Hold the front page. The biggest and most significant political story of the year has yet to be told. You can work it out for yourself if you watch Prime Minister's Questions (not all of it, just a bit) with the sound turned off.
Done that? Notice anything? Yes, Gordon Brown's smiling. Normally he scowls. Is it because he's having another baby? Perhaps but I don't think so. Word reaches me that the Tony and Gordon show is back on the road. They've agreed how to tackle Cameron - by mocking him as Blair did today for changing his policies so quickly and by mocking Tory policy "where it's sensible it's in agreement with the government and where it's not in agreement, it's not sensible". Could there be another reason? Could they have reached another agreement on the handover? I just leave that question hanging... for now.
"I'm listening," as Frasier Crane would say. And so are others. Yesterday's Media Guardian ran an article Lessons of the Kennedy affair featuring a series of the comments posted on this blog about whether journalists had been too kind or too tough in hinting at, but not exposing Charles Kennedy's drink problem. Can I recommend a read of the comments on my "Why hasn't Ruth Kelly gone?" blog for a revealing debate about the limits of ministerial responsibility (surely they can't be expected to pick safe teachers versus it's their job to carry the can) between Freddy and Ricardo and Stephen. Since starting writing this blog I've not found as much time as I would like to respond to the comments posted on it. It's been too much monologue and not enough conversation, but I have been listening and others are as well.
Let me turn over a new leaf by picking-up on a question posed by Martin - how, he asks, can you pre-announce something - as in "Downing Street pre-announced Ruth Kelly's ministerial statement" Why hasn't Ruth Kelly gone? Grammatically, he's right. It's a non-word but it does have political meaning in the Westminster village.
Ministerial statements are very rarely announced in advance unless they are for a long prepared launch of a White Paper, for example. A statement made under pressure as Ruth Kelly's will be, is normally announced on the day. That's what I meant when I wrote that Downing Street had pre-announced it. It was a device - that, by the way, has worked - to try and still the daily (hourly?) demand that Ruth Kelly come clean. The aim, in part, was to calm the atmosphere before she spoke.
Incidentally, only a cynic would observe that the day the government chose clashes with the day when former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, and former aide to Cherie Blair, Fiona Millar, are due to launch an assault on Tony Blair's cherished school reforms with half of Labour's backbenchers and not a few ministers cheering them on.
