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I think there’s something wrong with me. I used to find General Election month terrifically stimulating. I liked the opportunity for political debate. I devoured all the media coverage. I even campaigned.

And this time we’ve more media coverage than ever before (including the first televised leader debates in the UK! Yes, we are that slow to catch up!) and a genuinely unpredictable result. And still the whole thing leaves me cold.

I’m so bored of politicians that play safe. No one’s got very much to say, really. They’re just patronising us with a tedious act of pretending to be likeable. I don’t care. I don’t want to like them. I’m really missing old opinionated characters: Tony Benn, Shirley Williams, Ann Widdocombe. (Is Jon Redwood still around, or are they hiding him in a cupboard?) See, politicians are so terrified of Saying The Wrong Thing, so coached and groomed to be “on message” that any opinion has been diluted right out of them. And all the major parties believe (wrongly, I think) that radical views will make them unpopular (”unelectable” was the old 1980s term pushed by the Right).

It’s lacklustre… the whole £150 for married couples thing paraded as radical thinking - was ludicrous.

Someone (was it Gyles Brandreth?) quoted the old  point about disregarding anything uncontroversial: it’s nonsense. If you wouldn’t expect another politician to put the opposite point of view then it is pointless to say. If a politician says “I want a better world”, he’s saying nothing. Ignore him.

Tories saying “You Do It”… As, essentially, an anarchist at heart, this should appeal to me but it doesn’t. Because he’s failing to take into account how individuals should deal with, say, the banking crisis.

What people really want is a government that is willing to act like a government. To stop Commerce and Industry from behaving in a way that is detrimental to the general good.

Previous governments have been so weak. Spineless. Unwilling to stand up to USA when they want to go to war to protect oil interests. Unwilling to stand up to bankers when they ask for no regulation. And look at the mess this has yielded.

From a recent TV interview:

Mr Brown said: “In the 1990s the banks all came to us and said: ‘Look, we don’t want to be regulated, we want to be free of regulation’.

“Everybody in the City was saying and all the complaints I was getting were: ‘Look you’re regulating them too much’. The truth is that globally and nationally we should have been regulating them more. So I’ve learnt from that. So you don’t listen to the industry when they say ‘This is good for us’.”

Come on! Anyone could have told you that!

OK, what else?

• Oh! The Labour Party have a chapter in the manifesto called “crime & immigration.” Hmmm….
• Best tweet (Tim Minchin): timminchin I’ve never heard a good reason why voting is not compulsory here as in Oz. Oh, and abstaining cos you’re disenchanted is incredibly dumb.
• The vote now show - on radio 4 is the best thing to come out of theis election. Don’t miss it.

But what’s driven me to write is this. I really hate the anti-democratic stance taken by Lab/Con against people voting LibDem

The editor of the sun admits they deliberately sidelined LibDem: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/18/clegg-media-elite-murdoch-lib-dem

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8628765.stm

For Labour Lord Mandelson warned a hung parliament might give “disproportionate power” to the Lib Dems.

Right… because they’ve always had proportionate representation in parliament?

Anyway, let’s look at what this “disproportionate power” really means. It means a casting vote, a few extra votes to a body that already has very close to a majority. It doesn’t mean they could do something unsupported by the majority, like the threats seem to imply.

I’m personally keen on a hung parliament. Cameron warns of “some sort of indecisive vote, haggling and negotiation”. Negotiation is a Good Thing - it’s a form of cooperation. And what would he call decisive? 100%?

Current poll (YouGov) puts:

• LibDem 33%
• Con 32%
• Lab 26

I’ll be voting, of course I will. But not for any of those parties.

Some years ago, I knew some Americans who came to live here. Not knowing anything about how to find a place to stay in Glasgow, they’d accepted whatever the agency sent them. They were overjoyed to find out they’d be living on an estate! …the Queen lives on an estate, doesn’t she? When it turned out to be a housing estate in the east end of Glasgow, they were less pleased.

Clive Anderson came up with a great quote in his “Chat Room” radio programme last week.

“The upper classes tend to be similar to the lower classes. There’s a sort of established theory… They gamble a lot, they drink a lot, they smash up things, they have lots of children, they marry young, they live on estates, they have guns.”

Excellent! So true…

This was in the context of a serious discussion about David Attenborough’s support of the Stop At Two campaign for population control. For more info: http://www.optimumpopulation.org/

Ah… another one bites the dust. One less of those Grand Old Men of British Radio: the lovable lively eccentrics.

In recent years, we’ve lost : John Peel, Ned Sherrin, Humphrey Lyttelton…

Is it too much to hope Nicholas Parsons keeps in good health for a bit longer?

So, for those who don’t know: Clement Freud was grandson of Sigmund, brother of Lucien, a renowned cook, a Liberal MP and radio broadcaster.

I knew him mainly for his droll dry wit on “Just A Minute” - a programme that appeals to me for its combination of Silliness and Pedantry. But apparently I was - as a very young child - present at a cookery demonstration of his and heckled in a very loud voice “Why is that man burning sausages?” To which he returned a hard stare.

One other thing to mention. According to popbitch, he was spotted at a Sonic Youth gig. No idea if this was corroborated, but I like to believe it’s true.

I’ve been saying this for a long time, for anyone who would listen: why do we revere characters in the film “Star Wars” who are essentially using the same thinking as the Islamic (or any other!) terrorists we hate so much. My point being that we should be looking not at whose side people are on but what their methods are. I disapprove of the use of violence by Bush just as much as by bin Laden.

Now finally, BBC Radio 4 has made a comedy sketch which encapsulates this far more concisely than I ever did.

Oh dear. Humphrey Lyttelton died last night.

86 is a pretty decent age to get to, though!

Sad there will be no more “I’m sorry I haven’t a clue”… or at least, they will never be quite the same.

Radio 4 had seem so reliant on old men… With John Peel (a shock early death) and Ned Sherrin gone, who is left? Nicholas Parsons and Clement Freud are getting on a bit, well into their 80s. All these Old Men of Radio… Barry Cryer must be getting on a bit, though he seems robust to the point of indestructible, fitting with his adolescent character and childish sense of humour.

OK, I’m not big fan of trad jazz, but understand his importance. And of course know his contribution to Radiohead’s “amnesiac”. And the Beatles “Lady Madonna”!

Lyttelton ran a jazz club; told very rude jokeson Radio 4; presented a jazz programme on radio 2 for 40 years; had an old 1970s Volvo, which he still maintained even though it had been round the clock 3 times. He was a calligraphy expert, a cartoonist on the Daily Mail, a journalist and “romantic socialist”.

He was also - admirably - among a small group of people who have turned down a knighthood. (A group which includes: David Bowie, Alan Bennett, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, LS Lowry…)

Well, of course it’s easier to live a life like that if you come from an aristocratic, privileged background (educated at Eton etc.). But it would also be very easy to follow the accepted path of the landed gentry and go into law or the City… So I think this shows his truly rebellious nature - to turn his back on the obvious careers and follow his love of music.

One last footnote: the name Humphrey had been eschewed by his family for hundreds of years because the last Humphrey Lyttelton was implicated in Guy Fawkes’s famous plot. His parent’s decision to break with tradition and use this name suggests even as a newborn baby he showed that spark of rebellion.

Hilarious to hear that old “Yes Minister” on radio 7 this week (I’m a bit addicted to radio 7, especially since i got my new DAB radio for xmas- which can RECORD programmes). The one where it transpires that a vast amount of money has been paid as sweeteners to a deal with some Arabs.

And now - in real life - there’s pressure to reopen the fraud enquiry about Saudi Arabia and the corruption associated with years of arms deals. A can of worms of course!! Of course we don’t want to upset the Big Boys.

More info at The Guardian’s story.