He has no formal management responsiblity, but his views carry weight - never more so than when he's opining on the future of the Tory party. He recently described David Cameron, with whom he crossed swords when Cameron was a Carlton Communications chief, as a 'company bag-carrier'.

'He was a PR flunky. There was one occasion when he came far too close to denying something that was true. His idea of talking to the press was a bit like talking to the great unwashed and I resented that, but I don't want to come across as a chippy working-class grammar school boy. I fought the BBC's bias against "toffee-nosed gits".'

Perplexed Sky interviewer asks ‘ where is the opposition in Libya’ as if brain can’t compute beyond naming some political parties to bring the situation back into comprehensible form. In reality the question is idiotic – the opposition is in the streets and in the armed uprisings in Benghazi and elsewhere.The west is in panic mode – they’d rather keep Gadaffi than deal with the leaderless resistence.

CNN yesterday an "expert" on the Middle East (she was a counter-terrorism official in the Bush administration). She was asked to analyze Libya. She kept talking about "Faysal" Qadhdhafi. realized she was talking about Sayf Al-Islam.

ALso I notice Camerons in Egypt now -

He’s going to put them right now ”What you need is Big Society”……

Earlier this month, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algeria's president, said he would lift emergency powers, address unemployment and allow democratic marches to take place in the country, in a bid to stave off unrest.

"The regime is frightened," Filali said. "And the presence of 30,000 police officers in the capital gives you an idea of how frightened the regime [is] of its people."

You said you loved me and I kind of believed that

To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.

They all (demonstrators/dissenters) seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.

If Egypt new that the sex life of Britons was freed due to democracy then perhaps they would think again about elections, which is a costly excercise, throwing up dimwitted candidates that bankrupt your country, cause the Speakers' wife to strip and thus needing the Black Rod on her backside. MP's who don't even get the Mace thrown at them when they steal/corruption, change Laws to suit themselves, and have an Useless lot of low IQ in the Foreign Office! Makes you wonder!

The '90s were really formative for me, and I love my three-hole black oxford Doc Martens. I spray-paint the soles black to make them completely anonymous and unbranded. They really do last forever.

Read More http://www.gq.com/style/ten-essentials/201102/patrik-ervell-ten-essentials#ixzz1CvP0bkww

It would be wonderful to think that what replaces Mubarak will be better. But here's the thing about Middle Eastern Regimes: They're all vile. The ones that are "friendly" are vile and the ones that hate us are vile. Revolutions in the region have a habit of going horribly wrong, and this may well have something to do with the fact that Islam and democracy appear to find it difficult to coexist for long.

There were also moments of farce, near the statue on the main square two figures stood, a girl and a boy, holding identical cardboard trays in front of them. The girl's tray was filled with cigarette packets; the boy's with stones.