On the Blair battle bus for a day, and what an illuminating experience. So far from pushing protesters forward to create incidents with the Great Helmsman, as alleged by Margaret McDonagh, the Labour Party general secretary, the media are cabin'd, cribb'd and confin'd. Under the pretext of security, journalists are not told where they are going until the bus sets off. At each visit, they are penned behind tapes when the PM arrives. Shouted questions are bad form. The tedium is such that the hack pack plays poker and Battle Bus Bingo, in which contestants pick three Blairite cliches out of a bag at a pound a throw. The one who gets most in the next speech wins. For the Gravesend address, I drew: "You can vote with your heart and your head"; "I couldn't have done it without you"; and "Everyone who comes to see me has got a good cause."
Unlike 1997, when there were cans of indifferent lager, the battle bus is dry. My day out cost close on £600, and I calculate that Labour will gross at least £1m from the media in fees for accompanying Blair. So, not only the party of business but the party in business.
The absence of a ministerial salary, not to mention the lack of an audience, seems to be playing on Peter Mandelson's mind. He is hawking a new book round London publishers, naturally looking for a best price. Random House has seen the proposal, which sounds like a sequel to The Blair Revolution, co-authored with Roger Liddle in 1996. That book went down like a concrete kite, attracting a withering review from Peter Kilfoyle. Liddle went on to Downing Street as an adviser, and promptly made a fool of himself to an undercover reporter from the Observer. The rest is history.
In Hartlepool, the Tories have reached for homophobia to boost their candidate, the businessman Gus Robinson. On the doorstep, their unsubtle message is: "Vote for Gus, he's one of us. Not for M, he's one of them." It almost makes you feel for Mandy, but not quite.
The portly Liddle went to the north-east to canvass for his co-scribbler, to no very great effect. The door was slammed in his face by an irate Hartlepudlian who offered: "We don't vote for ****ing Tories here."
Footnote to the parachuting of Shaun Woodward into St Helens South. His winning margin of four votes in the Millbank-fixed shortlist owes everything to the AEEU engineering union, which he joined two days before the constituency ballot. Its delegates were "delegated" to vote for the Tory turncoat. In the 1970s and 1980s, when I was on the old AEU parliamentary panel, you could only have the support of the union if you had seven years' adult membership. All that has obviously changed since the reverse-takeover by the electricians. But wait a minute, isn't this the same union that two years ago pledged to spend £1m on getting more working-class people into parliament? Instead, the union has spent its money in Lancashire on getting a millionaire back into the Commons. Perhaps Sir Ken Jackson, the AEEU general secretary, has hopes of a peerage.
My New Statesman colleague Lauren Booth, sister of the First Lady, has received too little notice for her honesty. She has disclosed that, on hearing news of Cherie's engagement to Tony Blair, Tony Booth called her and expostulated: "Jeez! Your sister is marrying a Tory!"
The Scottish First Minister, Henry McLeish, has contributed a personal article on his meeting with President George Dubbya Bush to Parliamentary Monitor that reads like a schoolboy "what I did on my holidays" essay. "What did I make of the president?" he writes. "Very personable and impressive. Is the Oval Office really oval? Yes, it is." It goes on in this banal fashion for a couple of paragraphs and then tails into a press handout on devolution. But the picture is a treat, showing McLeish looking up to Bush like a respectful sixth-former in the headmaster's study. That boy will go far, preferably as far as Duncansby Head.
Paul Routledge is chief political commentator for the Mirror
