How do you introduce a US citizen to Britain? Tea at Bettys? Exmoor? A trip on the canal at Llangollen? The Edinburgh festival? Well probably yes to all of those and much more.
But over here at Terminal House – home of newstatesman.com – we like to be inspired in our choices so we sent intern William Hilderbrandt off to meet the Official Monster Raving Loony by-election candidate in Ealing Southall.
We felt it would be good for this resident of Oklahoma, USA to find out just what our thriving democracy is all about. You can read his account of meeting Marxist-leaning John Cartwright in our By-election 2007 blog.
And while you’re there why not check out the posts from some of the other candidates in that campaign plus the battle triggered by Tony Blair’s resignation up in Sedgefield. We’ll be providing analysis and reaction as the results come in.
Meanwhile, don’t miss William’s report from the Archer Inquiry into the tainted blood scandal. He saw US movie maker Kelly Duda give evidence.
“In his film Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal, Duda explains how the Arkansas prison system was able to support itself entirely without taxpayer money and run at a profit due to its plasma programme experimentation.
“Doctors harvested large quantities of plasma from inmates – that’s despite the fact prison populations are considered high-risk populations for disease infection…”
You couldn’t make it up.
This week we also invited ex-Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane and psychologist Susan Marchant-Haycox to debate the issue of substance vs style.
The context was the arrival of the new Brown era and MacShane argued: “Substance and style are not opposite. Good substance creates belief and confidence. A good message can be undermined by poor messaging. But style without substance is not enough. A smile is just a smile. The Conservatives are making a fatal mistake if they think a Blue Peter-style David Cameron will win them the next election.”
You can read both sides of the debate by clicking on Head-to-head.
Alexander Larman meanwhile spent an enjoyable few days in East Anglia at the new Latitude festival and concluded that though there were moments of musical magic, there was a bit of a shortfall on the theatrical and literary fronts.
He writes: “Despite the flamboyant touch of the literary tent having a seven-foot mock-up of David Copperfield outside it, there was far too much sub-undergraduate comedy and little of the real intellectual playfulness that characterises such events as Hay or Port Eliot.
“Likewise, the theatre tent was mostly a waste of time, seemingly unsure if it was peddling hard-hitting adult drama or the kind of whimsy that passes for humour at the Edinburgh fringe.”
More from Alex’s festival tour throughout the summer.
And if all that wasn’t enough to sate your appetites, we’re marking the 40th anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality with a debate on whether being gay is genetic, don’t miss our upcoming article on nuclear power and then there’s the usual mix of comedy, comment and politics on our blogs.
I was listening to some TV the other night. We can’t watch it any more as our set has ceased to produce a picture. It’s a bit like having a large, ugly radio in the corner of the room.