Weekend

We were in Yorkshire this weekend, visiting lnr's parents. Quite a few pictures but they'll have to wait until my computer is back to upload them.

Saturday we spent mostly in the dales, passing through Kettlewell and spotting a strange funnel-shaped cloud. Dinner at a rather good pub called The Nag's Head. Sunday we went off to Newcastle to see Eleanor's sister, the Angel Of The North (apparently locally known as the Gateshead Flasher) and the millenium bridge. Tapas for dinner.

Tory party no longer requires satirising

...it's doing the job itself quite adequately. Nicholas Soames thus:

The Conservatives will not get anywhere until they end this mad obsession with gays, blacks and women and start behaving like a grown-up party

As my favourite magazine observes, this is around 60% of the population.

TBH the state of the Tory party concerns me. The Lib Dems, sensible though they often seem to be, don't seem to be quite perceived as a proper opposition yet (though I don't subscribe to the apparently common fallacy of not voting for them on that basis) and I'm convinced that at the very least it'll be an election or two before this can change, if it ever does; and the Tories are making a terrible job of it, hitting the headlines most effectively only when they are hitting one another. Until one or the other of them looks like a credible threat, where is the pressure on Blair and his colleagues to do a decent job?

Granted, there have been things like fuel protests and single-issue MPs, and my gut feeling is that they'll lose the euro referendum if it comes, but none of these will actually can them back onto the opposition benches.

The only things that I can see possibly changing this picture: the Tory party disintegrating, or a war in Iraq going with heavy British involvement going spectactularly badly.