet for the Estring brand vaginal ring, used to replace oestrogen for post-menopausal women: "The Estring vaginal ring is not recommended for use in children," it says. Into what bizarre mind could that warning have wandered?

Linda Paramor bought some limnanthes seeds for her garden. "Handy tip," it says on the packet, "plant carefully as they can be evasive." I love the idea of the flowers coyly hiding when anyone tries to admire them.

I didn't love the leaflet that came with Dick Tuckey's penicillin prescription: "Unwanted side effects can include nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, and black hairy tongue." No, please!

✒ David Scott startled me with a tale of a merciful guard on, of all services, Virgin. He was on a London to Manchester train sitting near two Norwegian tourists. One of them said he had lost his ticket and the ticket inspector let him off! "I won't tell you which train it was," David says, "because he would be sacked."

SNP triumph in Scotland must end Labour party complacency, warn shadow cabinet members

Ed Miliband is to be warned by senior Labour figures that he must work hard to fight a sense of complacency among many MPs after the party was rebuffed in Scotland and failed to make a breakthrough in the English local elections.

Shadow cabinet members were disappointed by results across Britain, with some saying the only hope was that the elections would jolt the party into appreciating the scale of the battle ahead.

The greatest blow came in Scotland where the SNP became the first party to win an overall majority in the parliament's 12-year history – a result widely described as an unmitigated disaster for Labour.

Miliband announced that he would launch a review of the Labour party in Scotland as Iain Gray, its Scottish leader, announced he would resign in the autumn. "While we have seen good results today, gaining councils and councillors across England and winning in Wales, this is clearly a very disappointing election result in Scotland," Miliband said.

"We need to learn the lessons of that result, both political and organisational. That is why I, with Iain, am today putting in place a root-and-branch review of the Labour party in Scotland. This will bring together all elements of the Scottish party to renew it for the future."

One Labour source said: "It was a total disaster at all the key levels of policy, organisation, personnel and message."

There was better news in the English council elections, where Labour gained more than 700 seats – at the upper limit of the party's official projections. But shadow ministers believe Labour should have done much better because the same seats were last contested in 2007, a month before Tony Blair handed over to Gordon Brown, when the party lost more than 500 seats and only just beat the Lib Dems.

The Tories are on course to secure about 38% of the vote, down two points on their strong performance in 2007. Labour is up 11 points on its weak performance of 2007 on about 37%. The Lib Dems are down seven points on about 17%.

One Labour source said: "It was good enough but it was not a knockout."

Unease on the left was reflected by Neal Lawson, of the Compass group, who said: "These results show that Labour is flatlining from its terrible result at the general election. It still looks, feels and acts too much like New Labour."

Labour officials tried to put a brave face on the results as they said successes in Gravesham, North Warwickshire, Lincoln and Sheffield showed the party could succeed across England. "We were worried until we heard the results in North Warwickshire and Gravesham. These are the sorts of places we need to win."

Miliband travelled to Gravesham to hail the result.

"North, south, east and west, Labour is making gains and coming back," he said. "I say this to David Cameron and Nick Clegg: you must listen to the people. The Conservative party does not have a majority in parliament and has only been able to govern because of the Liberal Democrats' willing participation in a Tory-led government."

But there was concern at senior levels of the party after the Tory vote held up in England and Labour failed to show it was making major inroads across the south.

There was an acknowledgment that Labour performed well against the Lib Dems and humiliated them in the strongholds of Sheffield and Hull and former stronghold of Liverpool. But there are fears that these successes could give Labour a false sense of security and mask the scale of the challenge ahead. "You cannot build a majority just by beating the Lib Dems," one source said.

The Tories delighted in pointing out that Labour only just hung on in the Birmingham city council ward of Kingstanding – after a 9% swing to the Conservatives – where Miliband launched Labour's local election campaign. They also reminded Labour that Miliband announced that his fightback would start in Scotland.

Party figures hope the lacklustre results will silence the likes of Kelvin Hopkins, the Labour MP for Luton North who told Cameron in the Commons on Wednesday that Labour was bound to win the next election. "Will the prime minister enjoy saying goodbye to most of his colleagues and sitting on this side of the house," Hopkins said, prompting the prime minister to tell him he was in Benny Hill's "fairy dairy land".

One source said: "If there is one silver lining it is that some of the complacency will hopefully be knocked on the head."

With electoral reform hopes dashed, Lib Dems in near-death agonies and the loss of Scotland, Labour has work to do

The AV referendum result comes as a thundering blow. In an era when voters are in rebellion against the old two-party duopoly, a third refusing to vote for either of the old tribes, the chance to shape an electoral system that might reflect that mood by recording people's true first choices has been cast away.

As for a properly representative system, that hope is dashed for years to come. Forget new parties breaking through, the portal to politics remains desperately narrow. Westminster can only be approached through the heavily guarded gateways of the old parties, barring the way to others. Parliament is a closed club that risks falling into deeper disrepute, further removed from its voters, less responsive to the increasingly complex feelings voters want to express. What's the point of voting, the poll refuseniks ask on the doorstep, if no one outside the two big parties ever has a chance.

How perverse to vote for less choice, but the reasons why are simple. The issue was steamrollered flat by the political passions of the day. For too many of those on the centre-left, instant vengeance against Lib Dems drove out all thoughts of the political future. It was a vile campaign, the No side mendacious beyond anything I can recall, the Yes side insultingly stupid with its call to make MPs "work harder".

Nick Clegg badly misjudged this by insisting the referendum be held on local election day, when winning councils was the activists' priority. A stand-alone referendum, after the Lib Dems had been trounced, might have aired the question better.

Shedloads of cash from Tory donors did its work. David Cameron's killer threat, untrue but mighty effective – that AV would leave the rump Lib Dems in power forever – probably won the day. But Labour's split between its retro-revengers and its forward-looking pluralists was a disaster. If Tony Blair at the height of his power dared not face down his party and push for PR with Roy Jenkins and Paddy Ashdown, Ed Miliband was in a considerably weaker position to whip the party in to embrace a more fluid multi-party future. Of course AV in itself, that "miserable little compromise", wouldn't have produced that outcome – but voting it down makes all electoral reform moribund. So will the Lib Dems get House of Lords reform instead? No, the Tories will kill that too, just watch and see, whatever Cameron may pretend. For many the loss of any hope of electoral reform will mark a dark turning point in their enthusiasm for politics.

The great double losers of the day were the Lib Dems, poll-axed by the end of their reform dream. Thrashing about in near-death agonies, expect all manner of contortions that may be as self-destructive as everything else they have done in the last year. Their overall result was not quite as bad as some polls predicted, holding on in some places, but their catastrophic coalition miscalculation may yet split and wipe them out for a generation.

They may bring down the coalition. They may eject Clegg, but what's the point of replacing him with Chris Huhne? Even before the last election, he was pressing the not-so-cunning plan of going into a death-hug with the Tories. All the Lib Dem leaders convinced themselves insanely that they must prove they were a grown-up party of government, eager to take harsh decisions as nasty as the Tories.

How badly they misunderstood the nature of their swelling support: they were a safe haven for voters not wanting tough choices, nice people with apolitical instincts, trusting Clegg's promised "new politics" would keep their votes clean from contamination. Had the Lib Dems stood apart and stood their ground, loudly opposing Tory plans, objecting to the savagery of the budget without quite bringing down the government, they might have kept their virginity. Instead, their relentless trashing of "Labour who left us in this mess" slammed the door on an alternative coalition future – and ensured angry Labour voters killed off their AV hopes.

Today a frightening question confronts Labour: is this the start of a long Conservative hegemony? The economy is flatlining – but so is Labour. It gained too few seats, compared with its 2007 low vote. Why didn't it do better? Unemployment is rising, the NHS faces deep cuts, libraries, leisure centres and Sure Starts are slamming their doors, while university fees terrify families, middle incomes shrink and growing ranks of economists warn that George Osborne's plans are sending the UK into a downward spiral – yet Cameron's shield is undented. Some progress is made with "too far, too fast" – but nowhere near enough yet. If there were a general election tomorrow, Cameron would win.Labour remains unforgiven, blamed for everything, its faces still too redolent of a rejected Brown era. Twenty-three policy reviews under the aegis of "No money left" Liam Byrne are not so far an inspiring prospect.

Meanwhile, Lib Dem votes collapsing to Labour may paradoxically yield more Westminster seats to Tories. Labour regained its northern strongholds but until it besieges Tories in the south, it's not a contender. Losing Scotland was a blow. Boundary changes favour the Tories and if Scotland breaks away, then Westminster looks blue stretching into the far horizons of the future.

Is this the death of the idea that Britain has a "progressive majority"? Is this really a Conservative country after all, as the Blair/Brown/ Mandelson project always assumed? No, though without AV, first preferences can't be proven: a fifth of voters are forced to vote tactically. A solid third of voters are Tory but the anti-Tory vote is now more dispersed and without voting reform, harder to assemble into a winning force.

What is the Miliband, pluralist wing of Labour to do about that? Open up the party to new entrants, hold open primaries to become the gateway into politics for unconventional candidates assembled around the spine of Labour values. Cameron has cooled on this, since the Totnes Tory primary delivered a GP critical of his health reforms.

Labour can only be attractive if it is welcoming, open-minded, free-spirited, the party that unlocks doors to Westminster for new ideas and new people. In the last weeks, the worst of Labour often paraded the opposite. Where once left and right were Labour's deepest rift, now the deeper divide is the open-minded versus narrow sectarians. Haunted by its painful recent past, Labour has yet to tell us what it's for.

After the wasted £100m and ministerial infighting, the AV vote has only proved the gulf between voters and the political class

Everybody happy now? The best part of £100m scattered to the winds. Government ministers fighting among themselves like rats in a sack. To those still inclined, the opportunity of genuine voting reform squandered for a generation.

For what? Democracy? The right of people to "have their say"? Across the land, happy Britons are settling down, mug of warm tea in hand, grateful for the opportunity to confirm through universal franchise what anyone with at least half a foot in the real world already knew. That they couldn't give a monkey's about the alternative vote.

Let's just step back for a second. Put down the dead babies and free the MPs from their chain gang. What did we achieve on Thursday? All that bile and bitterness; spilt political blood and squandered public treasure. I'll tell you. Sweet AV.

This was, we were told, a process whose primary function was to bring the public closer to the politicians. One that would begin to bridge the chasm that opened up over the expenses scandal. Short of giving every member of parliament a £1m raise, a free duck house and life membership of the Jedward fan club, it's difficult to think of a better way of embedding the impression our political class is on an all-expenses trip to a different planet.

When Gillian Duffy unleashed her litany of white working-class betrayal, did no one notice Labour's failure to implement voting reform was absent? When demonstrators set half of central London aflame in the wake of Nick Clegg's tuition fees U-turn, was it not significant they'd remained safely tucked up in bed when Tony Blair did the same over PR?

Of course it could be people were desperate for electoral change, yet finally baulked at the prospect of their vote being processed by a £150m super computer – "count my ballot please Hal"; "I'm sorry, I don't think I can do that Dave". With the Olympics beckoning, perhaps the prospect of the sneak who came third snatching the gold medal triumphed over their yearning for fair parliamentary representation. Or perhaps, just perhaps, the 99% of the public who told the last Mori issue survey they weren't interested in electoral reform were actually telling the truth.

This was not a referendum. It was a charade. An orgy of constitutional self-indulgence. I understand there were people who cared passionately about this issue. But now there is no dispute. They were the minority. A pitifully small minority, if those who didn't bother to deliver one vote – never mind one, two or three – are included.

This was not democracy. Democracy is about accountability and self-determination, about real people having a real say about the issues that matter to them. It's not about dragging the majority of your fellow citizens over the electoral coals just to prove a point. Let's return to the baby and the chain gang. Both campaigns will be pilloried: "no" as the knaves, "yes" as the fools.

Both are nothing more than patsies. Much better to claim it was the baby on the grassy knoll than face the truth. Nobody wanted AV. Nobody asked for AV. Of the two governing parties, neither even used the letters "AV" in their manifesto. As Clegg admitted in a moment of uncharacteristic candour, "AV is a miserable little compromise". A miserable little compromise with one objective. Locking him into a dance of death with David Cameron.

And what a dance. As we survey the barren wasteland of the 2011 referendum campaign, remember this. What you see before you is the price of Clegg's soul. Remember, too, that Cameron was prepared to gamble his entire premiership on this withered landscape. And had he lost, his own MPs would have made him pay the ultimate price. Even Ed Miliband became captivated by its grotesque beauty. He could have sat the whole thing out. Instead, he became trapped in no man's land, isolated from his own army, an army that stubbornly refused to march in step.

So here we sit. The status quo neither bloodied, nor bowed. With precisely nothing to show for our exertions. Except a choice. We can always pretend it didn't happen. Pledge to never again let AV intrude upon polite conversation. Or we can learn. And make a different pledge. A commitment that next time we ask the voters to sit in direct judgment, it will be on an issue that they, not their political masters, have decreed. Somebody won the AV referendum of 2011. And somebody lost. When you find out who it was, let me know.

The hatred of Nick Clegg is a simple scapegoating mechanism for people unwilling to admit they lost the general election

Why does the Left so hate Nick Clegg? Even to ask this question here suggests an appalling failure to grasp the obvious, like asking why ice is hard, or water wet. The Left, so far as Cif is concerned, is practically defined by people who hate Nick Clegg. This is an atmosphere in which someone can write "I really think this is one of Steve [Bell]'s all time bests - Hitler, bin Laden and now Clegg!" and it passes without comment. No amount of reasoning is going to shift this, which is why I am interested in the phenomenon.

I think that the explanation is a discreditable and unfortunate one, best understood by returning to an embarrassing time: our leader proclaiming that the last election was "A liberal moment". It wasn't. How could so many clever, nice people (as our leader writers are) get things so wrong?

The answer is that we had failed to notice that when they are given a vote, the British do not in fact want Liberal policies much, and they certainly don't get excited about them. There is no "progressive majority". Compare the excitement generated by the royal wedding with that about the referendum on AV. If we really thought that democratic politics said as much, as interestingly, about being British as the wedding does, there would surely have been a great deal more excitement about this.

Sometimes there is. I remember the fall of Thatcher as an electric moment, and the election of Tony Blair. But for the most part, democracy is like drains. You miss it dreadfully when it's not there. But you don't want to think much about drains or democracy, and the people who think that the most glamorous and impressive bits of their house are the bathroom fittings are just weird.

The electoral failure of the Lib Dems and their projects is the simple and endlessly repeated proof of this.

But it is difficult to keep going in politics with the idea of being part of a perpetual minority. So we need ways to work around the failure and unpopularity of Lib Dem policies with the wider public, and in this light the Left's hatred of Nick Clegg is a simple scapegoating mechanism. Does anyone seriously suppose that any other Lib Dem leader could have played the hand differently or better? I know he's been on telly, but is Vince Cable really so charismatic that he could have turned back a 68% to 22% defeat, even if he had danced for it?

The hatred over student fees in particular is evidence that even Liberal Democrat voters don't really want a more open and equal country. Of course, the Lib Dems knew this, which is why in opposition they took up a policy of "free" education for university students. "Free", because someone still has to pay for the whole thing; just not the beneficiaries. There is nothing particularly right-wing about student loans: the Swedish social democrats introduced them in 1960, under Olof Palme, when he was Minister of Education. The outcry against them comes from people who see themselves losing a privilege they had considered as a right. There's a word for that, and it's not "liberal".

Hatred of Nick Clegg is concentrated on the fact that he betrayed some of the policies he ran on; but he did so because the country voted against them. That's democracy. Sometimes the majority is wrong. Sometimes it disagrees with you. But the majority still gets to decide, as the Lib Dems, in coalition, have discovered. There's no reason whatever that a party with 23% of the votes should get 100% of its programme through. The people who think it should are not being democratic.

If even Lib Dem supporters are neither liberal nor democratic, it's hard to see why the rest of the country should vote for their – our – policies either. But to admit this is painful and unpleasant. It so much easier and more satisfying simply to hate Nick Clegg.

PS. I did actually vote Lib Dem in the council elections (with a sympathy vote for one Labour candidate, because he carried the burden of four Christian names). I even voted for AV. But I don't think that makes me part of a natural majority.

Nick Clegg's hold on his Sheffield Hallam constituency looks vulnerable after Labour wins back city council

It isn't quite a return to the famous "socialist republic of south Yorkshire", but the big beasts from Sheffield's heady Labour days are trumpeting the demise of their cocky Liberal Democrat rivals at the hands of the voters.

"Clegg-mania? Clegg pneumonia!" chortles former city council leader and later cabinet minister David Blunkett, celebrating with a posse of old-timer colleagues, and a lot of eager new Labour activists.

Alongside him, his latest Labour successor in the imposing leader's office at City Hall, Julie Dore, joins in the general Nick Clegg-bashing.

"Empty his bins?" she says, rolling her eyes at the notion that deputy prime minister's community charge payments now contribute to a Labour-run budget. "He doesn't own a house here any more. He's just sold it."

Clegg's hold on his Sheffield Hallam constituency suddenly looks vulnerable, with Labour advancing much further than its strategists had dared hope into the city's leafy – and historically Tory and posh – west end. His very public vote-casting in the morning was unexpectedly crucial; the Lib Dems held on to Stannington, where he now rents a flat, by only five votes.

Announcing his move last month, Clegg talked of bringing his family up from London to skim stones across the beautiful Rivelin river which threads through the area. Time for that will now be limited as the party plans how to bounce back, not just in Sheffield but other great northern cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Hull where it was also trounced.

"It has been a truly dreadful night for them," said Dore, who promises an open and consultative style of city leadership "in contrast to what has gone before".

Her party's campaign made headway by portraying the Lib Dems' year of minority rule, in loose arrangement with two Greens, as harsh and sacrificing Sheffield's interests to national coalition policy. "Forgemasters," she says laconically, a single word as damaging politically as "Clegg" in the city, since Labour's loan to help the local steel firm develop specialist components for the nuclear industry was cancelled by the government.

The Lib Dems were also lethally wounded by their play for supporters of Clegg's "new type of politics" before last year's general election.

Sheffield's Green leader, Jillian Creasy, says: "They made a huge thing of it, especially among young voters and the thousands of students here. It wasn't just the fees, but a wider sense of disillusion with their compromises which has struck home."

She survived the Labour tide in Central ward – with one feature which is encouraging the Lib Dems' battered Sheffield troops. For all the high stakes, Labour's surge saw some dispiritingly low polls; the battle could hardly have been fiercer in Central but turnout was only 31%.

"We are here for the long haul," says outgoing Lib Dem council leader Paul Scriven, whose files and papers are trundling through City Hall's Victorian corridors to the opposition's humbler quarters. "There is no criticism here among Sheffield Lib Dems of Nick Clegg. We want him to stay the course and stick with policies which we know are right. Not flip-flop to please the voters, as [Tony] Blair or [Gordon] Brown would have done."

The only mutinous call for Clegg to stand aside for a more Liberal Lib Demer, came not from Sheffield but Nottingham, the next big city southwards on the M1. The Liberal Democrats group leader there, Gary Long, broke ranks to say that his party chief was playing the coalition game "very badly".

Scriven is having none of this, and draws strength from the complete failure of Sheffield Conservatives to make up any of the ground the Lib Dems have lost. Even in Dore and Totley, the prosperous heart of their former Sheffield stronghold, they were well behind victorious Liberal Democrat Joe Otten, and that was on a 56%.

But Clegg's other task, besides sticking to his guns on the central, financial challenge, is crucial to the northern cities brand of liberal democracy, Scriven says. "He brings a real and distinct Liberal Democrat agenda of fairness to the government to show that it isn't the Tories of the 1980s. That is the case we have to make."

Former prime minister feared devolution and dismissed declaration by George Robertson that it would 'kill nationalism stone dead'

Tony Blair always had reservations about Scottish devolution even though he campaigned vigorously in favour of a Yes vote in the 1997 referendum.

As an English chap Blair never understood the deep passion among acolytes of the late John Smith, his predecessor as Labour leader, for a Scottish Parliament. Blair's expensive education at Fettes, the Eton of Scotland, did nothing to help.

A key moment for Blair came when Baroness Smith of Gilmorehill, the widow of the late Labour leader John Smith, told the future prime minister that he should create a Scottish Parliament if he wanted to live up to her husband's legacy. Lady Smith repeated her husband's claim that a Scottish Parliament represented the "settled will" of the Scottish people.

Blair delivered, though there were a series of internal Labour rows in the run up to the 1997 Westminster election, not least when he likened a future Scottish Parliament to a parish council.

Blair had two fears about Scottish devolution:

• It would inevitably loosen Scotland's links with the rest of the United Kingdon. Blair never quite bought the famous line by the former Labour MP Tam Dalyell, a prominent opponent of devolution, who said:

Devolution is a motorway without exits to independence.

But Blair shared the concerns of sceptics such as the Labour trade minister Brian Wilson. He never quite signed up to the famous declaration by George Robertson, then shadow Scottish secretary, who said in 1995:

Devolution will kill nationalism stone dead.

Blair thought that devolution could destabilise the delicate balance of relations within the United Kingdom. He was one of the first to spot one of the greatest threats to the Union – English resentment at the favourable funding arrangements for Scotland under the Barnett Formula.

• It would entrench Labour in Scotland which embodied for him the loathsome Old Labour which had made the party unelectable in Middle England. This is why Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who were the driving forces behind the creation of the parliament, agreed on a proportional voting system that was designed to guarantee that Labour would find it difficult to form a majority.

There was meant to be another benefit – the SNP would also never be able to form a majority. This would mean that the nationalists would struggle to hold a referendum on independence.

In the wake of the SNP's stunning breakthrough the former prime minister may allow himself a small "told you so" moment, though that sort of behaviour is not usually within his nature. A referendum on independence is closer than ever before, though Alex Salmond will proceed with care because a vote for the SNP does not necessarily equate to support for leaving the UK.

Blair's only hope will be that the more proportional voting system, which deprived Labour of a majority at Holyrood even when it dominated the political landscape, will also deprive the SNP of a majority. But at lunchtime today that is looking uncertain.

Whatever the final result at Holyrood one thing is clear. Scotland is already detaching itself from the rest of the UK, as my friend and former Herald political editor Benedict Brogan blogged today. One of the strongest examples of the parting of the ways was the role the UK Labour party played in this year's Scottish election: none.

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Tony Blair describes Osama Bin Laden’s demise as 'brilliantly executed’, adding: 'The Americans have given their account and I am sure it is accurate.'

In future, aid policy should take note of where past confusion might have contributed to poverty, conflict and corruption

Sierra Leone has just celebrated 50 years of independence. Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, reflecting on one of his more successful foreign adventures, made a fine speech, rightly congratulating the country on its progress since the dark days of the civil war in the 1990s – two free and fair elections, peaceful regime change, better governance, a rapidly improving economy.

He did not mention the unresolved social tensions that drove the country to war, or the confused aid policies that have arguably served to intensify these tensions. There is a long history to this confusion.

A settlement on the Sierra Leone peninsula was established in 1787 as a home for Black Loyalists who had fought for Britain in the American revolutionary wars. It later became a crown colony and base for the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. A mixed population of Africans freed from Atlantic slave ships eventually grew to become Freetown's creole community. British forces imposed themselves on the interior at the end of the 19th century to deal with political rivalries disrupting the flow of trade to the coastal colony.

From the outset, the country was shaped by military-backed humanitarian interests – in short, it was an early product of British "ethical foreign policy". The trouble is that those who set the standards for such policy are not much in touch with realities on the ground.

Sierra Leone has suffered – and continues to suffer – from a lack of attention to detail. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the on-off regard for agricultural questions in Sierra Leone. The early humanitarians deplored the plantations growing food for the slave ships in areas adjacent to their infant settlement. They introduced new crops (white rice and cotton) and techniques (the plough) to foster "legitimate" trade.

When cotton and the plough both failed, they shifted attention to other concerns (how to tap natural palm oil from the forests). The failure of later colonial agrarian interventions (schemes to produce rice according to Indian and Burmese models in the aftermath of two world wars) was followed by a shift in emphasis towards investment in Sierra Leone's rich iron ore and diamond deposits. Supposedly, alluvial diamonds were the cause of the recent civil war.

In fact, diamonds attracted international mercenary adventurers, allowing the belligerents to prolong their conflict. The more basic causes of trouble lay in an archaic rural structure that reduced many young people to sweated labour, penury and despair. This interpretation has been resisted by aid officials in charge of a large programme of British-funded post-war social and physical reconstruction.

Instead, they emphasised the rebuilding of a traditional rural social order. This brought a measure of short-term tranquillity to the war-ravaged countryside, the benefits of which are now being reaped by international agribusiness investors.

The issue of what the mass of rural young people do to attain self-realisation remains unresolved. Some youths might yet return to violence, perhaps to fight for land they perceive as lost to international investors.

Neighbouring Liberia presents a different picture. Here, a more enlightened policy has encouraged the agricultural training of ex-combatants. Despite initial scepticism, this programme shows promising results, for example in reducing the numbers of former combatants willing to re-enlist in the war in Ivory Coast.

For the celebration of Sierra Leone at 50 it would have been good to revive the old Blair slogan "education, education, education" but prefaced by the word "agrarian", an adjective still unfashionable in the overseas aid industry.

To consolidate peace, Sierra Leonean youths should now be granted rights to access land for farming equivalent to those enjoyed by international investors.

• Paul Richards is Edward P Bass distinguished visiting fellow at the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies

The psychologist Oliver James once incensed me, when we were both live on the radio, by claiming that Tony Blair...

Tony Blair describes Osama Bin Laden’s demise as 'brilliantly executed’, adding: 'The Americans have given their account and I am sure it is accurate.'

Party loses control of Sheffield and Hull councils, blaming defeats on Labour's 'decapitation' strategy

Nick Clegg suffered a humiliating reverse in his Sheffield backyard when the Liberal Democrats were ejected from power in the city, amid heavy losses for the party across northern England.

As voters punished the Lib Dems for their performance after a year in government, the party blamed a "decapitation strategy" by Labour and the unions which saw it lose power in Hull and suffer big losses in Manchester and Liverpool.

In the first full result of the night, Labour held onto Sunderland where it gained four seats from the Tories. The party's vote was up by an average of 20 points on 2007, the last time the same seats were contested.

Senior Lib Dems also said the party was on course to lose between nine and 12 of the 15 seats it was defending in Sheffield.

A third of the seats on the council, which the party has run as a minority administration for the past year, were up for election. The Lib Dems had 41 seats, with Labour trailing by just one, on 40.

David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary who is a Sheffield MP, said: "The Cleggmania of this time last year has turned into a kind of Clegg pneumonia. There is a great deal of pleasure [for Labour] in terms of winning the council but a great deal of challenge. Of course because Nick Clegg is deputy prime minister, because of the decisions he has taken over the last 12 months, because of the promises that were made exactly a year ago and were broken people have taken their revenge."

Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem deputy leader said his party had suffered a poor result in Sheffield – Clegg is MP for Sheffield Hallam. "Sheffield is going to be different from every other council because it is Nick Clegg's seat," Hughes told the BBC. "It is his city so any anti-Nick view will be exemplified most in Sheffield."

Hughes admitted the government's controversial decision to cancel an £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters was a factor. He said: "The combination of that and tuition fees mean that in the city Nick has become the issue despite of the fact that we have run the council extremely well. We haven't had mass redundancies, we have protected the frontline services."

The Lib Dems lost control of Kingston-upon-Hull after a strong recovery by Labour which saw it gain as many as 10 out of 12 seats from the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems were also on course for losses in Liverpool, where the party had 35 seats to 50 for Labour, after the former Lib Dem leader on the council Warren Bradley criticised Clegg's "record and perception". Bradley stood down before the election.

Lord Mike Storey, who led the city council from 1998-2005, lost his seat to an 18-year-old.

The Lib Dems were struggling in the Midlands. There was a strong swing from the Lib Dems to Labour in Birmingham. John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, admitted that his party was experiencing a bad night in the city. The Tories were on course to overtake the Lib Dems as the largest party in Birmingham.

Jeremy Browne, the Lib Dem foreign office minister who is a close Clegg ally, said the party was suffering from its first year in government since the second world war. "We are now in government and are making difficult decisions," Browne told Sky News.

Browne dismissed criticisms that the Lib Dems have broken promises. "We had the general election a year ago. The Lib Dems finished third. We got 8% of the MPs in the House of Commons, so we won no mandate to implement our manifesto in full. I wish we had. We are the junior partners in the coalition. No party won the general election so no party has a mandate to implement its manifesto in full. We are putting into effect about two thirds of our policies. It is worth saying it is 66 years since the second world war [when the Liberals were in government]. Nick Clegg has achieved more in one year than the previous 65 years put together so we have a record to defend."

But John Leech, the Lib Dem MP for Manchester Withington, Tweeted: "We've taken a real kicking in the ballot box tonight."

Mike Hancock, the rebel Lib Dem MP for Portsmouth South, said the party should table tougher demands to the Tories. He called on Lib Dems ministers to "spell out to our Conservative colleagues that we are not going to take anything lying down, we are going to be there fighting our corner and if we don't like it we are not going to go along with it.

Hancock told the BBC: "I am sure that that is what the majority of people in the country who voted for us would expect us to do and what a lot of our members - some of whom will have loyally supported the party and will lose their seats in local government today - will also be saying."

Labour was working hard to play down expectations after Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said the party should gain 1,300 seats nationally. Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, of Plymouth University, have said that Labour should be in the strongest position of the three main parties because the same seats were last contested in 2007, a month before Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, believes the Tory prediction overplays expectations for Labour.

Labour said it was performing in the south. It achieved strong gains in Exeter and was gaining in Swindon, Thanet and Gravesham, all key swing parliamentary seats.

Setbacks for deputy prime minister in Liverpool and Sheffield, with defeat blamed on Labour's 'decapitation' strategy

Nick Clegg suffered a humiliating reverse in his Sheffield backyard when the Liberal Democrats were ejected from power in the city, as the party also suffered heavy losses across England, Scotland and Wales.

As voters punished the Lib Dems for their performance after a year in government, the party blamed a "decapitation strategy" by Labour and the unions.

The Lib Dems only managed to hold on to a handful of the seats they were defending on Sheffield city council. The party also suffered setback in strongholds in Liverpool and Hull after an aggressive campaign by Labour which performed strongly across the north of England.

In the first full result of the night, Labour held onto Sunderland where it gained four seats from the Tories. The party's vote was up by an average of 20 points on 2007, the last time the same seats were contested.

Senior Lib Dems also admitted shortly before midnight that the party was on course to lose between nine and 12 of the 15 seats it was defending in Sheffield.

A third of the seats on the council, which the party has run as a minority administration for the past year, were up for election. The Lib Dems had 41 seats, with Labour trailing by just one, on 40.

Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem deputy leader said his party had suffered a poor result in Sheffield. "Sheffield is going to be different from every other council because it is Nick Clegg's seat," Hughes told the BBC. "It is his city so any anti-Nick view will be exemplified most in Sheffield."

Hughes admitted that the government's controversial decision to cancel an £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters was a factor. He said: "The combination of that and tuition fees mean that in the city Nick has become the issue despite of the fact that we have run the council extremely well. We haven't had mass redundancies, we have protected the frontline services."

The Lib Dems were also on course for losses in Liverpool, where the party had 35 seats to 50 for Labour, after the party's former leader on the council criticised Clegg's "record and perception".

Labour was working hard to play down expectations after Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said the party should gain 1,300 seats nationally. Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, of Plymouth University, have said that Labour should be in the strongest position of the three main parties because the same seats were last contested in 2007, a month before Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, believes the Tory prediction overplays expectations for Labour.

Tory attacks on Labour's performance indicated that David Cameron wants to treat the Lib Dems with kid gloves after setbacks for the junior coalition party.

Meanwhile the Scottish National party was on course for a strong result amid signs that it would add about 10 seats to the 47 it won at the last election for the 129-seat Scottish parliament in 2007. The party was unlikely to win enough seats to secure a majority though a strong performance by the Greens – in the face of a poor Lib Dem performance – raised the prospect of a majority in the parliament in favour of holding a referendum on Scottish independence.

Alex Salmond, the SNP leader who is on course to serve a second term as Scotland's first minister, had indicated during the campaign that a bill on a referendum would be an issue for the latter stages of the parliament.

Salmond's success came after former Lib Dem voters have switched to the SNP, ignoring Labour's warnings about the risks of helping the independence cause. The Lib Dems fear privately they could lose more than seven seats, sinking to below 10 at Holyrood for the first time since the Scottish parliament was set up. Early returns suggest the Lib Dems could lose a prized seat in the northern Highlands and two of its three seats in the capital, Edinburgh.

The strong SNP performance was seized on by the Tories who claimed that it showed that Labour was struggling to position itself as the natural opposition to the Westminster coalition in what was once a natural heartland. Iain Gray, the Labour leader in Scotland, was criticised for running a lacklustre campaign.

After talking up its prospects of gaining an overall majority at the Welsh assembly for the first time, Labour was playing down the idea . One party insider said it would be a good result if it won 29 of the 30 seats (they took 26 in 2007) but expressed concern that the media would portray this as a failure for Labour.

Plaid Cymru, who have governed in coalition with Labour over the last four years, also said they expected to lose seats. Final results will not be in until this afternoon because counting will not start in north Wales until themorning.

Peter Hain, the shadow Welsh secretary, said: "It is nip and tuck whether we will form a majority. I am sure we will get our best Labour percentage share of the vote in the assembly elections."

It was also reported that a Liberal Democrat council candidate, Neil Hamilton, standing in Westerhope, Newcastle, has been found dead after spending the day campaigning.

Police were called to his address after colleagues were unable to contact him, a party spokesman confirmed.

The death is likely to invalidate the result in the ward and trigger a fresh election.

Bill Roedy, former Chairman and CEO of MTV Networks International, began working for HBO in 1979 when it was broadcasting only nine hours a day. There he learned that distribution was everything. It was to be his mantra at MTV—aggressive, creative, relentless distribution.

Roedy shares his experiences and lessons in What Makes Business Rock. From virtually nothing, he built MTV International into the largest media network in the world. For anyone involved doing business internationally, it is essential reading.

As manager of HBO’s national accounts, he learned that “In life as well as in business, the ability to sell is the foundation upon which success is built.” Some people don’t understand that he says, but even in Vietnam, although he had the formal authority to force troops obey my orders, I found that if people didn’t believe in the mission, I never got a total effort from them.” Leaders are always selling.

Although reluctant to leave HBO and move to London, in 1989 he became managing director of MTV Europe. What he inherited wasn’t working. He had to quickly create a better product, get more distribution and generate revenue. Getting the right people in place was crucial to creating an entrepreneurial organization. “Never take ‘No’ for an answer.” “Take chances.” “Break all the rules.”

Their objective was to be the most visually engaging channel in the history of European television. To make sure viewers always knew they were watching MTV, they put their logo in the corner of the screen and leave it there. No one had done that before. (Now everyone does.)

Here is a lesson every leader could bear to keep in mind: as a leader, your opinion matters—maybe more than you know. But it can actually be having a negative impact. The MTV playlist is extremely important to its viewers and giving them what they want to hear is essential to MTV’s survival. Roedy says that in the beginning he attended those meetings if only to be the voice of reason and a subtle reminder that they were running a business. “But after attending half a dozen of these meetings I realized I was making a huge mistake. I was much older than our demographic and my musical tastes were very different. I was skewing the choices older.” So he stopped attending those meetings. “As much as I enjoyed being part of that process, I had to remind myself that I was a manager, and I had to delegate decision-making authority to those people I trusted.” How many leaders, for all kinds of well-intentioned reasons feel they have to leave their fingerprint on everything, while they are in-fact stifling their people and skewing the results?

Roedy’s success at MTV can be attributed to the fact that he was always reinventing. “The longer you stay with the same strategy, the more vulnerable you become to your competitors.”

His most important contribution was the idea, “Think global, act local.” MTV was already local to Europe, but it had to be broken down to the national level, country by country. “Learn the local culture and reflect it in every decision we make,” was their business strategy. He created a structure similar to what he learned in the military: small operating units in the field fighting the competition. “My belief was that the local people would best reflect the needs, tastes, and desires of the local audience, and because their jobs would depend on the bottom line, they were much less likely to make risky or destructive financial decisions. In Vietnam, I had seen over and over the benefits of dealing directly with the loyal population own their own terms, rather than trying to impose our beliefs on them.” Because of the complexities of operating an international business, you need be there on the ground to really feel it.

On MTV Arabia for example, they broadcast the call to prayer on the channel five times every day. For Ramadan they produced an animated film explaining the meaning of that important religious holiday to young people in a creative way and refrained for a month from showing any music videos.

Throughout the book there are stories of music celebrities—singing karaoke with Bono and Bob Geldof dressed as a nurse in Tokyo at 4a.m.—and others like Sumner Redstone, Robert Maxwell, Jeff Bewkes, Nelson Mandela, Jiang Zemin, Fidel Castro, Tony Blair, and the Dalai Lama. They add color to the book and make it all the more interesting. But read it for the insights into global business.

Related Interest:
  More lessons from Bill Roedy can be found on the LeadershipNow Facebook page.
  What Makes Business Rock

* * *

The Royal Wedding seems a long time ago already, blasted off the headlines by the assault on Bin Laden’s compound, itself finalised as the nuptials were unfolding. For many the sense of it being already an ancient event was part of its charm even at the time. All the more reason to give it a scorecard before it becomes another untouchable thing that gathers cobwebs in the British brain.

Monarchy restored

The monarchy has been rejuvenated by the marriage of the second in line to the throne. That it badly needed to be revived was the subtext of the huge sigh of relief from establishment England as all went well. It has taken a nearly twenty-year exertion, since the annus horribilis of 1992 when Diana separated from Charles and then declared war on ‘them’, the Establishment. The monarchy, under the leadership of the culturally autistic Queen, teetered on the edge of implosion. It was not going to be saved by the opinions of Prince Charles. Now it has secured a viable, long-term option for the eventual succession in terms of public consent. It has become sustainable.

Royal Power diminished

While ‘The Firm’ has secured its comfortable existence, it will not be returned to its previous, untouchable position. The weakening of what can be termed ‘Royal power’ has been confirmed. This is a nuanced distinction but in British terms significant and needs to be understood.

Before the Second World War the monarch was a personally active force, with George V taking a robust role in the creation of the peacetime coalition of 1931. Understood as such, in a polity that knew itself to be an Empire, the monarch could also be confidently removed by the governing class, as in Edward VIII’s abdication, without fear for the system. But under the pressure of the War as part of the Churchillist remoulding of the United Kingdom, the monarch became so much a part of “what were are” that it moved to a new status beyond consent. It became an unassailable totem. This status was consolidated by Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 when even the existence of republicans was denied.

It is hard now to imagine how the monarchy was a taboo subject. It could be cheered but it could not be touched. Long after the sixties and the rise of satire, serious debate about the existence of the monarchy and prerogative power was suppressed. The notoriety of the Sex Pistols God Save the Queen (banned by the BBC at the time in 1977 but in reality topping the charts despite their official manipulation to the contrary) has turned it into a celebrity cult. Today this may make it seem that the expression of anti-royalist views was normal, if also disapproved of. It was not normal and when it occurred it was shut down. Up until 1992 to be republican was still a private vice.

But a generational change was underway that emerged at Diana’s funeral. Michael Elliot has just summed it up in Time Magazine:

A nation that was supposed to be emotionally stunted, with stiff backbones and stiffer upper lips, descended into the sort of public grief normally reserved for the last act of second-rate Italian operas — except that it was genuine. Stuck at their home in Scotland, the royals seemed woefully out of touch with the sentiments of their people. Only at the last minute did the Queen walk into the crowds that were mourning Diana outside Buckingham Palace and show that she shared the national sense of loss.

The criticism of the royal family that week did not lead to a sustained increase in republican sentiment in Britain. To the contrary: once the Queen returned to London, the numbers of those saying they wanted to ditch her dropped to historic lows. But that extraordinary week changed the nature of the relationship between Crown and people forever. The crowds mourning Diana were not subjects. In a way that the revolutionaries of the 17th century would have understood, they were defining for themselves what they expected of a family, one of whose members was their head of state, and compelling that family to act accordingly. It was as if modern Britain were saying, "We get it. We're more than happy to have you around. But you do the job on our terms."

His conclusion in terms of power is that:

The Queen remains head of state, but in any real sense, she is the least powerful monarch Britain has ever had. You won't have heard that among the hushed voices of the global TV commentators who prattle on about Britain's wonderful sense of tradition, but it is true.

The argument that in a “real sense” the monarchy’s power is much diminished was confirmed last year. In the run up to the election, when a coalition looked probable, the Cabinet Secretary mobilised various constitutional experts to set out the procedures for what should happen. There is a clear account of the episode and its distinctiveness in Vernon Bogdanor’s new book, The Coalition and the Constitution. It was unanimously regarded that “the sovereign would not, and should not be expected to, take a role in the process”.  The sovereign’s permission or even, it seems, her own views were not sought out for this in British constitutional terms, ‘radical’ conclusion. There would be no return to the days of the Monarch seeking the advice of favoured courtiers and then issuing a summons to the Palace as happened, for example, in October 1963 when the Queen fingered the then 14th Earl of Home (pronounced Hume) to become Prime Minister. 

The explanation offered is that the Queen must not be ‘politicised’ by taking an active role. This is a sign of the royal weakness. Neither press nor people would now tolerate a hereditary head of state intervening to select the shape of the government: think of the precedent this would set for Charles! Such an intolerable prospect would give republicans the argument they need. Thus our experts had to protect our politics from being interfered with by the monarchy as much to preserve the monarchy as our politics. Preserved as a symbol, royalty has to be powerless personally. 

This relationship of a monarch playing a decorative role controlled by a secular political class was sketched out by Bagehot in his famous book on the English Constitution of 1867. He argued that the simplicity of the English Constitution was superior to America’s “composite” republic yet ours was also, in effect, a republic ruled by a governing class which used the pageantry of “constitutional royalty” to act “as a disguise”. He was wrong, monarchism penetrated English decision-making as the Empire reached its apogee. But Bagehot was not wrong to observe that royal influence was a device of the political class. Since 1992 it has been confirmed.  The way in which the wedding was talked about, indifference and lack of defence noted even while popular mobilisation was encouraged, confirmed that Royal Power, in contrast to its pageantry and media celebrity, is limited.

Except that there is still Charles. He seems to regard limitations on his influence as yet another burden one has to endure. Was it Charles who pushed through the absolute ban on our knowledge of how the Royal Family spends taxpayers’ money and exercises their influence, by excluding them from the Freedom of Information Act? Only Heather Brooke, the hero of the MPs expenses scandal, has so far pressed this story. But it is a scandal. Charles is known to influence building and architectural decisions. If he is going to claim to have the right to his views ‘as one does’, then it needs to be established that this is not a divine right and Freedom of Information on all such public activities should apply.

So while the diminution of Royal Power is confirmed it has far from disappeared. Brooke’s vigilance should be supported as ‘the firm’ grows in confidence.

Conservative State Strengthened

Below ‘Royal Power’ is the power of the state itself. Here a more ominous rolling back of the democratic impulse is underway as we witness the recreation of a Conservative state. What matters is policy but also the shaping culture that legitimises it. In terms of its public culture the Conservative state is a particular form of ‘one nation’: led by upper class males, white, unionist and favouring the City and finance. Yet it orchestrates consent not polarisation and is not  politically Thatcherite. It is rich but cool rather than striving and hot.

The Wedding said it all. Cameron needed the deal with the Liberal Democrats to detoxify the Tory brand. Now the marriage of William to a privately educated commoner and daughter of a self-made business couple who know their limits has detoxified the braying royals. The crowds confirmed the branding. Unlike Diana’s funeral which for the first time saw a distinctly multi-cultural public mobilised, reflecting the composition of our cities, the wedding crowd in 2011 was happy but pale. It was also issued with Union Jacks, which as a matter of policy (one can be sure) gave a union stamp to the proceedings to counter the recent rise of the Cross of St George. The same exercise is likely to be repeated for the Olympics. 

The grand politics and hard-ball implementation of Cameron’s strategy is for another article but their ideological hegemony, as some of us used to say, was enormously aided by the wedding.

Bye, bye, Blairism

For many of us the best part of the wedding was the way the ice closed over Tony Blair. There was no tanned and iconic mug shot of the Middle East ‘peace envoy’ alongside Beckham, no smirk from Mandelson or manipulation of the day’s meaning by Alistair Campbell. It is not just that New Labour has been defeated, it has not even been honoured in the pantheon of recent history. Blair himself must have been eating the carpet with frustration. First he loses his long-term investment in the Gaddafi fortune, then the retail value of his speaking engagements drops sharply as he can’t offer his clients any first-hand royal gossip. 

John Rentoul, still amongst Blair’s greatest fans, sets out a brilliant, angry analysis of the hurt in the Independent on Sunday. What ingratitude of the “vindictive classes” towards the man who saved the monarchy. But he also shows how Blair patronised the Queen and broke protocol, cashing in by writing about his relations with the royals. The real ingratitude is surely that the Prime Minister happily sat back and let the symbols take the flak. For the foundations for the revival of the Conservative state after the debacle of the 1990s were laid by Blair, as he discarded the opportunity to set the country on the path towards constitutional democracy. 

Report says partnerships between government and businesses are 'most promising and most effective' option for African growth

Partnerships between governments and the private sector need to be supported and encouraged to speed up development in Africa, according to a report published on Thursday.

In its annual state of the continent report, the Africa Progress Panel says that partnerships for development "are among the most promising, and potentially most effective" options for African growth, noting that the private sector was playing an "increasingly important" role.

"We have come to the conclusion that all actors [governments, private sector, civil society and international community] can do more to facilitate the spread of successful partnership models across countries and sectors – and that doing so is in their own self-interest," says the Africa Progress Report 2011, launched at the World Economic Forum for Africa, being held in Cape Town this week.

The report adds that private sector partnerships were experiencing a "well deserved renaissance" – certainly the UK government sees the private sector as crucial to realising its development policies – but "we do not see effective partnerships in nearly enough sectors. Consequently, many opportunities to tackle problems and drive development are being missed."

African governments, the report says, bore the main responsibility for the continent's development and needed to work harder to create the right conditions and incentives for partnerships. But the report warns that too many companies were not adhering to the UN Global Compact when seeking to invest in the continent. The compact is a set of 10 guiding principles aimed at businesses wanting to work in developing countries. The principles cover human rights, labour standards, the environment and anti-corruption, and are voluntary.

The report urges businesses to modify their models so they target the poor or integrate local communities and producers into their value chains. Civil society groups too play a key role in developing partnerships, said the report, ensuring that deals are accountable. Civil society groups could also play a role in mediating or brokering partnerships.

However, while pressing the importance of partnerships, the report authors emphasise that they are not a "panacea for all of Africa's problems". Good governance and strong political leadership are the most important ingredients in African success. International donors also need to fulfil their financial commitments to the continent.

Launching the report, Kofi Annan, chairman of the panel, which also includes Graça Machel, president of the Foundation for Community Development, Olusegun Obasanjo, former Nigerian president, Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, and Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, said: "We know of many partnerships in Africa that work and change people's lives, but not enough of them are replicated or brought to scale. This new report highlights the significant impact of successful partnerships and outlines tangible steps to strengthen, replicate and expand such models."

Looking back

Looking back over the year, the report notes that while Africa had been quick to recover from the economic crisis, and had huge potential for continued growth, "enormous risks" to progress remains, from the continuing financial downturn and insufficient economic diversification to the acceleration of climate change and environmental degradation. Too many countries are still too reliant on the extraction and export of unprocessed raw materials and need to find ways to add value to their goods through processing. Trade patterns skewed in favour of developed and emerging economies have resulted in little improvement in people's lives, says the report.

"The lack of economic diversification, in terms of both export products and destinations, explains the high volatility of African trade in recent years, and the strongly adverse impact of the global economic crisis through trade. It also explains why so little of the continent's high GDP growth translates into social development and tangible improves to people's lives," says the report.

On the issue of governance, the progress panel finds that nearly two-thirds of countries have seen deterioration in political participation, human rights and the rule of law over the past year, pointing to the crises in Ivory Coast and Libya as examples. The report notes the worrying trend of leaders clinging to power. "Six of the nine presidential elections held over the last year were won by the incumbents, some of whom have been in power for well over two decades," says the report. The trend looks set to continue, as only four of the 15 counties due to hold elections over the coming 12 months will not include the incumbent seeking re-election (excluding Egypt and Tunisia).

The report also notes that while many African countries have made progress in achieving the millennium development goals, inequality – within and across African societies – was increasing. The continent's strong economic growth "has not translated into widespread job creation and poverty reduction".

It adds that food prices are still having a major impact on many African states, saying that they were higher now than at any time since 1984.

All the details on the referendum for introducing the alternative vote in Westminster elections
• Pros and cons
• Who is winning the argument

What is the current system?

UK general elections are held under the first past the post, where the voter casts an X for their preferred constituency candidate. The candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of their share of the total number of votes cast.

What is the alternative vote?

AV is designed to secure 50% or more support for MPs by allowing voters to rank the candidates on offer in order (if they want to). So they would put "1" by their first preference candidate, "2" by their second preference, and so on.

If, at the initial count, any candidate receives 50% or more first preference votes, they are declared the winner. But if no candidate gets more than 50%, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and his or her votes reassigned according to the second preferences expressed on the ballot papers. The process goes on until one candidate receives more than 50% of the vote and is declared the winner.

However, it may be that voters chose not to rank all the candidates, and that no candidate gets more than 50%. In that instance, whoever ends up with the most votes wins.

Is AV the same as proportional representation?

No, which is why Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats – long in favour of switching to a PR system – called it "a miserable little compromise" before the general election. Parties can still form a government with less than 50% of first choice votes. The Lib Dems have long supported the single transferable vote, a proportional system that would consolidate existing (and, under AV, single-MP) constituencies into much larger multi-member constituencies.

Do you have to choose more than one candidate under AV?

No. You can vote just for one if you choose to.

Where else is AV used?

AV is used in three countries – Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. It is used in a number of internal elections, such as those for some unions and political parties, for example. Most recently, the Labour leadership election that saw Ed Miliband elected allowed for candidates to be ranked in preference order.

Why AV?

The referendum was the result of coalition negotiations after the general election in 2010, despite the fact that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats wanted it.

Tories fear the party would struggle to ever form a majority government again under AV, while the Liberal Democrats campaigned for proportional representation – which AV isn't. The only party for AV was Labour, which promised a referendum in its manifesto but is now the most split on the issue.

When is the referendum?

5 May, the same day as the devolved elections in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and local elections in Northern Ireland and parts of England.

Many Conservatives are unhappy about the timing, which they say it will lead to a distorted turnout, with those in areas in which there are no elections, such as London, being less likely to vote.

Who is eligible to vote?

Around 46 million people will be eligible to vote, the same as at a general election – British citizens plus Irish and Commonwealth citizens who are resident in the UK. Peers cannot vote at a general election, but can vote in the referendum.

What are the pros and cons of AV?

Supporters of a switch to AV say:

• The aim of securing more than 50% of the local vote would ensure MPs work harder to earn and keep voter support. Two-thirds of MPs at the last election were elected on less than a 50% share of the vote.

• It would end the "jobs for life" culture in safe constituency seats (campaigners point to MPs in safe seats who were embroiled in the expenses scandal that hit the previous parliament).

• It would encourage more people to vote, because voters would feel that their say matters more. Campaigners say many are deterred from participating because under first past the post because they feel their vote is wasted.

• AV is moving with the times: two-party dominance has made way for a more pluralist system (notably in devolved Scotland and Wales).

• It eliminates the need for tactical voting. Electors can vote for their first-choice candidate without fear of wasting their vote.

• A switch to AV would not mean changing the current MP-constituency link.

• Supporters say the system would make it more difficult for extremist parties to win an election, because they would be unlikely to secure many second or third preference votes.

• It encourages candidates to chase second and third preferences, which lessens the attractions of negative campaigning (one doesn't want to alienate the supporters of another candidate whose second preferences one wants) and rewards broad church policies.

Those against AV argue:

• First past the post is the fairest system because it is based on the principle of one person, one vote. AV is a "losers' charter" where the candidate who comes second or third in first preferences can actually be elected.

• Some votes will count more than others: If a voter gives their first preference vote to a mainstream party, their other preferences may not be counted. But if they vote for a fringe party candidate who gets knocked out, their other preferences will count.

• AV is a "politicians' fix" because, instead of the voters choosing the government, it would lead to more hung parliaments and backroom coalition deals.

Critics counter that the current coalition was a result of first past the post and that AV is unlikely to lead to more coalitions because it is not PR.

• AV makes decisive electoral outcomes less likely (critics again point to the 2010 election, which led to an inconclusive win for the Conservatives under first past the post).

• Switching to a new voting system would cost £250m.

• It takes longer to count.

• AV will do little to improve under-represented groups, such as the Greens, in parliament.

Allegra Stratton has stress-tested the two campaigns' claims

So who's for and who's against?

There are two lead campaigns registered for and against AV. Each is a coalition of cross-party supporters and others from outside politics.

For example, 200 Labour MPs and peers support the No campaign, alongside the majority of Conservative MPs, and the No2Av president is the former Labour foreign secretary Margaret Beckett.

The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, is, meanwhile, a high-profile campaigner for the Yes campalongside the Liberal Democrats in the belief that AV would enable "progressive" parties to come together.

Nick Clegg, the party leader who pressed for the referendum, has been urged by Miliband to keep a low profile over fears voters may vote No just to punish him for compromises made in coalition.

The SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Green party, Ukip, the SDLP, Sinn Féin and Northern Ireland's Alliance party support AV (though many would prefer PR), while the DUP and UUP are opposed. Celebrities for and against have also nailed their colours to the mast to broaden the campaigns' appeal.

Outside the mainstream campaigns are those who object to the referendum not offering PR as a choice. A number of crossbench peers have launched a campaign to oppose AV in favour of PR. It is independent of the main No2AV campaign. Conservatives linked to Yes to AV have set up their own website.

Why did the Conservatives agree to the referendum if most are opposed?

It was a compromise. David Cameron won a guarantee that the next election will be held under AV only if there is a Yes vote in a referendum and also an equalisation in the size of constituencies – a move that will see the number of MPs fall from 650 to 600 and could benefit the Tories.

What is the exact question being put to voters?

The referendum will say: "At present, the UK uses the "first past the post" system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the 'alternative vote' system be used instead? Yes or no?"

Who is winning the argument?

Polls have swung one way and the other. In February, the Yes and No camps were pretty much neck and neck, then a Reuters/Ipsos MORI poll said that, among those certain to vote, 49% supported AV while 37% were against.

A YouGov poll for Sky News the following month suggested support for the Yes campaign was stronger, with 37% in favour of change to 32% opposed.

The arrow then began to point the other way. A YouGov poll for the Sun showed the No campaign ahead at the end of March, with 44% against AV and only 31% in support. In April, a Populus poll showed a clear lead for first past the post. A Guardian/ICM poll later the same month showed the no campaign 16 points ahead.

As the referendum grows closer, tension is mounting between the two sides, with each accusing the other of dirty tricks. Members of the coalition are also at loggerheads: the energy secretary, Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat, has accused his cabinet colleague Lady Warsi of turning to "Goebbels-like propaganda" over claims AV would make mainstream parties pander to the BNP.

What would it mean for the next election if we switched to AV?

No one can reliably predict the electoral impact of AV if it is used in the next election, because much will depend on the relative popularity of the two coalition parties at the time. However, general modelling suggests Labour and the Liberal Democrats would gain seats under AV and the Conservatives would be the losers.

This would go some way to appeasing the Liberal Democrat claim that the number of seats the party gains under first past the post does not reflect their national share of the vote (though this would only be properly redressed under PR).

The main party leaders: in their own words

• David Cameron has warned that scrapping the first past the post would be a "massive step backwards for accountability and trust in our politics" because it would result in more hung parliaments with politicians doing deals before and after elections. He has described AV as "undemocratic, obscure, unfair and crazy":

The real beauty of first past the post is the principle of one person, one vote. Under AV, some votes count more than others.

Why? Because if you vote for a mainstream candidate who is top of the ballot in the first round, your other preferences will never be counted. But if you vote for a fringe party who gets knocked out, your other preferences will be counted.

How can it be right that the second, third, even fourth vote of someone who supports the BNP can count as much as the first vote of someone who supports one of the mainstream parties?

What's more, AV isn't as proportional as people make out. Indeed, if it had been used in 1997, 2001 and 2005, Tony Blair would have got even bigger majorities. Would that really have reflected the will of the country? No. And there's another big unfairness inherent in AV – that candidates who no one really wanted can end up winning.

• Nick Clegg claims AV would help tackle corruption in politics by forcing MPs to listen to voters. Politicians who hold safe seats under first past the post have "jobs for life" and are free to ignore voters, he says.

For years, politicians and parties have courted the votes of a few thousand people in marginal seats and ignored the rest. It is because there are so many MPs with jobs for life that there are so many who can take their constituents for granted.

And it is because there were so many MPs taking their constituents for granted that so many abused their expenses. There was a clear link between how safe an MP's seat was and how likely they were to abuse the system. When a system makes corruption more likely, it should be changed.

• Ed Miliband admits AV is "not perfect" but argues that it would help restore the balance of power in favour of voter:

The arguments in this referendum have been framed around whether a Yes vote damages David Cameron or a No vote damages Nick Clegg. It is about something more. I want to take, head on, the fear designed to appeal to Labour supporters: that a Yes vote in this referendum will be seen as a vindication of Nick Clegg.

I know this referendum is far harder to win because of Nick Clegg's broken promises. But we can't reduce the second referendum in British political history to a verdict on one man. The change to the alternative vote deserves our support because it is fairer and because it encourages a better politics.

The British people know that the state of our politics is badly broken. Many see Westminster as remote and out of touch.

Politicians should never feel safe or insulated from those they represent. That's what I want to change.

To his supporters, he is bold and charming. To his detractors, he is lazy and reckless. But after his first year in office, do we have any idea who the prime minister is?

In a neat symmetry, the first year in the premiership of David Cameron is ending as it began: in the judgment of the British people, delivered on the first Thursday in May. This time his name is not on the ballot anywhere, as people vote for devolved assemblies, local councils or on the AV referendum. But the results, especially on AV, will inevitably be read as an interim verdict on the man who – five days after the general election of 2010 – entered Downing Street as the first Conservative prime minister for 13 years.

How is he doing in the job? What kind of leader is he proving to be? Is he destined for success of failure? These are the questions both his allies and opponents, those working with him or working to unseat him, still grapple with, 12 months on.

If Britain says No to AV today – as the polls suggest it will – then Cameron will be hailed as a winner, the man whose late intervention turned around what had been an ailing No campaign. The Tory right, in parliament and the press, will lavish him with praise. He will be the hero who saved Britain's time-honoured electoral system of first-past-the-post. If Yes springs a surprise, then he will be branded a loser – the result a second failure by the man who couldn't win a majority last year, even against the "open goal" created by a recession and an opponent as unpopular as Gordon Brown. The view that is formed tomorrow, as the votes are counted, could well define Cameron for years to come.

For now, friends and foes of the PM are able to present rounded cases both for and against him – sometimes citing the same evidence. Neither view has fully taken hold in the public imagination; Cameron is still a work in progress, the collective mind not yet made up. After just a year, that's natural enough. What's more intriguing is that some of that uncertainty lingers at the core of the political class. Conversations with those in the inner circles of both government and opposition suggest many have not entirely worked out what to make of the country's new-ish leader – neither the strengths that could be the making of him, nor the weaknesses that could prove his undoing.

Cameron boosters start with a simple point that few contest: that he looks and sounds the part. Whether in a lineup of world leaders or "on the sofa with Phil and Fern," as one ally puts it, he seems "comfortable in his own skin". Often mentioned is his early and graceful performance delivering the government's apology for Bloody Sunday. He is able to speak fluently and rarely looks ridiculous. If this is remarked upon, it may be because of what some analysts call "the contrast principle": put simply, he benefits from the comparison with Gordon Brown.

In private, too, he has won admiration even from those who don't share his party label. One coalition insider says Cameron has close to the full package: "He has a genuinely commanding personality, he's incredibly intelligent, charming, pleasant, professional, courteous – all that takes you a long way."

Above all, say Cameron's advocates, the PM has the quality Brown so conspicuously lacked: courage. This first year has been bolder and more radical than anyone expected, whether attempting to eradicate the entire deficit in four years, launching a wholesale reorganisation of the NHS in England or leading the way, along with Nicolas Sarkozy, in pushing for military action in Libya. All those moves have entailed high risks. The threat of double-dip recession remains real. If he is seen as the wrecker of the NHS – despite the notorious "air-brushed" 2010 posters declaring his personal promise that the health service was safe in his hands – his entire decontamination strategy for the Tories will be in shreds. What was billed as a rapid, limited intervention in Libya could turn into a long, drawn-out war.

Those looking for an explanation for the pace and scale of the government's ambition are directed to look no further than the precedent set by Tony Blair. "David's obsessed with the lessons of Blair's first term," says one friend of the PM. Hadn't Blair come to regard his first four years as a waste, wishing he had started reforming straight away? Well, Cameron and the coalition are determined to learn from his mistake. Besides, Cameron does not have the advantage enjoyed Blair: he won no majority, let alone a landslide. The result is an extra sense of urgency. "You only get one shot," says that Cameron friend. "And you've been working for it all your life. No wonder you don't want to waste it."

That reference to Blair is a recurring theme of the Cameron premiership and the wider coalition: a near-compulsive interest in the former Labour prime minister, cited as a role model and guide by the coalition's upper echelons much more often than, for example, Margaret Thatcher. Blair is offered as a precedent – usually with chapter-and-verse references to his autobiography – either to be followed or avoided.

A perfect example came during the House of Commons Libya debate. Cameron stressed that there would be no ground invasion and that military action had full legal backing from the UN: indeed his attorney-general sat at his side. He might as well have said: "This is the un-Iraq. Everything about it will be different." But when he came to make the positive case, the comparison Cameron reached for was Kosovo in 1999, when Blair was lauded. During the debate, the prime minister took an intervention from the veteran leftwinger Dennis Skinner. He treated him with exaggerated courtesy, just as Blair used to do – and for the same reason: in order to render Skinner harmless. Every aspect of Cameron's conduct that day could be traced to the Blair playbook.

The result, Cameron's friends say, is that the prime minister is enjoying some of the former Labour leader's success. He may lack Blair's landslide majority and bulging coffers, but they reckon he's inherited Blair's Teflon exterior, the lucky knack that allows gaffes and missteps to go unpunished. Last month, for example, the prime minister gave a dressing down to a Daily Telegraph reporter while out on the road, complaining about a story he deemed unhelpful. "You fucker," he said to him. Just imagine for a moment how that would have been reported had Brown been the culprit. One Lib Dem has already written the headline he knows the Sun would have used had the deputy prime minister been the offender: "Clegg's final meltdown." But the story was confined to the news-in-brief and diary columns. The political press corps, true to the principle that you should only kick a man when he's down, still fears Cameron – and so lays off him.

The rosy assessment of the prime minister concludes with a nod towards the opinion polls. Cameron's personal numbers are ahead of the Conservative party's, one pollster tells me, adding that Ed Miliband is in the reverse position, his own ratings lagging behind Labour's. With an expected boost coming tomorrow, Cameron's position is looking healthy. Or at least that's how his friends see it.

The contrary view has poll numbers of its own. Labour sources direct you to the latest Ipsos/Mori survey that has Cameron with a net rating of -3 (with Miliband on +1), adding that Cameron has never got close to the popularity enjoyed by Blair. More surprisingly, they note that the PM has not even reached the level notched up by Brown during his three-month honeymoon.

It's not just Labour partisans who speak this way. One coalition player reckons "stock in Cameron is selling way above its true value at the moment," anticipating the day when the prime minister gets a much tougher ride which, he implies, would not be undeserved.

The critics light upon those same traits identified by his admirers, seeing them not as assets but as liabilities. Where his friends see boldness, for example, his opponents see recklessness. To them, it's folly that the government is attempting simultaneously to eradicate the deficit, reshape the NHS, transform the welfare state, fight a new war in Libya and much, much more besides. The Downing Street machine is simply not equipped to cope, taking on so many major missions at once. They accuse Cameron of embarking on major policy changes that he has simply not thought through – with Andrew Lansley's health reforms only the most obvious example. The forestry sell-off, too, suggests a government that acts first and thinks later. Some put Libya into the same category.

Related to this is the debate over Cameron's management style. Early on it became fashionable to describe the PM as a chairman of the board, rather than chief executive. Breaking from Brown's micro-management and obsession with detail, Cameron preferred to give his cabinet ministers their head, allowing them to nurture their own pet ideological projects. He would hover presidentially above the fray, allowing Michael Gove to start his free schools, Iain Duncan Smith to introduce his universal credit and Lansley to upend the NHS.

His defenders say all this is an exaggeration, that he is hands-on, that every cabinet minister knows any serious decision has to go through Cameron. But the impression lingers. One coalition insider believes the health-reform car crash happened because Cameron failed to ask the question of Lansley that Blair had pressed on his own reforming health secretaries: "OK, I understand the policy: now what about the politics? How do we make this fly?" (Others dispute the notion that it was sloppiness that allowed Lansley's scheme through, insisting that Cameron approved it because he agreed with it: "It's worse than you think: he believes this stuff," says one friend, quoting – guess who – Blair.)

This criticism runs deeper, suggesting that there is a kind of patrician laidback quality, even a laziness, to Cameron – as if, while in his head he knows he should be like Blair, giving the impression of constant activity, in his heart he'd rather be like Harold Macmillan, taking a month off in the summer and making time for a decent lunch. One close-up observer says that if Blair was a shark, permanently on the move, Cameron "is a whale. He sleeps."

The laziness critique has gained momentum with the PM's gaffes, whether branding Britain as America's "junior partner" against the Nazis in 1940 (when, in fact, the US had not yet joined the war) or wrongly accusing an Oxford college over the precise number of black students it had admitted. "He busks it," says one Labour bigwig. "He doesn't actually do the work." One Downing Street insider reports that the prime minister's aides have advised him to avoid all mention of dates when he speaks – because of his unfortunate habit of getting them wrong.

More seriously, one former cabinet minister believes that Cameron's style and his ambition form "a terrible combination". You can't simultaneously promote a packed agenda and be a hands-off leader, he says. You might be able to delegate the detail, but success demands that a prime minister shepherd the policy through, overseeing the overall strategy and the politics. Above all, once you've trusted a minister to do a job, you stand by him. Instead, say his detractors, Cameron has developed a nasty habit of letting his ministers hang out to dry once things get uncomfortable. Few senior Tories will have forgotten the fate of Caroline Spelman, whose forestry sell-off plan was publicly dumped by Cameron at prime minister's questions. Lansley's career appears to be hanging by a thread.

All this, say his opponents, belies Cameron's initial, meticulously crafted image as Mr Nice Guy. The veneer might be smooth and charming but underneath is a less pleasant character – and increasingly, they believe, the mask is slipping.

The best example came late last month, when Cameron told Labour frontbencher Angela Eagle to "Calm down, dear." Earlier, the PM had fumed at Ed Balls, describing him as "the most annoying person in modern politics". Labour top brass have delighted in reports that Cameron often lets rip in private, with a temper whose ferocity has shocked civil servants. Less heir to Blair than heir to Brown, they chortle.

They hope to cast Cameron as Flashman, the public school bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays with an added streak of vindictiveness: they cite the prime minister's blocking of Brown as a possible head of the International Monetary Fund, a job his predecessor pined for. That struck even non-partisans as spiteful.

Take a step back from this cluster of criticisms and you'll see that they don't quite fit together. Is Cameron a weak figure, not fully on top of things, u-turning under pressure, backing down at the first sign of Telegraph displeasure, whether over England's forests or a morning suit for the royal wedding? Or is he a bully, arrogantly driving through a radical programme, ignoring his lack of a mandate, bent on fulfilling his ideological mission? The trouble with the latter description is that it might sound too much like praise: pollsters remember that it never hurt Thatcher or Blair to be described as too tough.

Labour reckons "arrogant" is the key word, one that encompasses both Cameron's placing of a personal photographer on the public payroll (a decision reversed under fire) and his serial breaking of promises (including the vow that there would be "no top-down reorganisation of the NHS"), evidence, they say, of a contemptuous disregard for the electorate.

For the moment, Labour's critique is a lonely one. They have no allies among the Lib Dems, as they did in the Thatcher era, and the bulk of the press remains firmly on Cameron's side. If he wins a No vote today, that will become truer still. After one year in Downing Street, David Cameron retains the power of fear. For now, at least.

Metcalfe's plan to amend the Pennsylvania Constitution begins in the State Government Committee of which he is the Majority Chair. As Chair, he has the power to bring the amendment to a committee vote.  It would be best to squelch that and you can help by contacting the other members of the committee. 

The message is very clear.  There are many more important issues than this and we need our elected officials to focus their time and energy on them -- the economy, transportation, taxes, health care, the environment, etc. 

Note that there are several Southwestern PA committe members. It is not too early to galvanize your networks to make the calls and make it personal -- people in our neighborhoods need jobs, healthcare, focus on energy issues, education, etc.  The links will take you to the reps contact page - phone, email, webforms, etc.   Just a few clicks if you live in Moon or Penn Township and you can help put this divisive issue aside to focus on your family priorities. 

Republicans

Seth Grove - York County

Jim Cox - Berks County

Matt Gabler - Clearfield and Elks Counties

Linda Schlegel Culver - Northumberland and Snyder Counties

George Dunbar - Westmoreland County (Jeannette, North Huntington,  Penn Twp, Irwin, North Irwin, Penn)

Eli Evankovich - Armstrong and Westmoreland Counties (New Kensington, Penn Township, Murrysville, Upper Burrell, Lower Burrell, Allegheny Township, Arnold, Export, Bethel Township, Cadogan Township, Parks Township, and Gilpin Township)

Glen Grell - Cumberland County

Marcia Hahn - Northampton County

Rob Kauffman - Cumberland and Franklin Counties

Jerry Knowles - Berks and Schuykill Counties

Timothy Krieger - Westmoreland County (Greensburg, Hempfield Twp, Delmont Borough, Hunker Borough, New Stanton Borough, Salem Township, South Greensburg Borough, Southwest Greensburg Borough. Unity Twp, Youngwood Borough)

T. Mark Mustio - Allegheny County (Aleppo Twp, Ben Avon Heights, Collier Twp, Edgeworth, Findlay Twp, Haysville, Kilbuck Twp, Moon Twp, North Fayette Twp, Ohio Twp, Osborne, Robinson Twp, Sewickley, Sewickley Heights, Sewickley Hills)

Brad Roae -  Crawford County

Jerry Stern - Blair County

 

Democrats

Babette Josephs (Minority Chair) - Philadelphia County

Tony Payton, Jr. - Philadelphia County

Steve Samuelson - Lehigh and Northhampton Counties

Greg Vitali - Delaware County

Tim Briggs - Montgomery County

Eugene DePasquale - Montgomery County

Florindo FaBrizio - Erie County

Kenyatta Johnson - Philadelphia County

Eddie Day Pashinski - Lucerne County

Steven Santarsierio - Bucks County

 

AP – Mideast envoy Tony Blair says the international community supports Palestinian reconciliation but will demand that the new unity government recognize Israel’s right to exist and renounce violence. More: continued here

JERUSALEM — Mideast envoy Tony Blair says the international community supports Palestinian reconciliation but will demand that the new unity government recognize Israel's right to exist and renounce violence.

Yoostar 2 is very much one of those games that can live or die by its post-release downloadable content. Thankfully for fans of the bizarre title, more is on the way.

Throughout May, Yoostar 2 will be giving you additional opportunities to reenact scenes from notable movies. The full list is broken out below, but you can expect stuff from The Big Lebowski, The Princess Bride, and a surprisingly beefy amount of content from The Hangover.

I often forget how much people love that last one.

Scenes

• American Graffiti - Got an ID for the liquor?
• Apollo 13 - Re-entering Earth's atmosphere
• The Big Lebowski - I'm the Dude
• The Big Lebowski - The rent
• The Blair Witch Project - I'm scared to close my eyes
• Cheech and Chong's Next Movie - I'll teach you some Spanish words
• Crank - Who are you?
• Fletch - John who?
• The Hangover - Doug is missing
• Kick-Ass - Child, you always knock me for a loop
• Kick-Ass - The kindest daddy in the world
• Marathon Man - Swallow the diamonds
• Matrix Revolutions - Give 'em hell!
• On the Waterfront - I coulda been a contender
• The Princess Bride - You killed my father - prepare to die!
• The Princess Bride - Where is the poison?
• Saw II - I want to play a game
• Saw V - Killing is distasteful to me
• Star Trek: Generations - The death of Kirk
• The Terminator - You're terminated
• Three Amigos! - A plethora of piñatas
• Weeds - A grow loan

Hollywood Sets

• Men in Black 2 - You are the Light of Zartha
• Scarface - From the desk of Tony Montana
• Tropic Thunder - Scorcher VI trailer

Free Video Background

• Fast-Moving Clouds

Scene Packs

Hollywood Sets Pack

• 300 - Xerxes' great beast advances
• Clash of the Titans - Tremble before the Kraken
• Fast and the Furious - Drag race
• GI Joe - Missile chase
• Tropic Thunder - A pandacide

Hollywood Icons Theme Pack

• Beverly Hills Cop - Axel checks in
• Forrest Gump - A bullet in the buttocks
• The Godfather - Luca Brasi and Don Corleone
• Rocky 2 - I am a fighter
• The Terminator - I love you, too, sweetheart

The Hangover Film Pack

• The Hangover - What's the last thing we remember?
• The Hangover - I'm gonna propose to Melissa
• The Hangover - Am I missing a tooth?

Soldier 3-Pack + bonus video background

• Platoon - Make it out of here
• Rio Grande - The War Department promised 180 men
• Sands of Iwo Jima - I'm gonna get the job done
• Video Background - Desert Fire

Wizard of Oz 3-Pack

• The Wizard of Oz - Dorothy meets the Cowardly Lion
• The Wizard of Oz - Is that the witch?
• The Wizard of Oz - Toto didn't mean it

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Mahmoud Abbas to abandon a unity agreement with Hamas during a meeting with Quartet envoy Tony Blair.

Since the royal commission of 1908, political calculation has dominated the debate over electoral reform

In all the petty mud-throwing over Thursday's AV referendum one key protagonist who has attracted neither praise nor blame is William Robert Ware, the Harvard-educated American architect who devised the model while briefly dabbling in voting systems in his spare time as a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That was in or about 1870, and Ware's was not the first high-minded attempt to inject greater "fairness'' into the ancient winner-take-all method of picking leaders now widely known as first-past-the-post (FPTP). The architect's starting point was the single transferable vote (STV) system, independently invented for multi-member constituencies by both the Danish politician-mathematician Carl Andrae (1855) and the British political scientist Thomas Hare (1857).

Ware adapted STV to the needs of elections where there is a single winner: whether for national constituency politics, state or local council ballots, more widely in choosing mayors, presidents or party leaders and — since 2009 — winners of Hollywood's Oscars. Colin Firth, who is campaigning for a yes vote, got his King's Speech Oscar that way.

Known in many countries, including the US, as "instant-runoff" (IRV) or the "preferential ballot", AV had to wait until a modification of the Ware model known as the "contingent vote" was first used in an election for the colonial government of Queensland, Australia. By 1908 true AV was being used for a state election in Western Australia. Hare's STV had been adopted by Tasmania in 1897, but in 1918 it was AV that Australia adopted nationally.

A high-minded democratic instinct for experiment in the young dominion (it abandoned property qualifications to vote long before Britain) was part of the story. But so was low partisan calculation. Australia emerged from World War I with its old Labour v Liberal position fragmented. Faced with a Labour candidate winning the 1918 Swan byelection on 34.4% of the vote, the conservative Country (30.4%) and National (29.6%) parties joined forces over AV to avoid it happening again.

By now AV was on the radar in Britain too. The Proportional Representation Society — known as the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) since 1958 — was founded in 1884 by Sir John Lubbock, the first Lord Avebury, to promote proportional representation (PR). Its own preferred model, then as now, being pure STV. CP Scott, editor-owner of The (Manchester) Guardian, was an early supporter. So was the Rev Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).

Early efforts to attach STV to political reform bills failed (Gladstone had declared he would prefer a reactionary Tory government to STV) – and the society flagged until after the great Liberal landslide (in informal cahoots with Labour) of 1906. At this stage – though not after the Liberal collapse in the 1920s – radicals such as Asquith and Lloyd George ("a device for defeating democracy") were both hostile.

Yet after a vigorous campaign by the ERS's dynamic new secretary, John Humphries, in 1908 Asquith conceded what remains Britain's only royal commission on voting reform.

STV was proposed for Ireland under the doomed 1914 Home Rule bill (and adopted to this day after independence in 1921), but by 1917 the royal commission was recommending AV.

Humphries duly helped ensure that a Speaker Conference in that year split the difference, an attempted compromise which often characterises the PR battle. It proposed AV for 358 of the then-569 UK seats (the mostly rural ones) and multi-member STV for densely-populated urban areas.

During debates on the representation of the people bill (the reform which gave the vote to all men and women over 30) the Commons narrowly rejected STV and — by one vote — inserted AV. The Lords voted for STV. Efforts to achieve further compromise floundered, though STV was introduced for the then-university seats. Over the next few years backbench bills proposing STV or AV were routinely defeated.

But in 1923 a sea change occurred in British politics. Lloyd George's Tory-dominated coalition had collapsed. Exhausted and divided by the war, the Liberal party was overtaken by Labour which formed its first, brief, minority government. Facing the political wilderness, Asquith and Lloyd George finally embraced electoral reform as their route back to influence and power.

In circumstances like those facing Gordon Brown in 2009-10, their chance came after 1929 when Ramsay MacDonald formed Labour's second minority government. To shore up Liberal support against Stanley Baldwin's newly-defeated Tories, MacDonald offered not STV but AV as part of a Lib-Lab progressive alliance which, speculation suggested, might have sent Lloyd George back to the Treasury. The history of the Great Depression might have been different if the Keynsians had prevailed and deficit spending eased the horrors of mass unemployment. Instead, Labour's latest representation of the people bill – including AV – passed the Commons by 295 to 230 votes on 24 February 1931. The Speaker refused to allow discussion of the more radical STV option – as outside the scope of the bill. In the Lords attempts to insert the 1917-18 compromise of 100 urban seats elected by STV also floundered.

An AV amendment to cover conurbations of over 200,000 was passed by the Lords on 21 July. But by now the government, grappling with spending cuts and the tottering value of sterling, was close to collapse. The bill fell with the government on 24 August and MacDonald emerged as head of a three-party coalition, buttressed by a very distorted general election result. In varying guises a national coalition ruled until Labour's great postwar victory in 1945.

With a Lab-Con duopoly now claiming up to 95% of the vote, electoral reform again disappeared from the political agenda until 1974 produced a hung parliament, prompting moderate Tories such as Douglas Hurd and Chris Patten to flirt with PR, versions of which were by now in use in many countries.

After Labour's third defeat by Margaret Thatcher it set up the Plant Commission, which recommended a version of AV and a referendum. As opposition leader, Tony Blair promised the Roy Jenkins commission, which produced yet another refinement, known as AV-Plus, for Westminster, to match the use of the additional member system (AMS) in the new devolved assemblies.

Blair's landslide victories killed that option. Only when defeat again loomed did pragmatic politicians reach for the electoral reform lever to save themselves. Brown, and now the coalition leaders, Cameron and Clegg, mix high rhetoric with low calculation: business as usual.

John Harris, page 30

Leader comment, page 32

The Israeli prime minister said the Palestinian Authority should not make peace with Hamas after five years of enmity. Hamas is widely seen as more radical than Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, but he is focusing on internal reconciliation while the peace process with Israel stalls. The Israeli government has frozen $100 million in funds collected for the authority as it pressures Abbas to walk away from a tentative deal, announced by the two parties last week. The deal would create a unified governing party and plan parliamentary and presidential elections next year. —KDG

CNN:

As Palestinian political factions prepared Tuesday to formally sign a political reconciliation agreement in Cairo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the Palestinian Authority to pull out of the deal, saying it would jeopardize the already-stalled Middle East peace process.

Meeting with Middle East Envoy Tony Blair in Jerusalem, Netanyahu called on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to “immediately cancel the reconciliation deal with Hamas and choose the path of peace with Israel.”

The Egyptian-brokered agreement, word of which was first announced last week, seeks to mend the political differences between the two largest Palestinian factions: Abbas’ party, the West Bank-based Fatah and the Islamist group Hamas, which rules Gaza.

“The agreement between Abu Mazen (Abbas) and Hamas is a hard blow to the peace process,” Netanyahu told Blair. “How can peace be achieved with a government (in which half of the ministers) call for the destruction of the State of Israel and praises the master killer Osama bin Laden?”

Read more

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• May 2, 2011 Pakistan and the U.S., Post-bin Laden
• May 2, 2011 The Plan: Maps, Photos and Diagrams of bin Laden’s Compound

Gainsborough Standard

Buble Fever Gainsborough Standard one of the world's most renowned Michael Buble tribute acts is coming to the region to get Lincoln swinging. Having performed for the likes of the Queen and Tony Blair, Rickie Arthur looks like, sounds like and is said to be the next best thing to the ...

By choosing to execute the al-Qaida leader the US has denied justice to the victims of 9/11 and perpetuated the 'war on terror'

Al-Qaida strategists, propagandists, operatives and supporters will be relieved that Osama bin Laden, their iconic figurehead, died a martyr and was not captured alive and imprisoned to stand trial. To this extent the strategists determining US counterterrorism policy have shown a disregard for effective counterterrorism and instead fostered continuity with the war on terror which has boosted, rather than diminished, global support for al-Qaida since 9/11.

When Tony Blair and George Bush stood shoulder to shoulder in the aftermath of 9/11 it was clear to both leaders that military responses would replace criminal investigations as the preferred tools of counterterrorism. Sadly, in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the globe, the war on terror resulted in the deaths of far more civilians than suspected terrorists – whether high profile like Bin Laden or lesser and unknown known figures operating in the name of al-Qaida.

As a result, the war on terror lost moral authority and became a gift to al-Qaida propagandists. The fact that the most effective counterterrorism is always closely focused on the prosecution of terrorist conspirators appeared to be of no concern in the Pentagon or Whitehall.

According to al-Qaida propagandist Saif al-Adl, 9/11 was intended to provoke the US to "lash out militarily against the ummah" in the manner if not the scale of "the war on terror".

"The Americans took the bait," he continues, "and fell into our trap" – no doubt using hindsight to describe al-Qaida's ability to predict the massive scale and range of the military responses to 9/11.

The death and disregard of innocent civilians – often referred to as "collateral damage" – characterised the war on terror and provided al-Qaida strategists with effective recruitment campaigns. Bin Laden himself became adept at exploiting it:

"By what measure of kindness are your killed considered innocents while ours are considered worthless? By what school [of thought] is your blood considered blood while our blood is water? Therefore, it is [only] just to respond in kind, and the one who started it is more to blame … "

As Karen Greenberg reminds us, due criminal process and the rule of law is not anathema to effective counterterrorism. On the contrary, history suggests, in the long run it is an aid.

That was certainly the case in 1993, when the World Trade Centre was the subject of a terrorist bomb attack the first time. On that occasion FBI investigators came to London to establish background details of Ramzi Yousef, a prime suspect in the case who had previously studied at a university in Britain. Yousef was later prosecuted and convicted for his part in the terrorist conspiracy in which a massive truck bomb exploded in the underground car park of the World Trade Centre, killing six people, injuring over a thousand and narrowly failing to destroy the landmark building – something it was clearly intended to do.

In addition the FBI arrested the blind Egyptian scholar Omar Abdel Rahman, otherwise Sheikh Omar, who was then convicted for seditious conspiracy in relation to the same bomb attack. If the war on terror had not so completely eroded US judicial authority it is wholly plausible to conceive that Bin Laden could have been tried in exactly the same way as Sheikh Omar.

Of course, it was far more practical to kill Bin Laden than attempt to bring him to trial. No doubt Barack Obama and his counterterrorism strategists ruled this option out without too much deliberation.

However, if Bin Laden had stood trial he would have faced the bereaved families and friends of those innocent civilians killed on 9/11. If found guilty he would deserve to be labelled a terrorist because it is the intentional killing of civilians that defines terrorism and distinguishes it from other forms of political violence. If he had been imprisoned for life then, like Sheikh Omar, he would also have been denied the status of martyr.

Imprisoned for life, Bin Laden would have been forced to reflect on the wicked crime of killing innocent civilians. He has been spared that fate. Bush, Blair and Obama should reflect whether they too have now killed too many innocent civilians in the name of the war on terror and revert to the rule of law – however difficult that may be.

What with the royal wedding – an inherently Tory cultural event – the Conservatives ought to feel much brighter, despite the circling economic gloom

It may just be political hypertension of the familiar pre-election kind. But back from my Easter break (very nice, thank you), I'm struck by the wave of defeatism sweeping over the political commentating classes – especially on the centre-left – as David Cameron approaches his first anniversary in No 10.

You can see why Lib Dem activists and politicians might be feeling the strain as they contemplate the loss of hundreds of council seats and the AV referendum on Thursday. What I say to them is what I always say: "Cheer up – things are never as good or as bad as they look on the day." The coalition will recover from its marital wobble and fight on.

What with the royal wedding – an inherently Tory cultural event – still offering a warm spring glow and Osama bin Laden dispatched to a watery grave, the Conservatives ought to feel much brighter, despite the circling economic gloom.

As Cameron wittily observed to Ed Miliband after the Labour leader complained about 0.5% growth in the first quarter, that's as good as any quarter's growth when you were in the cabinet. Economic prospects are still scarily bad (my sister lost her job to the cuts last week) but there's no point in a prime minister succumbing to the gloom. Sensitive, yes. Gloomy, no.

Yet Iain Martin, the latest occupant of the Daily Mail's Saturday politics spot, wrote a piece so glum for the royal wedding edition that even Kate and William might have been depressed if they'd had time to read it.

Martin's thesis was that the wedding reminded us that two great British institutions, the monarchy and the armed forces, are still tip-top while the rest are in terrible shape. Britain is no longer self-governing, parliament is impotent, the union is falling apart, Brussels and the judges run everything. Cameron isn't a Tory. The constitution is badly broken, etc etc.

Put the man on pills! I share several of his prejudices, including a wary view of over-important and not very good judges, but it isn't that bad. Most of the time we muddle along with a mixture of luck and judgment.

If there is one single source of relentless pessimism in British public life, of denigration and dishonesty, it is surely the printed media, of which the Mail is such a distinguished market leader.

As for self-government and Brussels, on the two – arguably three – most important policy issues of the past decade, Britain has gone its own way, for better or worse.

· We did not join the euro (hurrah) and are thus free to run our own economy as well or badly as we do while watching the eurozone handle its own distinctive problems.

· We sided with Washington, not with Paris or Berlin, in the Middle East, the consequences of which decision remain to become clear.

· We remained outside the Schengen agreement on the free movement of EU residents, a naive if well-intentioned policy which is now unravelling. Instead we ran our own open door policy, for which the EU is not to blame.

Feeling better, Iain? It is not even true that Buck House and the military are much better than the BBC or parliament. The monarchy has had a very rocky few years, and is now recovering. The army has emerged poorly from Iraq and Afghanistan, over-stretched by politicians, yes, but not run by politicians – the mistakes have been military.

Assuming a no vote on Thursday, the Tory right will probably not cheer up: it removes one more excuse for being miserable and sniping at Cameron.

I heard him and Nick Clegg again on Radio 4's Today programme this morning – and Dave sounded in pretty good shape, teasing John Humphrys for a factual error and other rascality, even urging him to get a better researcher.

Cameron refused to apologise for that "calm down, dear" remark during last week's PMQs, acknowledging that some voters were cross but insisting that most will understand it was a joke, not a sexist assault on 51% of the electorate.

He's right about that, I'm afraid, and Labour was wrong to make such a fuss. Most voters prefer politicians who can make them laugh (Mrs Thatcher was the exception) rather than make them more miserable than they already are. Puritans, beware – you are always a minority. Tony Blair knew that, as GB did not.

Alas, mishandled rows are not the cause of Labour gloom, but the AV referendum and a wider unease that Miliband is yet to connect with voters either personally or on issues.

"The right no longer fears Labour," was Friday's conclusion by my level-headed colleague Martin Kettle about the Blair-Brown exclusion from the Abbey and Cameron's thumbs-down to Brown for the IMF post, which may not even become vacant.

Kettle's purpose was to persuade many AV waverers – lots of people asked me about it on holiday – that a yes vote on AV is a) right and b) would strengthen the Lib Dems in the coalition.

"If you want to harm the coalition, vote yes to AV. If you want to make the British establishment fear Labour again, vote yes," Kettle concluded.

Writing in the Observer, the less level-headed Will Hutton was even more apocalyptic about the "brutal desire driving the Tories' lust for power". Not just the Tory-funded no campaign or Murdoch getting hold of BskyB while the BBC gets stuffed, but a wider campaign to beat back pluralism and restore the network of private and public Tory interests which, says Hutton, run Britain.

It is the mirror image of the Mail's Martin, whose imagined world is run by sandal-wearing Guardianistas at the behest of foreigners in Brussels.

Vote yes to AV to create a more open, plural Britain and defeat hegemonic forces, Hutton concludes, accusing Labour's leaders of "naivety" about power in (some of them) supporting the no campaign. If only they'd had the guts to oust Brown in 2008-09, Labour would now be in coalition with the Lib Dems.

Pause for deep breath. Hutton makes the shrewder point that a smaller Commons – 600 seats instead of 650 – and more equal sized constituencies is also designed to shore up Tory hegemony. It's part of the coalition's constitutional package (the part which will become law) and, says me, potentially the more objectionable part, one that will divide and weaken politics.

Underlying this sort of talk is the notion that Labour's record in 13 years of office is being rubbished or wiped from the record as a period of barely-mitigated failure. This is far from true, as Cameron at least understands.

Those who argue that AV will help the centre-left because Britain repeatedly demonstrates majoritarian centre-left habits may be naive: as Hutton admits, no one knows how AV might work in practice.

But it is also reasonable to point out that the post-Thatcher Tories are not so hegemonic that they have managed to win a British election with a working majority since 1987. In 1992, John Major unexpectedly won them a fourth term with a fragile 21-seat majority which soon fractured, even before Blair tilted his lance. Since then, they have struggled.

It's not exactly hegemony. So cheer up, lads. You lost an election you deserved to lose. But life goes on.

Politicians are hiding their real values and intentions behind snide, loaded euphemisms

While sitting at my desk performing my usual "back-office function" recently, I was struck by a story on the debate over cuts to police budgets and the likely impact on the "frontline".

Warwickshire police officers are being ordered off the beat into civilian roles as the force tries to manage its budget after the 20% cuts imposed by the coalition government.

The Home Office response was familiarly blunt: forces should cut back on "bureaucracy" and "wasteful spending" while "increasing efficiency in the back office". David Cameron weighed in the following day: there is no reason for frontline policing to be affected, he said.

Sir Denis O'Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary, hit back in a report stating how important "middle-office" and "back-office" roles were in supporting "frontline" officers. All in this together, if you like.

Elsewhere in austerity Britain, Hull council was being lauded by a Times leader for making "substantial savings by rationalising back-office functions and reducing the number of buildings from which it delivers services". Eulogies were reserved for other local authorities reacting to the big cut in central funding by launching "efficiency" drives.

The BBC has been caught up in the fight between government and opposition to win a spin contest over the precise terms to use when covering stories about the cuts.

Savings or cuts? Here at the Guardian, we normally use cuts. It's shorter, to the point and is a shoo-in for headline writers. Oh, and Lord Littlejohn of Maildom rants about its use. For the record, he prefers to talk about "massive waste, non-jobs and vast salaries of senior council officers".

All around us these figurative euphemisms are being trotted out by ministers defending the burden placed on the NHS, local councils and the police to protect the all-important frontline services. Get rid of the back-office staff, the thinking goes. Not quite as "unproductive" as the "feckless workshy", the unworthy and disposable state employee has the cheek to draw a salary – paid for by "you, the taxpayer" – while easing towards retirement and, yes, a "gold-plated" pension.

These invidious phrases aimed at those with lower qualifications and on lower pay are not new. "Deregulation" of the job market and enhanced "labour mobility" have long been phrases associated with the school of economic thought that implies the market will naturally find full employment and equitable wage levels as long as it remains unfettered by state legislation and intervention. Unemployed people must get on their bikes and find work or stay on the dole through "lifestyle choice".

The phrases du jour are rooted in the economic doctrine of the neoclassical orthodoxy of the 1930s – the father of Thatcher's 1980s monetarist mayhem and grandfather of Cameron and Osborne's supply-side wild child currently ravaging the public sector and ushering in an era of militant privatisation.

They are utterances born of the strict economic theory that sees employees purely as factors of production; not human beings with occasionally irrational urges, needy families, hefty mortgages, complex relationships, myriad emotional commitments and a need for belonging, a place in society, "big" or otherwise.

The longest-serving Labour prime minister in history, Tony Blair, set the current trend for euphemistic political buzzwords while masking an ideological drift to the right. "Choice", "hard-working families", "fairness", "prepare for change" and "rights and responsibilities" were all key elements of New Labour's "reform" policy agenda in health and education.

Such fuzzy language was noted by George Orwell in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language as increasingly used by politicians as a "defence of the indefensible". For this reason, he went on: "Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."

Back in coalition Britain 2011, the back-office function is a prime example of Orwell's target. The implication is that those employed in these jobs are virtually useless and their loss would be no great shame for the organisation; the reality is that unemployment can turn a person's life upside down.

There are, however, members of an organisation who no doubt do meet the criteria of vulnerability and exposure to ruthless market forces.

Take the coalition ministers spouting these snide, loaded, euphemistic circumlocutions. As Anne Robinson might ask: "Who's 'frontline' and who's 'back-office' in this government?"

Clearly Cameron, Osborne, Hunt, Gove and Pickles are out there flying the flag for "reform" while fighting the big ideological battles. Frontline, maybe.

But the three most prominent Lib Dems in the coalition – Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and Vince Cable – should perhaps think twice before using such inhuman, pejorative and invidious language. Some observers might argue they're no more than "human shields" for the Tory generals leading the fight.

So with the knife-edge AV referendum and the potentially devastating local elections just days away, the Lib Dem high-ups and ward councillors alike may be about to feel like the most disposable of team members.

As for the coalition – with its stark divisions on AV increasingly apparent – who knows how the result will play out for the losers facing their party faithful?

Even from my "back-office" position, I can see that Thursday's elections might just unleash the powerful yet precise force of the political "invisible hand" as voter "rationalisation" sweeps through polling stations all around the country.

Like most people, I’m mostly glad that Osama is dead. He directly caused the deaths of thousands of people, and indirectly led to the deaths, displacement and exile of millions more. Would Sparky have launched the grand $3 trillion and yet-to-be-paid-for invasion of Iraq if Osama hadn’t leveled the Towers? No, of course not. So Osama had a lot to answer for, and while I would have preferred to see a trial, this will do. What I’m having some trouble with are the responses from the right, the ones that question Obama’s timing of this exercise. Many of these have been neatly summarized over at Alicublog, where Edroso has his usual fun with the lunacy that emanates daily from the cognitively impaired (check out his Voice column too). Drudge seemed to think it was to do something bad to Donald Trump, that sort of thing.

What is being overlooked here is the obvious, as usual. Much has been made here of the failure of the Royal Wedding planners to invite Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to the wedding of the century, or the millennium, or something. Many commentators seem greatly troubled by this. If that’s true, imagine how Obama must feel. This is hugely embarrassing. So, clearly Obama went after Osama at the point that he did in order to distract attention from his grievous failure to receive an invitation to the Royal Wedding, and remove all that Royal Wedding coverage off the front pages of the world’s newspapers. And he’s been remarkably successful. Simple, really.

The excitement of the Royal wedding did not last even as long as the long Bank Holiday, displaced as it has been by Mr. Bin Laden’s death. There was little in the way of politics to the wedding: omitting Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from the guest list hardly counted as a constitutional crisis. As [...]

Bin Laden Dead: Tony Blair thanks Obama and the troops, Bush says the fight is not yet over

Andrew Malcolm: Osama bin Laden dead: George W. Bush and Tony Blair congratulate President Obama http://lat.ms/m1F2hd

(By @latimestot - Writer - Politics)

- Jennifer of Cubachi More reaction about this huge news. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reacts, and said there is justice, but the battle is not over.

Former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has warned that despite the death of Osama Bin Laden, "the battle goes on" to defeat terrorism.

Former prime minister Tony Blair expressed his "heartfelt gratitude" to President Barack Obama today for the military operation which killed Osama...

Tony Blair has had this to say on the execution of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan: My heartfelt gratitude to President Obama and to all of those who so brilliantly undertook and executed this operation. We should never forget 9/11 was ... Continue reading →

Nick Clegg has also made a statement on the death of Osama Bin Laden and whilst it is a far better response than that of Tony Blair, I would have expected a couple of other things to have been mentioned: ... Continue reading →

Former prime minister Tony Blair expressed his "heartfelt gratitude" to President Barack Obama today for the military operation which killed Osama bin Laden.

✒Richard Deverell's switch from BBC North chief operating officer to the corporation's new role of programme director for the W12 project raises many questions, not least of which is: will he only consider jobs with a point of the compass in the title? And it is a sign of how quickly the BBC's wheels turn that as recently as 20 April he was confirmed as a speaker at the "Impact of Media City" conference in June, when he would offer a "senior overview of how the BBC is likely to engage across the north in coming years". Seven days later and it turned out he wasn't moving north after all. Coronation Street, it would appear, will not be the only long-running soap to be based at Salford.

✒It's not easy being a columnist at the Daily Mail. Just ask Allison Pearson, who spent five years on the paper before quitting last year and switching to the Daily Telegraph. "As I get older, I don't really like opinions," she tells the current issue of Word magazine. "I always think that any sane person has about five opinions a year, and at the Mail I was supposed to have five a week. It's a recipe for lunacy. The whole sitting in judgment approach to other people increasingly fills me with discomfort ... Hate is not a word I would use now. These days, I much prefer to write and describe the human comedy and to laugh people into recognition."

✒It is entirely apposite, after all the recent excitement, that Heat magazine should feature none other than HRH Prince William as its "torso of the week" in its new issue, out tomorrow. He is pictured entirely without clothes apart from a swimming cap, although presumably he has trunks on out of shot. We can only hope they had enough time to change his job title to Duke of Cambridge. Wills's brother Harry has previously featured in the slot, as has Tony Blair. An appearance by David Cameron would presumably require an entirely new feature – "white tie and tails of the month".

✒Fans of Archers trivia have been puzzling over the significance of the date 1 January 1970. For that marks the birthday of many of the lesser known characters in the BBC Radio 4 soap, if the Archers phone app is to believed. Scroll through a who's who of characters, and you will be surprised to learn that Geordie grandmother Heather Pritchard was born on that day – which makes her younger than her daughter, Ruth – as was midwife Amy Franks, Borchester Land's legal eagle Annabelle Shrivenor and Jack Woolley's adopted daughter, Hazel. Stranger still, according to the app, so was "pensioner" Derek Fletcher - a silent character whose "likes" include "garden gnomes and the sound of his own voice". Many happy returns ...

✒Monkey's favourite absorbent children's character Spongebob Squarepants has not been averse to the odd merchandising spin-off or 200 in his short life, but Bikini Bottom's most famous resident's latest money-spinning range is the most unexpected yet. A tie-up with Savile Row tailor Richard James, due to be launched next week. Highlights of the brightly-coloured collection include £185 shirts, £95 ties, and a "bold yellow suit" - this barely does it justice – made to order. Bet that costs a Spongebob.

✒When is a digital radio not a digital radio? When it's on a trail on BBC Radio Wales, it would appear. A listener was moved to complain to the BBC Trust after splashing out £150 on a Roberts digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio, inspired by a seven-second jingle on the Welsh station proclaiming: "On AM, FM, digital and at BBC.co.uk/radiowales ... this is BBC Radio Wales." Alas, the station is not on DAB in the part of Monmouthshire where the complainant lives. Nor is his other favourite station, BBC Radio 5 Live. But the corporation politely refused the suggestion – backed by his local MP, David Davies – that it refund his money, pointing out that "the use of the word 'digital' was accurate given that it was possible to listen to BBC Radio Wales through Freeview, digital satellite and Sky at the time". Just not on digital, sorry, DAB radio. Clear? As an AM signal.

✒The BBC's biggest appointment of last week, of George Entwistle as the new director of BBC Vision, came less than 24 hours after DG Mark Thompson had been bemoaning how difficult it was to fill top jobs now that big bucks at the Beeb were a thing of the past. "It's extremely hard now to fill senior jobs at the BBC ... increasingly remuneration is a factor," he told the Lords communications select committee. His comments were clearly just the rocket up the behind that the headhunters needed, for lo and behold the Entmeister was installed in the Vision job the very next day. On £270,000 a year, it turned out, a third less than his predecessor Jana Bennett's basic of £415,000.

✒Monkey's quote of the week: "Who booked this fucker?" BBC Radio 5 Live's Shelagh Fogarty – fortunately off-air – after co-host Nicky Campbell pretended to be a nightmare guest called Anthony Grierson, a supposed philosophy professor, on her last day in the job. Hoaxed! "When that happens in real life I really don't swear off mic, ever," said Fogarty. "My mum would kill me."

Legal actions for the rich cost at least £10,000, often serving the interests of married men. But a tougher PCC, backed by the force of the law, could be the more responsible way

One effect of what are lazily called superinjunctions was last week's bizarre interview with Imogen Thomas, a Welsh glamour model, by Phillip Schofield on ITV's This Morning. Because of the intervention of lawyers, it fell to the silver-haired presenter to ask a string of detailed questions about her "six-month fling" with a "married Premier League footballer" (his words, not hers). "You met in hotel rooms for an hour or two at a time, sometimes before key matches and he told you you were the love of his life?" asked Schofield nodding. So bemused was Thomas by this legal nonsense that she meekly nodded. It was the presenter who was reduced to answering the question himself.

On the face of it, there could be no clearer example of the inequalities inherent in the "superinjunction" process. These are legal actions for the rich – costing at least £10,000 to get time. The hasty, judge-only rulings have the immediate effect of suppressing or limiting reporting. When it comes to keeping secret sexual indiscretions, they often serve the interests of married men, while the women involved in these sorry affairs are, like Thomas, exposed to public questioning on commercial television. And, in theory, if they can be used by footballers/actors and Andrew Marr then, perhaps, they can be used by, say, companies to suppress corporate secrets – as toxic waste dumping company Trafigura tried to do in 2009.

Yet, the problem has been massively overstated. Genuine "superinjunctions" prohibit reporting of their existence (the Guardian believes only one still to be active); the rest are the "you can't name me" type, as in the Thomas case. Injunctions are for the rich, but there is an alternative. The much-maligned Press Complaints Commission code actually has a section on privacy – the PCC would invoke it if it's needed when William and Kate go on honeymoon: clause 3i of the code copies Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and presumably Mr Dacre knows that, whatever moaning is made about the impact of incorporating the ECHR into UK law.

Which raises the question of why super and the "anonymised private" injunctions have come about. Part of the problem is a perception that the PCC is weak, a point exacerbated by the phone-hacking scandal. There are good arguments for forcing the PCC to toughen up – it should not be possible for newspapers to duck out of their responsibilities, as the Express and Star titles have done; there should be a debate about whether the PCC should be able to levy fines on newspapers; and consideration should be given to whether to back up the PCC with the force of law.

Politicians, too, need to take a proper interest, rather than being too afraid to regulate the press, or even really to discuss media standards (Tony Blair saved the subject for one of his last speeches in office). Their timidity creates the vacuum that highly paid lawyers end up filling. But the recent sideswipe by David Cameron at superinjunctions is pointless. If he thinks privacy law should be made by parliament, then get on with it, but in reality it will be very very difficult to improve on Article 8's right to privacy, as balanced by the Article 10 right to the freedom of expression.

Yet, as Roy Greenslade points out in his cover feature, there is more. The culture of kiss-and-tell journalism, encouraged by all manner of intrusion, and thin uses of the public interest defence (he's a hypocrite because he's a journalist), causes constant battles between tabloids and celebrities. That's why most superinjunctions are taken out to conceal sexual indiscretions – the details of which it is seldom obvious that the public should know about. There is, in short, no noble cause fighting against so-called superinjunctions; only against those which are clear abuses of power and free expression – such as Trafigura's. As for celebrities shagging, who cares?

Retiring politicians have an occasional habit of issuing a big valedictory warning to their nation.

Think George Washington’s farewell advice against foreign entanglements and permanent alliances or Dwight Eisenhower's farewell fulmination about the military-industrial complex.

The new monster troubling departing politicians is the malign influence of the modern media.

Tony Blair set the standard with his farewell speech, describing the media as a 'feral beast' that overwhelms politics and saps the nation's 'confidence and self belief'.

Australia's former Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, has followed the Blair example with his book 'Sideshow: Dumbing down democracy'.

Some politicians do take on the media while still in the arena rather than as they hit the exit ramp: Barack Obama last week did his bit for the silly distractions argument by skewering 'sideshows and carnival barkers'; although, the President rather undercut the let-us-be-serious tone by then hopping on the plane and flying off to be interviewed by Oprah.

The Tanner effort is a sustained and passionate argument, but ultimately notable for what it lacks: the politicians. Here is a man who has devoted his life to politics and was one of the Gang of Four that ran Australia from 2007 to 2010. He kicks the Oz media with gusto — and often with good cause — but the blows delivered to the political class are passing or glancing.

Tanner is determined not to damage the Labor Government he has just departed and that makes for a curiously one-sided rant.

The symbiosis between politicians and media means one can't be understood without constant reference to the other. In his effort to be true to Labor, Tanner wimps out by talking about only one side of the relationship — what the media are doing to politics.

The former Finance Minister laments that the media have become a 'carnival sideshow' where the 'contest of ideas is being supplanted by the contest for laughs'.

He argues that the 'creation of appearances is now far more important for leading politicians than is the generation of outcomes'. The cult of celebrity is driving out complexity. 'Big ideas and crucial reforms' are subsumed by the need for 'announceables and soundbites'.

Just consider those points for a moment: for our pollies, appearances matter more than results and the crucial must bow to the needs of the doorstep. And this strange perversion of values is caused by journalists?

In the world Tanner describes, the media run the artificial reality show and the politicians have walk-on parts.

Tanner is most interesting when he glances back at the political side of the symbiosis. The asides are tantalising. For instance:

'During the interminable discussions within the government around presentational issues, I sometimes joked with colleagues we should experiment with governing well: maybe that would go down well with the focus groups and polls'. Please, tell us more.

In Chapter 5, The Power of Choice, on the media's agenda-setting role, Tanner offers this tantalising single sentence: 'Many stories reflect processes of information trading between journalists and sources where each is seeking to manipulate the other'.

Exactly right, but that is the start and finish of any thought on how ministers and minders and oppositions operate — and plot and manipulate — in the subterranean information trade that pulses through all politics and government. Instead, the rest of the chapter is on the arbitrary way the media decide what to cover.

This is a market not a monopoly, but not the way the former Finance Minister explains it.

One of the most interesting bits of the book is when the mutual mechanisms of the symbiosis get some discussion. The issue of 'spin' momentarily takes centre stage in a chapter entitled 'Politicians fight back'. Suddenly, Tanner is talking about all the techniques used to drive or deceive the media, although he maintains it is all the fault of the journos:

'What is now universally derided as 'spin' is, in fact, a whole range of techniques that have evolved among politicians in response to changing media dynamics. In essence, these techniques, though highly manipulative, are inherently defensive'.

Sorry folks, our leaders may deceive and dissemble, but it's all defensive. The media made me do it.

The suite of techniques includes a preference for general not specific answers, use of 'weasel' words and stock phrases, attack your opponent or attack the interviewer, never admit doubt, withhold information to deny 'oxygen' to a bad story, leak information selectively to create a false impression through the media, give favoured journalists choice stories in return for positive treatment, set targets years ahead, juggle dubious statistics to suit — skipping between cash/accrual/nominal/real or proportion of GDP indicators.

And if all else fails, try a calculated display of contrition, 'manufactured to soften the impact of public criticism'.

If the list is a bit complex, Mark Latham boiled it down to five tactical ploys in routine use:
1. Buy time
2. Create a diversion
3. Create an illusion
4. Deliver up a sacrificial lamb
5. Make a small announcement

Sideshow reduces this to two key rules that now govern the practice of Australian politics:
1. Look like you're doing something
2. Don’t offend anyone who matters

The nation that made swearing an art form has apparently produced a political class of timid, mealy-mouthed wimps.

In 2010, Lindsay Tanner was close to the centre of the most cyclonic year in Australian politics since 1975, but only a few soft zephyrs touch this account. Here is the one substantive comment on last year:

'The democratic process is undermined by the dominance of cynical apparatchiks who are skilled at manipulating the levers of political power but believe in little other than their own career advancement. The sideshow syndrome punishes idealists and activists and elevates cynical machine-politics to paramount importance. It fosters politics without beliefs. It has little tolerance for leaders of conviction such as Paul Keating. The removal of Kevin Rudd as prime minister had very powerful echoes of the sideshow syndrome. The two charges against him — poor poll figures with an accompanying loss of community engagement, and an autocratic governing style — are hardly unusual in Australian politics. Paul Keating's path from 1993 to 1996 bore some resemblance to Rudd's, but he wasn't removed by the Labor caucus. The dominance of media imagery and the machine politics it encourages is the difference. When a political leader is in trouble nowadays, patience isn't an option. Rudd went from being in a strong position to suffering political decapitation within a few months. Even though the election wasn't due for five months, fears of irresistible media pressure led many Labor MPs to conclude that his position couldn't be recovered. This sudden-death context is altering the nature of political leadership. Leaders will find it increasingly difficult to take necessary but unpopular decisions in the hope that they will succeed in the longer term because they probably won't get the opportunity to have a longer term'.

On the final page of the book, Tanner is 'appalled by the childish quality of the 2010 election campaign', and amplified that with Barry Cassidy on Insiders, lacerating Labor's 'Moving Forward' slogan (and the Coalition's slogan effort, too) as inane, content free, bland, and meaningless.

Lindsay Tanner may yet give us a great book on Australian politics, but it will be delivered on the other side of the Gillard government. Those reading Sideshow might reflect that media have always lived by simplifying and exaggerating. And in a free society, the duty of media is to report on the rulers, not necessarily make it easy for them to rule.

Tanner lets fly with some excellent zingers, such as the ultimate sentence of the first chapter: 'Modern politics now resembles a Hollywood blockbuster: all special effects and no plot'.

Nicely done, but if tempted to enter Tanner’s Sideshow, take with you a second companion — an excellent journalist writing about how the pollies play.

In 'Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era' George Megalogenis travels over the same ground as Tanner in less than half the wordage while dispensing just as much sarcasm and sorrow about the state of Oz.

The difference is that while giving the media plenty of kicks, Megalogenis argues that it is the politicians who are the problem.

Where Tanner stays his sword, Megalogenis judges that Labor returned to office in 2007 unready and unable to lead: 'The Rudd enigma explains some of it. He came to office with more than 600 promises to implement and a determination to win every day in the media. Ambition and indecisiveness linked arms to create an unusual model of leadership. Rudd talked, and talked. In the end, he was all doorstop and no delivery...This wasn't an exercise in leadership but a form of politics as celebrity'.

Unhappy is the land where the doorstop has the same status as a decision.

Photo courtesy of Penguin Books Australia.

Giles Fraser is on his journey from left to right, as befits his geographical move to the City (Comment, 30 April). Fine. But he must stop these meaningless generalisations about the rest of us. He tells us, after Friday's jamboree, that the left is committed to bloodless rationalism. He's clearly never enjoyed the collective emotion of (say) the Durham Miners' Gala. And socialists have always sought more recreation, less grind. (Does he know how little leave the hyper-capitalists of the US allow their workers?) So "any excuse for a party" is a slogan more at home with the left than the right.

Moreover, the left has nothing to fear in owning that its commitment to the NHS, free education and wealth redistribution is both rational and emotional; they warm our hearts. But it's these that the right seeks to undermine, with its own version of cold-hearted reasoning – before, during and after the welcome bank holidays – "there is no alternative".

Father Patrick Morrow

Uxbridge, Middlesex

• Chris Chivers talks of Milton's poetry in the context of "the depth of the national tradition of which the [royal] couple are the youngest icons" (Face to faith, 30 April). This idea of a seamless and homogeneous national tradition is mythical. Likewise, the irrational bonding and the unassailable links between state, monarchy and church that Giles Fraser imagines in his article conceal a more complex reality. British history and culture is fissured and rich with oppositional currents. John Milton was, of course, an ardent republican who faced prosecution and worse for his support of the execution of Charles I.

Dr Bill Hughes

Timperley, Cheshire

• It's a bit ironic that having snubbed every Labour supporter in the country by not inviting Tony Blair, the party's longest-serving prime minister, and Gordon Brown, who only left office last year, to the wedding, five of the 10 pieces of music (excluding the national anthem) played at the event were written by Fabians – four pieces by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and one by Ralph Vaughan Williams. So, no socialists please, but their music's alright.

Barbara Burfoot

Alton, Hampshire

• Ian Jack (Royal wedding supplement, 30 April) fails to mention the feminist objections to Charles and Diana's wedding, which proved to be the most accurate in both their analysis and their prediction of the likely outcome. We all knew that Diana was a young, unknowing girl who had been "kidnapped" by a powerful and cynical older man, backed up by the patriarchal establishment, for breeding purposes, and that it would end in tears. We wore our "Don't Do It, Di!" badges, but did anyone take any notice? Perhaps not, but at least partly due to Diana's own fightback, one of the gratifying features of Friday's event, in spite of continued compulsion upon the bride-to-be, both stunningly beautiful and slim as a reed, was the apparent equality in the relationship between her and the groom. 

Isabella Stone

Matlock, Derbyshire

• "Judge it right," says your leading article (30 April) about the monarchy's offering to the nation, "and we buy. Get it wrong, and we may one day look elsewhere." Well, the same can be said of your newspaper – nine full pages of dross, plus a 16-page supplement, and only Polly Toynbee for contrast.

Michael Clayton

Wisbech, Cambridgeshire

• I see now why they had to ban smoking in Westminster Abbey. Polly Toynbee says it's made of cardboard, I had been fooled by this in the past.

David Hockney

Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire

• Didn't watch the wedding; would have gone to Red Lion Square if I'd known about the party there. But I thought your supplement was great. Thank you. 

Carol Orchard

Winchester, Hampshire

• Could it be that the little bridesmaid to Kate's right on the balcony photographs – her face glum and hands over her ears – is a Guardian reader?

Peter Higgins

Oxford

Officials in Tripoli complain of 'great injustice' against Libyan regime after rapprochement under Tony Blair

The apparent death of Muammar Gaddafi's youngest son and three of his grandchildren in a Nato air strike will reinforce and magnify the powerful sense of victimhood that is gripping the inner circle in Tripoli.

Feelings of betrayal and incomprehension at the west's rejection of the Libyan regime, particularly directed at the UK, are compounded by aggression, belligerence and merciless military assaults. It is a potent mix.

Dismissing the violent suppression of protests in Libya as the normal reaction of any government and the military campaign as self-defence, regime officials believe they are victims of a "great injustice" perpetrated against them by the international coalition – led, they say, by Britain and France.

A series of private conversations with figures considered to be among the more open and reform-minded within the government highlights a fin-de-siècle mood within the regime.

"I face losing everything I have worked for," said a diplomat who has clocked up more than 30 years in Gaddafi's service.

However the current crisis was resolved, he said, the Libya he had known all his adult life was at an end.

Britain was frequently singled out as a source of aggrievement. "We gave them everything," said one official.

"We gave up our WMD [weapons of mass destruction] voluntarily. We were the best country participating in the fight against terrorism.

"Gaddafi gave all the information we had about al-Qaida. We gave them the file about the IRA."

Libya had eventually co-operated over the Lockerbie investigation and had offered British oil firms access to Libya's greatest natural asset.

"I honestly don't know what happened. I have thought about it for two months. We feel betrayed."

A second diplomat said: "The UK was a country that was friends with Libya. It had diplomatic relations, cultural relations, investments. Why have they taken sides?"

In answer to his own question, he went on: "They decided from day one. It was a plot, 10 times a plot, a conspiracy to remove Gaddafi, to change the regime.

"It's all to please public opinion. One day you're good, and the next you are bad, bad, bad."

David Cameron, he said, had not attempted to build a relationship with Gaddafi since becoming prime minister. Another diplomat said: "Relations with the Cameron government were not good."

The officials accused Britain of judging the Libyan regime too harshly over its response to the uprising.

"I'm not defending what happened," said one. "There was bad management – but it doesn't warrant war.

"OK, so there were some demonstrations and some policemen got upset – so what is the role of ambassadors? What is the point of building up good relations? Ambassadors exist to cool things down."

The "bad management" referred to the days following the start of unrest when cities and towns across the country – including Gaddafi's stronghold of Tripoli – erupted in protests.

Gaddafi's security forces moved swiftly to put down the rebellions, shooting dead unrecorded numbers and arresting thousands, who are still believed to be languishing in the regime's brutal detention centres.

Officials described the west's horrified response and subsequent action as "interference in internal affairs".

The officials pointed to "double standards" in the west's response. "What's the difference between the Libyan rebels and the IRA?" asked one.

"The IRA were armed rebels who wanted their independence. The British – the legitimate government – fought them, and anyone who gave [the IRA] support was considered an enemy. Now the British are doing the same with the Libyan rebels."

Another said: "If the British talk to the self-appointed [opposition] council, why not talk to Hamas? Or the Taliban?"

Why hadn't the west imposed a no-fly zone on Israel over Gaza, or intervened militarily over pro-democracy protests in Bahrain?

Libyan arguments about unwarranted interference and betrayal were robustly rejected by Sir Richard Dalton, the British ambassador to Tripoli from 1999 to 2002.

"The argument that the west abandoned them is grossly superficial," he told the Guardian.

"What the hell do they expect when they behave the way they did after 17 February? They shouldn't be remotely surprised that their friendships throughout the world deserted them."

Dalton described the UK's rapprochement with Libya as "functional".

"We wanted a partnership with Libya but there was only so much at any one time that we'd accept.

"You are always aware with a country like Libya that you are skating on thin ice."

Asked if the UK under Tony Blair became too close to the regime, Dalton said: "You can always fail to predict the future. History shows that we did get too close, but that history wasn't laid out on a plate in advance."

There were, he added, "significant voices in the British establishment saying, 'Don't do it'."

Officials within the regime claim that Gaddafi is ready to implement serious political reform as part of a negotiated resolution to the civil war.

They insist that he must not be forced out in any deal – but there is an underlying reluctant recognition that epochal change is inevitable.

"If the leader has to go, it has to be done shway shway [slowly slowly]," said one.

Another, asked where Libya would be a year from now, said: "Honestly? I don't know. I don't see any solutions to anything."

Such situations are sometimes observed more sharply away from the eye of the storm.

A foreign businessman in Libya, well-connected with regime figures, paused suddenly in the middle of a discussion about overseas investment in the country.

Without preamble, he said: "It's over."

What? "The regime. It's over. Everyone knows it, but no one says."

William and Kate play cat and mouse with the press – and it's round one to the royal couple

The ink is barely dry on the wedding register but already the game of cat and mouse between the press and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge is well and truly on.

Royal sources have told the Guardian that Prince William's decision to return to work as a search and rescue helicopter pilot in Anglesey this week instead of heading to a honeymoon beach with his bride was long planned. The media had previously been led to believe the couple would take a fortnight's holiday shortly after Friday's wedding at Westminster Abbey.

It seemed to be a classic piece of mis-direction intended to keep their honeymoon secret and a senior aide said the decision to delay the break had nothing to do with security fears in the Middle East, as was reportedon Sunday. Jordan had been mooted as a possible destination.

"We don't tend to do things last minute at the palace and we wouldn't have taken any risks with their security anyway," the aide said. "We are concerned to keep their destination private."

That extended to their British mini-break, which began at 11.15am on Saturday when the newlyweds flew from Buckingham Palace to an unknown location in the UK in the Queen's Sikorsky S-76C Spirit. The Scilly Isles and Balmoral were touted as possible boltholes. Their Macavity-like departure set the tone for a couple who are said to be keen to avoid the full glare of publicity in the early months of their marriage.

It also left room for their wedding guests back in London to pick over the bones of the wedding – the winners and losers, the spats and the love-ins which followed a service that David Cameron said was "absolutely beautiful, gripping, moving".

Tales from the eight-hour party at Buckingham Palace on Friday night began to circulate. Prince William, it was reported, introduced his new wife in a speech as "Mrs Wales" while Prince Harry referred to his brother and sister-in-law as "the dude" and "the duchess".

The pair began the dancing under glitterballs in what one onlooker judged to be a "twirly" performance. No well-to-do wedding would be complete without the presence of John Lewis, and so it was apt that the duke and duchess stepped out to a live rendition of the retailer's tear-jerking Christmas advert tune: Ellie Goulding's cover of Elton John's Your Song. The 25-year-old singer went on to perform versions of Bryan Adams's Summer Of '69 and Stevie Wonder's Superstition before DJs played Tinie Tempah's Pass Out and Bodyrockers' I Like The Way You Move.

Few did pass out and even Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall apparently kept going past midnight.

On Saturday, the bride's younger sister, Philippa, hit the headlines as "her royal hotness" after her appearance as maid of honour in a figure-hugging dress.

Already a well-connected party planner, her transformation into a star at the wedding looks set to boost her fortunes further. Less welcome might be the Pippa Middleton Ass Appreciation Society page on Facebook, which has already beenhad been "liked" by almost 90,000 people.

Estimates in the Sunday papers suggested the Middletons may have laid out £250,000 during the wedding on dresses, suits, jewellery, hotel rooms and food, drink and parties for friends, although that did not account for the possibility of discounts from suppliers, such as the Goring Hotel and fashion company Alexander McQueen, which enjoyed publicity throughout the wedding that money could not buy.

There was speculation, too, about the business aspirations of the bride's brother, James Middleton, 23, who registered three companies in weeks running up to the wedding: Nice Wine, Nice Cakes and Nice Group London.

Other winners included Sarah Burton, the wedding dress designer who joined Alexander McQueen as a student intern and won almost universal praise for her chantilly lace and satin creation. "This will open up further avenues for McQueen and it may open up the possibility of her own label," said Sukeena Rao, a style consultant. "Women who may not have considered it before may start to look at the brand. She couldn't have got it more spot on."

Burton's name had already been mentioned in connection with the top post at Christian Dior, vacated after John Galliano was sacked in March for alleged antisemitic remarks.

In the aftermath of the wedding, no aspect of the day was left unexamined. Lipreaders continued their trawl over who said what in the abbey, revealing that the Duchess of Cornwall remarked "it all looks very posh". Perhaps it was, compared with her own wedding to Prince Charles in Windsor town hall in 2005.

The Mail on Sunday revealed it had obtained the 744 horseshoes worn by the steeds of the Household Cavalry, presumably including the one that bolted, and is offering them to readers as mementos.

Political commentator Dominic Lawson even advanced a new theory about the absence of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair: royal revenge because the former decommissioned the royal yacht Britannia when chancellor and the latter banned fox hunting as prime minister, which displeased the Duchess of Cornwall.

The ghost of Diana lingered. Jemima Khan, daughter of Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a close friend of Princess Diana who was not invited, tweeted during the ceremony: "No offence to Camilla but I'd have preferred – out of respect – that no one had substituted for mother of the groom at register signing." That fuelled talk of a rather aristocratic spat between the families over the lack of invitations.

The feelgood factor generated by the wedding was even enumerated in a YouGov poll , which showed that 78% of people think William and Kate will overshadow the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.

In the face of widespread public warmth about the event, republicans took solace. "They are facing a problem of their own making," said Graham Smith, director of anti-monarchy group Republic.

"They would do well for the Queen and Prince Charles to stand aside, but they can't do that. William will go back to work this week and the attention returns to the old guard."

He said membership of his group had more than doubled to 15,000 in the five months leading up to the wedding and that 1,000 people came to a Republican street party in London on Friday. His group has some way to go yet.

Labour splits but Conservative and Lib Dem MPs all stick with their leaders ahead of Thursday's alternative vote referendum

David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, has kicked off the no campaign's final drive to persuade wavering Labour supporters not to use Thursday's referendum on the alternative vote to punish David Cameron by voting yes.

Both sides in the campaign claim undecided Labour supporters can yet determine the outcome.

Blunkett urged people to vote against AV in a referendum broadcast shown on the major channels. He said: "If you think we should keep one person, one vote, if you think we should keep the system that is simple and straightforward and has stood us in good stead, then please join us by voting no."

But the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said voters should vote yes if they were unhappy with the political system, at the start of a last-minute effort to show that the leadership of the Labour party – including most of the shadow cabinet and all of last year's leadership candidates – are backing the yes campaign.

Miliband said: "This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change our voting system. The last time we had a nationwide referendum was 36 years ago in relation to the European Union. These things don't come along often and in the end it's about this: if you're happy with politics as usual, vote no. As I go round this country I see lots of people who are unhappy with politics as usual. This is a chance to change it."

While Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters swing loyally behind their leaders, Labour is divided. The latest YouGov poll in the Sunday Times shows a narrow 45 to 42 majority for yes among Labour supporters, taking into account how likely they are to vote. The margin needs to be much wider if yes is to win.

One problem is that while not a single Tory or Lib Dem MP has broken from their party line, Labour MPs are split: 130 declared for no to AV, to 86 in favour. Lord Kinnock, the former Labour leader and still a good judge of party mood, claims this division may not be matched at grassroots level. He said: "Talk to the activists and they are not split down the middle. They are in favour of this change."

Tom Watson, the Labour MP for West Bromwich East and one of the few Labour MPs to switch from first past the post (FPTP) to AV, said it was hard to analyse any pattern in how Labour members thought.

He said: "New intake MPs, MPs in safe or marginal seats, northern MPs or whatever – it is an issue that divides all the Labour tribes, groups and regions. Everyone is coming to their own decision."

Maria Eagle is against AV; her sister Angela is in favour. Some Blairites, such as Alan Johnson, are in the yes camp, while others, such as Hazel Blears, Lord Falconer and Caroline Flint, are opposed. New MPs such as Tristam Hunt say no, or in the case of Stella Creasy, say yes. Others, such as Luciana Berger, refuse to say.

Watson said: "I always expected there would be a majority of Labour MPs voting no. Much of this is to do with Nick Clegg. I have never known an issue inside the Labour party that is being so determined by your attitude to one man. The wider arguments have not been heard."

Probably only three patterns emerge among Labour MPs. Those in London, a stronghold of the yes campaign, appear to favour AV. Scottish MPs, with the exception of six including Alistair Darling and Douglas Alexander, largely support the no campaign. In Wales the story is different. There is also a strong tendency among former Labour full-time organisers such as Jane Kennedy, Lady McDonagh and Joan Ryan to support the no campaign, partly due to their fierce loyalty to the Labour tribe, and their dislike of a system that undermines the targeted campaigning inherent in FPTP on which they have built their careers.

Many who oppose AV believe Labour can win another majority under FPTP, especially since three-party politics may have been damaged by the coalition.

Divisions inside Labour also reflect its history. Historically, like any other party, Labour's attitude to electoral reform has been governed by self-interest. The Liberals under David Lloyd George strongly opposed electoral reform, and only changed their position as their star waned in the 1920s.

Labour began to show a serious tactical interest in AV during the 1929-31 Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald, which was running a minority administration dependent on Liberal support. But a bill introducing AV was abandoned before completion due to the economic crisis and the formation of a national government.

After the 1945 Labour landslide, interest in electoral reform was minimal. The dominant view was that of political theorist Harold Laski: "The first and most vital function of the electorate is to choose a House of Commons, the membership of which makes possible the creation of a government that can govern."

Neither of the revisionists of the 1950s, Anthony Crosland or Hugh Gaitskell, saw Labour's problems in terms of an electoral system. In the 1980s, the position started to change as Margaret Thatcher – with the popular support of just 43% of the population – used enormous Commons majorities to impose her will.

But there is a long history of Labour leaders vacillating. Neil Kinnock intimated in the 1992 general election campaign that he might support a royal commission into electoral reform.

After Kinnock's defeat, John Smith was confronted with a report his predecessor had commissioned, recommending a form of AV for the Commons called the supplementary vote. Smith deferred the issue, saying he would hold a referendum on the issue if Labour were elected.

On succeeding Smith, Tony Blair reaffirmed the referendum pledge. In government, Blair set up the Jenkins commission, but when it proposed a mixture of 500 seats elected by AV and 150 seats filled by a top-up to make the system more proportional, he drew back.

Cabinet divisions, and Blair's jaundiced experience of coalition government in Scotland and Wales, reduced his enthusiasm. He also never bought the view that PR was necessary to force Labour to become electable and centrist, arguing that he had achieved that through his leadership.

Even Gordon Brown's late conversion to AV on the eve of his election defeat appeared as the forced product of circumstance, rather than conviction.

It is only in the past four months that the party has had a leader that unambiguously supports a change in the voting system, almost 15 years after Labour first said it supported a referendum. At the launch of the Labour yes to AV campaign, Miliband argued the right result could be transformative for Labour, as well as for the country. "For Labour, changing the way we vote will be a constant reminder of the need to be strong, broad and inclusive, not narrow and tribal," he said.

The monarchy sidesteps the awkwardness of patriotism and allows us to feel a rare British pride

What memory will live on? For those who lined the Mall, painting their faces red, white and blue, or who just stayed home watching on television — what will they remember? The kiss on the balcony will be the image replayed in perpetuity, just as it was when William's mother and father married 30 years ago — the difference being that this time they looked like a couple genuinely in love. Others will talk about the pageantry, a show no one lays on quite like the British. It's a fair bet that almost no one will remember the words. Even the eyes of the wedding couple wandered during the spoken bits.

Yet when the Dean of Westminster invoked a "mystical union", he surely got close to the essence both of the royal wedding and of something much larger. The literal reference was to the bond between Christ and the church, but he could just as easily have been describing the "mystical union" that exists, and was reinforced in spectacular style, between Britain and the royal family.

For what we witnessed was the mysterious alchemy that somehow converts love of country into affection for the House of Windsor. The emblem of it was the banner waved by many in the crowds, the same one that has been on display in shop windows throughout the land: a union flag, with a portrait of William and Kate at its centre.

The scale of the crowds, like the fervour of the broadcasters, was a reminder of just how rare such displays are in Britain. We have no national day, no Fourth of July. World Cup victories are rarer than coronations and, besides, sporting events are complicated: the teams often represent England or Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland alone rather than Britain.

As for the union flag, that too can be fraught – residually associated with a nasty strain of nationalism rather than simple, sentimental patriotism.

Royal occasions sidestep all these difficulties. They are all-encompassingly British – note the Scottish titles handed to William and Kate, as well as the one that makes the prince sound like a pub: the Duke of Cambridge. But they are also unthreatening, the union flag rendered utterly benign once there's a smiling young couple in the middle of it.

This, then, is how Britain does patriotism. Too ironic and embarrassed to make the "Is this a great country or what?" declarations of the Americans, we channel our feelings through the outlet of a single family, praising them rather than ourselves. Note our national anthem. Not a song about us at all, it is entirely focused on them. We don't ask God to save Britain – but to save the Queen.

How else to explain the hunger of those crowds, camping for several nights, just to get a glimpse of the bride in her dress? It's nothing Kate Middleton herself has done: she looked lovely and seems perfectly decent, but she would be the first to admit that she has hardly notched up some great human achievement.

The people who cheered themselves hoarse love her the way football fans love a new signing to the team – because she has joined the select group of people who embody the entity to which they feel they belong.

Viewed this way, as our chief vehicle for national pride, royalty has several advantages. For one thing, a family story has an emotional resonance few abstract ideas can match. And the Windsors have proved to be a compelling story. Yesterday's event had an extra poignancy for those who remembered William's last major appearance at Westminster Abbey, as a 15-year-old boy come to bury his mother.

Indeed, the tension – and peril for the royal family – of that dizzy week in 1997 seemed long ago. Monarchists will have noted the warm cheers that greeted Charles and Camilla's limousine as it approached the abbey – unimaginable in the heat of Diana week – and smiled with satisfaction.

The threat of those days, when the institution itself seemed fragile, has receded. The wound has closed over.

A family can also promise what might elude other national institutions: a permanent connection to the past and the possibility of a future. Take that balcony appearance. At the edges were the Queen and Prince Philip, who stood in that same spot before similar crowds after their own wedding in 1947. Continuity with the national past is built-in.

At the centre, though, was Kate Middleton — who an hour earlier had heard the most senior cleric in the land pray for her to bear children. She brings fresh blood into the royal family, offering the prospect of a new generation and a secure succession. For William, this may have been a wedding. For the institution of monarchy, it was a blood transfusion.

Above all, royalty is able to be ruthlessly selective about what it does – and does not – represent. Outside party politics, it need not stand for any of the difficult decisions associated with governments, past or present. It can blame those on the politicians. But it can co-opt the good bits without shame. Striking yesterday was the flypast by the Battle of Britain memorial flight: the Lancaster bomber and Spitfires overhead recalling Britain's "finest hour", our solitary defiance of the Nazis in 1940. That story now has the status of a creation myth in Britain and the royal family can put themselves at its centre.

There are drawbacks to this practice of ours, making a single dynasty the symbol of our nationhood. It can end up in a curious disdain for democracy. The exclusion of two past prime ministers – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – from the abbey was not just an insult to them or to Labour. Those men are part of our nation's history now; Blair was elected by the British people three times. And yet, in royal terms, that counts for nothing.

Our royal habit also makes us an object of fascination abroad, but of a variety we might not relish. We are seen as the keepers of a tradition last seen in storybooks. One US TV network, seeking to discover what Kate Middleton's life would be like as a princess, went to Disneyland to interview Snow White and Cinderella.

Republicans in Britain have long made their case in the language of political institutions, explaining why an elected head of state would be a better system. They've couched the argument as if abolishing the monarchy were like a move to AV. It's nothing of the sort. What we saw yesterday is proof that a shift away from royalty would require an entirely new form of British patriotism – for the two are utterly bound together, hand in hand, like a prince and his bride at a gorgeous wedding.

From darling of the TV debates to villain of the tuition fees protests, the deputy PM Nick Clegg has had a year of extraordinarily mixed fortunes. Days before the crucial AV vote, he reflects on his punishing first year in office and opens up about life in the coalition, the impact on his family… and having a sneaky fag in the garden

We are talking in his capacious Whitehall quarters with its fine view over St James's Park, and I pop a fairly obvious question: has he enjoyed the last year? Up until this point, Nick Clegg has been as candid, good-humoured and relaxed as it is reasonable to expect from a frontline politician under great pressure. In fact, he has been bouncy. But now the sun disappears behind the low cloud of wariness that scuds across his face. His reply is cagey: "I'm not sure whether to take up your invitation to provide a kind of enjoyment monitor."

He smells a trap. If he responds that it has been a thrill to be the first Liberal in many, many decades to be entitled deputy prime minister, then he will expose himself to the accusation that he is on a power frolic while thousands of voters are suffering the effects of spending cuts, tax rises and job losses. If he says that he hasn't enjoyed it, then he will feed the rumours that he has often been depressed by the onslaught on him.

In the end, though, he can't leave the question alone and comes back to it without prompting: "Enjoyment? Some parts more than others."

In the positive column: "Do I get up every morning and ask: am I doing the things that I believe in and am I doing them for the best possible motives? Yes. Unambiguously yes."

In the negative column, he has been pounded by "a barrage of criticism". It is not David Cameron who has been burnt in effigy by protesting students. It is not George Osborne who has had dog shit poured through his letterbox. It is not William Hague who gets sworn at when he takes to the streets of his constituency. For opponents of the coalition, it is Nick Clegg who is the magnet for loathing. That has got to be tough for a politician who liked it when he was liked.

Many politicians before him have travelled this trajectory from the fresh face enjoying the cheers of the crowd to the battle-bloodied leader who can no longer hope to be loved and must instead aim to gradually win respect for his resilience. Yes, it is a road well travelled. But rarely at such speed. A process that normally takes years – about six if you think of Tony Blair – has in the case of Clegg been compressed into months.

His very existence as deputy prime minister is a daily reminder to the Conservatives and their tribalist mouthpieces in the media that the Tories failed to achieve a clear election win, even against an opponent as unpopular as Gordon Brown. For many on the left, Clegg is the great betrayer who sold out when he contracted his shotgun marriage with David Cameron.

"Getting it in the neck from both sides, yeah," says Clegg. Basically pretty friendless, I remark. "Yeah," he says. "Both left and right are enraged."

He likes to locate this in a bigger picture. "You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed."

This is spoken with feeling by a man who has whooshed and plunged on "an emotional rollercoaster" over the past 12 months. He was up when he stole the show at the first of the election leaders' TV debates; then he was down when the Lib Dems lost five seats on election night despite gaining nearly a million extra votes. He was victorious in becoming the first Lib Dem leader to lead the party into government; and then – if not crushed, certainly hammered – by the backlash that soon followed.

"I do ask myself: did we take the right decision going into the coalition? Have we taken the right decisions since? Are the progressive values of the party that I lead being properly reflected?"

On the first choice he made – the big call from which everything else has flowed – he is "completely and bullishly assertive" that "it was the right thing to go into coalition with the Conservatives".

"I understand a lot of people on the left, maybe people who read the Observer, they're not happy with the coalition. I do ask them: what would they have done? Couldn't have gone in with Labour. You couldn't have provided a stable government with Labour. If we hadn't gone into coalition with the Conservatives, as night follows day there would have been another election within a few months. You probably would have had an outright Conservative victory."

Fair-minded observers would surely agree that his analysis is essentially correct. Neither the maths nor the personalities added up to make it feasible to form a coalition with Labour. The Lib Dems would have been ridiculed for eternity if they had passed up their first chance since the second world war to be part of a government. It is highly probable that the Tories, the only party with any money, would have formed a minority government and then dashed into a second, autumn election which they would have won outright.

Astute Lib Dems anticipated that government would be tough: the smaller party nearly always takes the bigger risk when it goes into coalition. But none of them guessed that within months they would be the target of rioting in the streets over tuition fees. Clegg argues that they did their best in the circumstances. Given that they were the minority partners, they did well to broker a more progressive outcome than the policy inherited from Labour, the scheme recommended by Lord Browne, or what would have been done by a solely Conservative government. But only one number has lodged in the public consciousness: £9,000 is a tripling of the cap on fees which the Lib Dems had pledged to freeze and then abolish.

They weren't the first party to break a manifesto promise and they won't be the last. But the starkness of this breach enraged people in ways that Clegg can't deny, and the damage was magnified because the volte-face jarred so horribly with his pre-election pieties.

In the election debates he presented himself as the prophet of a pure politics who would sweep away the grubby mendacities of the broken down red-blue duopoly. Has he looked again at those TV debates? "No. Never." He winces a little.

A Lib Dem campaign broadcast featured Clegg walking the embankment opposite the House of Commons surrounded by pieces of paper meant to represent the betrayed pledges of the Conservatives and Labour. He proclaimed that a vote for him would mean "an end to broken promises and the beginning of a new hope." You can watch it again on YouTube . An effective piece of propaganda at the time, it makes pretty excruciating viewing now that we know what happens next. Does he recall what he said in that broadcast? He looks rueful: 'Yeah. I remember that."

Opponents have relished having their revenge on the politician formerly known as St Nick as his hands have got grubby with the compromises of power. Deputy prime minister's questions in the Commons often resembles a blood sport. The jokes have come thick and piercing: why did Nick Clegg cross the road? Because he promised not to.

I suggest to him that he is paying the price not just for specific broken promises but for a deeper intellectual dishonesty at the heart of that broadcast. If the Lib Dems ever found themselves in government, they must have known it would be as part of a coalition. Coalition entails compromise, and compromise means not being able to keep all your promises. He ought to have been more honest about that. Clegg doesn't really argue. "I have as gracefully as possible taken a barrage of criticism about what we've done in government in comparison to what we've said before, and I take all of that on the chin. What I totally accept – and here I do have a regret – is that all parties will need to be clear (in future) what their real priorities are."

So will it be Lib Dem policy at the next election not to raise tuition fees above £9,000? He laughingly refuses to answer: "I think I've learnt from my mistake."

In the second half of last year, when the barrage was especially intense, he was visibly ragged. He groaned to friends about how little sleep he was getting and talked about the strain of trying to keep an eye on everything the Tories were up to. The Whitehall machine took a while to adjust to the novelty of a deputy prime minister who was the leader of another party. He was having to cover as many policy areas as David Cameron – more really because the Lib Dem cabinet ministers are greatly outnumbered by the Tories – with nothing like the same level of official support.

Some around Westminster whisper that Clegg is already reconciled to being in this role for one parliament and no more. Others gossip that his wife, Miriam, has set a time limit. It is suggested that he will return to Brussels, where his political career began, to become a European Commissioner.

"Absolutely not," he says. "No, no, no. No, no, no. I've concentrated on delivering a full five-year parliament because that's what we said we would do in the coalition agreement, and that is the period of time we need to sort stuff out." As he doesn't say, the Lib Dems also need time – and an accumulation of evidence that they have had an impact for the good– to rebuild support. Their opinion poll rating has slumped into single figures; the party is braced for a severe kicking in the ballots at this Thursday's local and devolved elections. Of his own future, he says: "I don't do this as a person: constantly trying to second-guess what might happen round the corner. In politics, that is an extremely perilous thing to do."

This strikes me as genuine. The caricature Clegg is the Lib Dem Pinocchio. Or the cartoonists have him as the junior schoolboy fagging for Flashman Cameron. Neither depiction does much service to the truth. I generally find him unusually frank for a politician. He is often too open for his own good. He was rewarded with "Clueless Clegg" headlines when he made a light-hearted remark to one interviewer that he had "sort of forgotten" that he was supposed to be in charge when Cameron was abroad. When he told another interviewer that music can move him to tears, that was twisted to lampoon him as "Crybaby Clegg".

That emotional side of him is the fruit of his father's family tree with its roots in Russia. "My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that. Emotion is not something to be frightened of."

Passions of a venomous nature are now running high in the battle over reform of the electoral system: a bitter fight which reaches its climax with the AV referendum on Thursday. At the beginning of the campaign, Clegg and Cameron appeared to have a gentlemen's agreement to keep their differences polite. But it has now degenerated into a slanging match, with Conservative and Lib Dem cabinet ministers calling each other liars.

Clegg holds the Tories responsible. "I kept my silence for weeks and weeks and weeks of ludicrous bilge being put out there [by the no to AV campaign] to dupe and to scare the British people." He "makes no apologies" for hitting back. "The yelling and screaming" from the anti-reformers is "the yelp" of people who can't accept that first past the post is bust and the two-party system is over. They "desperately want everything to be put back into its box". These "yelpers" and "screamers" include his frenemy, David Cameron. Clegg blames the prime minister for letting the campaign turn ugly. "David Cameron and George Osborne, a couple of months ago, became very worried that the right wing of the Conservative party would react very badly if AV wasn't defeated, and they decided to basically throw the kitchen sink at the referendum." He hopes that the voters will "strip away the yah-boo" and see AV for what he believes it to be: "a pretty simple and relatively modest change" that offers an evolutionary improvement. "It's not a revolution. It keeps single MP constituencies. You'll still be able to visit your MP in their constituency surgery every week. It's not fully proportional. It's something which is very familiar, it's used up and down the country, it's used in the Conservative party. It is an incremental change which gives voters more of a say. It makes MPs work harder. It challenges this culture of safe seats. Between now and Thursday, what all – particularly progressive – voters need to ask themselves is: what's wrong with that? A relatively small change which nonetheless makes quite a big, progressive difference."

A win for AV would be a significant boost and a needed one. He can plausibly contend that the Lib Dems are shaping coalition policy, and often in progressive directions, on everything from schools to the environment, from tax on lower earners to the future of the nuclear deterrent. They have put a brake on the Tories headlong rush to shake up the NHS. "It's got to have significant changes," he says, a shot across his coalition partner's bows. "This will not pass parliament, I won't ask Liberal Democrat MPs to pass this legislation, until I am satisfied."

But the jury of public opinion is not currently giving him much benefit of the doubt. Even if the ultimate verdict is more favourable, it will not be returned for quite some time. The greatest gamble – essentially a bet on George Osborne's judgment – was to sign up to the Tory approach to tackling the deficit by making early and deep spending cuts while the economy was still fragile. He insists that "the judgment to be decisive" was "the right one", but has to rely on "the passage of time" to prove it so. If that gamble pays off, then it may help Clegg's ambition to build a reputation for the Lib Dems as credible and competent wielders of power. If they lose their shirt on it, then the Lib Dems probably face evisceration at the next election.

Clegg is frustrated that the scale of the spending squeeze "dominates everything" and "obscures what I think is a brick-by-brick building of long-lasting progressive changes which I'm genuinely proud of". He rests his hopes on the Lib Dem contribution to the government being more clear in four years' time. He believes he will be able to point to enough delivered manifesto promises to earn some forgiveness, or at least more understanding, for those that were broken.

He has made the promotion of social mobility his personal cause within government. We cannot escape the irony that he and David Cameron are striking examples of how Britain appears to have gone backward in terms of equality of opportunity. A prime minister who went to Eton with a deputy who went to Westminster would seem very familiar to Victorians. But Clegg's passion to unfreeze social mobility is sincere, if not yet fully formed into altogether coherent and workable policy. He is a liberal, not a social democrat – an important distinction – but he does have a pronounced egalitarian streak which he puts down to the influence of his Dutch mother.

It is also true to say that social mobility is much higher up the agenda of the coalition than it would have been for a purely Tory government. But formidable obstacles confront any politician trying to spread opportunity more fairly in Britain. We are talking just before the royal wedding. Kate Middleton might just about be construed into an example of upward social mobility from the affluent middle classes into the aristocracy. William Windsor owes his position entirely to his birth certificate. I tease the deputy prime minister by wondering how the monarchy helps social mobility. "I, I, I actually don't think there is a, er… I don't think there is a powerful link between the existence of the monarchy and social mobility."

Really? "Well…" His delightful press secretary, Lena, starts giggling as her boss tries to unknot himself from this contradiction. I persist: are the royals not a symbol of people reaching great and privileged positions thanks to parentage not their merits? "You put your finger on it. It's a symbol." He thinks this gives him an escape hatch. "To then elevate what the monarchy is today into a sort of fetish, to make a wider point about social mobility is not something I subscribe to."

You don't think hereditary monarchy sends all the wrong signals about our society – how you get ahead in Britain? "I'll tell you what I think. If you were to ask me what is the most urgent task to promote social mobility, do I think it's having a debate about the monarchy rather than dealing with the tax system, the education system, early years, internships. Do I think any of those things are more important in promoting social mobility? You bet they are." He eventually falls back on the stock defence of the lukewarm monarchist: they're good for tourism. "Just look at the thousands of people who have flocked to London for the royal wedding."

He has now acquired some of the trappings of the establishment himself, including the Chevening country house where John Prescott once embarrassed himself by being snapped playing croquet. Clegg confesses: "I've grown to like it. I was a little bit embarrassed by it when we first went down there. But from my purely selfish point of view, being able to walk through the woods and fields without having a protection team at my shoulder, and being able to let the kids run around totally unrestricted, that is absolutely lovely. It's a sort of haven of freedom."

His children are nine, six and two. The elder two are aware of his status and "I hope" proud of what he does. "We're an incredibly close family. I try and do everything I can as a father to protect their innocence." He and Miriam have kept them away from the lenses of the media. "I don't think you'd ever find a photograph of my children in public. Miriam and I thought we don't want our nine-year-old to go to school and have little Jack sitting next to him and saying: 'Oh, I saw you in a Sunday magazine', because I think it'll make them feel different and separate. I want my children to feel normal. And they go to a nice normal school just down the end of the road. We're very lucky. Miriam and I haven't had to move into some battlement in Whitehall. We still live in the home that we did before. We still walk the kids to school."

Is he still smoking? "A little bit." That sounds like the sort of fib people tell to their doctors or partners. How much is a little bit? "Not much. No, not much. Three. Maybe three. Sometimes four. I never have smoked that much. I smoke only in the evenings, out of sight, when the children are asleep."

They don't know he smokes?

"No, no. So please don't tell them."

You hide in the garden?

"Yes, I hide in the garden. No, hide is the wrong verb. I cower. I cower."

Miriam gives him a hard time about his habit. Has he tried to quit? "Not much. Not right now." He pulls a face which begs for mercy. "Can I please have one little private sin which I can keep to myself?"

A less open and more artful politician would have not allowed himself to be drawn into conversation about his smoking. Perhaps he would be better off bodyguarding his tongue more carefully and growing several extra layers of skin. "Look," he says. "I'm not going to do this for ever. I'm 44. I'm adamant that what we're doing is the right thing. My conscience is clear. I think that over time people will see that the difficult decisions we are taking now are the right ones, and so on and so forth. But in that process, I want to remain a human being, I don't want to lose my sense of humour. I don't want to clip on the armour every morning. I've seen some politicians do this and they get a bit mangled and bitter. I just refuse to do that. I refuse to be angry or bitter or complain, and I remain open. I may sometimes be a bit too open but I'm not going to change that one bit. It's really important not to allow politics to distort who you are. You've got to hold on to yourself."

He might make fewer mistakes if he were one of the calculating machines of politics, those robots who are carapaced in caution. But he would also be a less interesting and engaging human being.

FROM CLEGGMANIA TO CLEGGZILLA – 12 months as deputy PM

7 May 2010 The nation wakes up to a hung parliament. Nick Clegg says the Conservatives, having won the most votes and the most seats, should have the first go at forming a government. Gordon Brown locks the door to Downing Street from the inside.

11 May After a weekend of frenzied negotiations, David Cameron becomes prime minister, appointing Clegg as his deputy, forming Britain's first coalition since 1945. In a formal ceremony, senior Lib Dems exchange their sandals for ministerial cars.

12 May Cameron and Clegg hold genial press conference in Downing Street rose garden; herald era of "new politics"; laugh at each other's jokes.

20 May The full coalition agreement - a blend of the Conservative and Lib Dem manifestos - is published. "You've never read a document like this," Clegg tells the nation.

12 June Clegg tours Europe and impresses his hosts with proficiency at foreign languages, including Spanish, German and Dutch. Foreign secretary William Hague pretends to smile in fluent English.

5 July Clegg unveils plans to hold a referendum on the voting system, reduce the number of MPs and change constituency boundaries.

21 July Standing in for Cameron in prime minister's questions for the first time, Clegg describes the Iraq war as "illegal". Downing Street clarifies that this is not the government's view.

11 October News emerges that Clegg, a professed atheist, is looking at a posh Catholic school for one of his children.

12 October A major review by Lord Browne into the future of funding for higher education proposes higher fees. The Lib Dems back the plan, although Clegg had signed a pledge opposing the idea in opposition. And had his pictures taken signing the pledge. Trouble brews.

15 October Clegg announces a £7bn "fairness premium" to help the poorest children and, hopefully, undo some of the damage done to his reputation by the tuition fee U-turn.

20 October The government publishes its comprehensive spending review, with the biggest cuts to the public sector in living memory. Conservatives cheer George Osborne's heroic axe. Lib Dem MPs look uncomfortable. Clegg smiles weakly.

21 October A "row" breaks out when the Institute for Fiscal Studies questions claims that the spending review is progressive. "Nonsense," says Clegg. It depends how you define "progressive", say pundits.

10 November Police and politicians taken by surprise when around 50,000 students hit the streets of London to protest against cuts to higher education and higher tuition fees. A crowd surrounds Conservative headquarters and some demonstrators break in. Luckily for the Lib Dems, no one knows where their HQ is. Clegg is burnt in effigy.

9 December Another demonstration turns sour as parliament takes a crucial vote on tuition fees. Two Lib Dem ministerial aides resign and 27 MPs rebel.

11 January 2011 Clegg pays tribute to "alarm clock Britain", the people who he says "get up early to go to work". Lie-in Britain fails to be impressed, probably because it is still in bed.

11 February A freedoms bill is published, scrapping what Lib Dems say are authoritarian state measures introduced by Labour. The ceremonial sandals of liberal principle get a rare outing.

24 February Clegg jokes that he "forgot" he was in charge of government while David Cameron was on holiday. No one laughs. Cameron says he is still in charge.

13 March Lib Dems hold spring conference in Sheffield. Clegg tells party members to pass on the message to the country that they are building a Liberal Britain. Party members tell Clegg to pass on the message to the Tories not to wreck the NHS.

23 March The budget introduces major Lib Dem policies on tax reform. Tories start to mutter that Clegg is too powerful. Lib Dems are pleased that Tories are muttering about how powerful they are.

5 April Clegg attacks nepotism in the awarding of unpaid internships to the "sharp-elbowed and well-connected"; defends fact that he benefited from connections himself; promises to blunt own elbows.

7 April Jemima Khan interviews Clegg for the New Statesman. Showing his softer side, he reveals that he cries to music and reports his son asking: "Why are the students angry with you, Papa?".

12 April Gillian Duffy, the voter called a "bigoted woman" by Gordon Brown during the 2010 election campaign, confronts Clegg in Rochdale. Is he really happy with coalition policy, she asks. Clegg ducks the question.

18 April Clegg distances himself from Cameron on immigration. He says a "numbers game" - slashing immigrants to tens of thousands a year - is "not a government policy".

23 April Cameron says he is "relaxed" about offering work experience to the children of friends - a contradiction of the coalition's social mobility policy.

Mina Holland and Rafael Behr