March 2010 Archives

I read this article on the very fine ePolitix.com website. I blogged a few months ago on another blog about the Damian Green Thingie as I like to call it. I don't do Affairs or Gates. The Damian Green Affair seems a bit more risque than I would like. I know he's a Tory MP, but they can't all be at it all the time. Green Gate sounds a bit like an Edwardian country house. So for me it's the Damian Green Thingie.

I have some concerns over this report by the House of Commons Privilege Committee. The MPs say "We consider that the failure by any police officer expressly to advise the Serjeant at Arms of the right to refuse consent was symptomatic of the sloppy approach of the police in this case.

"It is true that failure to do so does not necessarily make a subsequent search unlawful but there was no excuse not to observe proper procedure."

It's unlikely that a police officer who turns up to effect a search without a warrant is going to be all that happy to inform the person being searched that they don't have to be searched if they don't want to, especially if the search is still legal without the warrant. The House of Commons Privileges Committee is always going to choose to protect the privileges of Members of the House over outsiders but the search was not illegal.

It may have been a disproportionate response to leaks from the Home Office. Just to remind those of you who don't have an obsessive interest in the farce that is the Home Office, Mr Green received information from a worker at the Home Office called Christopher Galley. Officials at the Home Office had a threw a bit of a paddy at what was just one in a series of leaks of information to the press and opposition politicians and decided to throw the book at the MP and his informant. Mr Galley was dismissed but the Crown Prosecution Service prosecuted neither him nor Mr Green.

My criticism rests not with the police who were faced with investigating a complaint in as thorough a fashion as possible in a very sensitive situation nor with the House of Commons authorities but with the Home Office who must have known that no good could possibly come of this in the long term. They must have known that an MP was never going to face prosecution over receiving information from anyone in connection to his work.

The Privileges Committee saves its heaviest boots for the former Speaker. "Mr Speaker Martin failed to exercise the ultimate responsibility, which was his alone, to take control and not merely to expect to be kept informed." He had advice from the Clerk of the House and from the Serjeant at Arms, presumably that they should co-operate with the police in their inquiries and had to rely on it. When it all blew up in his face, he insisted that in future no search of an MP's offices would be permitted without a search warrant signed by a judge. It was too late to save either his position or his reputation.

I have little sympathy for him. He was ineffective as defender of the rights of Members of the House of Commons and failed to act strongly or quickly enough when public disquiet at MP's expenses began to build. Nevertheless, the Privileges Committee has been too strong in its criticism of the police and the former Speaker. The ultimate cause of the problem is the Home Office. Again.

Mark Webber is a proper bloke. He enjoys sports, drives quickly and doesn't bother messing around with the F1 political circus. I noticed this Tweet in his Twitter feed from after the race on Sunday. He says "Wow! New rules, not sure huh? Why do they keep dicking with it? Followed Mercedes power for the whole race, no chance to overtake - again"

There is lots for us in this one short comment. Well there is if you were bored shitless by the race. I was. I can't imagine I was alone. I now think that Mark feels my pain. I'm oddly gratified by that. More importantly, I think it's possible that he was pissed off at his own car's lack of oomph. Nobody knows for sure, but it's likely that the Mercedes engine has more power than the Renault one in the back of Mark's Red Bull. It's a popular choice for teams. The two Mercedes works cars and both the McLaren's finished ahead of him. Liuzzi's Force India Mercedes was behind him. Five of the top ten finishers were powered by Mercedes. Rumours circulated last year that Red Bull wanted a Mercedes engine for 2010 but nothing much came of that.

Mark has in the past complained about the Renault engine's lack of power. When engine development was frozen at the start of the 2008 season, Mercedes and Ferrari found ways to extract extra power without developing their engines. Renault didn't. They managed to secure an agreement from the FIA and the other teams to do some development work and bring their engine closer to the power outputs of their rivals. Both the Renault works team and their customers at Red Bull suffered because they just couldn't keep up in straight line or out of slow corners.

It's interesting to me at least that Mark has noted so early in the season that he was stuck behind Mercedes engines all race. A bit more power might have made all the difference in getting past the cars in front. I'll speculate and say that perhaps he advocated Mercedes power for the Red Bull team rather than a renewed contract with Renault. Of course, the aerodynamic and circuit factors also made it difficult to pass and it's just as likely that Mark was complaining about that. I've already said that he doesn't do politics so I may be talking mince. Again. It's still interesting to speculate and more interesting than the sodding race was.

So, thanks Mark. You're a cracking bloke and that wasn't a whinge.

Fernando Alonso won his first race for Ferrari at the Bahrain Grand Prix this afternoon. He inherited the win when Sebastien Vettel's Red Bull started to blow its exhaust like a penioner's Austin Maestro. Vettel finished in fourth place as both Felipe Massa in the second Ferrari and Lewis Hamilton overtook him.

The early laps saw some of the rookie teams and rookie drivers making the rookie mistakes. Nico Hulkenberg got himself into a bit of tankslapper in his Williams. Karen Chandhok (who?)was the first to go out in his Hispania (who?) on the very frist lap. It's hardly surprising given that neither he not his team have had much running and he was really pleased just to have made the grid at all. Lucas de Grassi stopped on the next lap in his Virgin (stop sniggering at the back, there). Bruno Senna in the other Hispania (really, I'm serious, who?) made it to lap 17 before he had to park his car. As he sat in his cockpit, he looked so much like his uncle that I thought it was 1992 all over again.

He outlasted both both Timo Glock in the other Virgin (it's not funny, stop it) and Vitaly Petrov in a Renault. I had another collapse into the past when I glimpsed the Renault on the track for the first time. It was like 1977. The yellow and black paint job is the fastest on the grid by a long way. Shame the car isn't quite as quick as its paint job.

The Lotus was the best looking car on the grid. Its green and yellow paint job was exquisite. It was the best of the new teams. They got both their cars to the end of the race when neither of the other new teams could get even one car beyond lap 17.

The trouble is that the race was as dull as buggery. I love motorsport, I really do. I love the noise and the dram and the history. I love the overtaking and that was the problem today. There was hardly any overtaking. Martin Whitmarsh of McLaren talked some nonsense in the post race BBC Forum about mandating a minimum of two stops for tyre changes during the race. He avoided the point that it's very difficult for cars to pass one another. The cars aerodynamic appendages work the air so hard that one car cannot follow another closely enough through the corners to allow for overtaking on the straights. Circuit design on the most modern circuits tend to spread the field out rather quickly and reduce the number of overtaking opportunities. The carbon brakes shorten braking distances so much that it's really hard to pass at the end of a long straight.

I'd like to see much more simple cars in F1. Steel brakes, narrower tyres, a simpler aero package and maybe even manual gearboxes would all make the racing tighter and increase the spectacle for the fans. I love the cars but they don't allow us to see which is the best driver overall. Nor do they give us a show which is worth watching most weekends. Nobody's  seriously going to suggest reducing the amount of technology in the cars but something more radical has to be done to improve things for those of us who have to justify the amount of time we're going to spend on the sofa between now and the end of the season in November.