This comment from the Guardian comments thread says all I want and need to say about airport security, something I increasingly loathe.

There used to be an old joke.

Two passengers were travelling north to Edinburgh and after a while one of the passengers started tearing up his copy of "The Times". Once he had a small pile of shreds of paper he opened the top sliding window in the compartment (remember those) and started throwing the shreds out of the window.

After a while the only other passenger in the compartment asked why he was engaged in this rather obscure activity. With confidence he replied: "to stop the elephants tearing up the track".

"But there aren't any elephants" was the obvious reply.

"Precisely - Sir, you see it works".

This probably summarises my view on 'security'. I just might have had a more empathetic view to the national paranoia, had it either ever caught a terrorist or not been selectively employed to just one form of mass transport. As it so happens the long queues of disrobing adults and arbitrary seizures of private articfacts, surrounded by armed officers and growling dogs is terribly redolent of 'other events' in Europe not that long ago. It is deeply dehumanising. It is in my humble view absolute affront to our civil liberties and dignities.

No, I didn't make this one up.

"A woman has appeared in court accused of marrying another woman in a lesbian civil partnership ceremony while still being married to a man."

I wonder will this make it into the Shropshire Star.

Sir Ian Richardson has died at the age of 72. Richardson, perhaps best known for his spellbinding role as evil Chief Whip turned Prime Minister Francis Urquhardt in the House of Cards trilogy was, as far as anyone knew, in good health and about to start recording for a new series of Midsomer Murders. He was a wonderful actor and extremely dishy in his own way.

I had the chance to see him on stage when he appeared in a play called The Creeper last year in London, never quite got around to it, and now I never shall. Which gives me a second reason to be sad about the matter.

"You might very well say that Matty. I couldn't possibly comment.

Morrissey to do Eurovision? Say it ain't so! Someone should tell the Grauniad it's January 9th, not April 1st.

We went to visit a friend in the Barbican after church this morning, which is about 5 miles from Bayswater.

When we got to Paddington tube station, we found the Circle Line was closed between Edgware Road and Liverpool Street due to engineering works... so we toddle across the road to get the 205 bus. This is supposed to take 38 minutes to get to the Barbican, and probably a lot less on a Sunday, but as everyone else has been kicked off the Circle Line too, it ends up taking just over an hour.

So on the way back, we decide to walk down to St. Paul's and get the Central Line to Queensway... except we find St. Paul's is closed for refurbishment!!! So two buses this time, both extremely hot, and again it takes over an hour. I would mind, but I had Chris with me and he's not as young as he used to be. Well, he's 83 so long walks to alternative routes are not really an option.

Thank God I cycle to work and do not have to deal with public transport every day.

Sometimes I think this town is just one big cesspit.

So Blair has set a 12-month time limit on remaining Labour Party leader although, as Guido Fawkes notes, not necessarily as Prime Minister. Guido calls this the Aznar option, it's worth pointing out it was also the less-than-successful Gerhard Schröder option too.

Personally, I doubt Blair will last 12 months or anything like it. Until he goes, civil war will reign in the Labour Party. Unlike Blair, too many people in the Labour Party have an interest in not losing the next election for that to happen. Unless they're really, really stupid. And I don't think they are.

Will Gordon Brown simply be annointed as Labour leader? Even though I’m not a Labour supporter, I’m rather inclined to agree with what Charles Clarke said this morning about Brown being able to stop last week's anti-Blair letters if he wanted to.

Brown will be a disaster as Labour leader. If Brown really had the capacity to be leader, he would have become so after the Granita restaurant, after Blair was clearly out of step with the country on the war, after Labour lost 50 seats at the General Election, etc., etc. He didn’t because he has no killer instinct and no real leadership skills. Brown likes to skulk in the corner and avoid difficult issues (so, what's your position on the War, Gordy?). You can't do that as Prime Minister. He might well become Labour leader, but he isn’t going to be a good one.

And the left will end up hating him - they forget that he’s co-creator of New Labour and just as pro-American as Blair. Cue more Labour infighting

The Blairites seem to be rallying round Alan Johnson or Millburn - these are not serious suggestions to anyone outside the No. 10 press office. In fact they just go to show how far detached from reality the Number 10 coterie are these days.

I mean, like, Alan Millburn? Be serious.

A second-rate minister with the charisma of a plastic toilet-roll holder and a tendency to bully, who’s so far to the right he even makes me nervous and, more importantly, will be incapable of shoring up a Labour grassroots more and more disillusioned with their natural party. Who is going to go out and canvass for that eejit to become Prime Minister. And the ground war might matter a lot in what could well be (note the hedging here) a low-turnout election with a lot of splintering to micro-parties.

This is the silliest idea in politics I’ve heard for a long time. If Millburn is leader, Labour will be crushed at the next General Election. Enough people know that for him not to become leader.

As for Alan Johnson - who are ye, Alan Johnson? John Major without the charisma. No chance.

John Reid obviously wants to be Prime Minister and his performance over the transatlantic hijack plot has sent his stock soaring. Just remember that shares can go up as well as down, he's also very right-wing, he's not an especially likeable person (it's useful to be liked when your party is falling to bits), and he's profoundly, irredeemably, Central Belt Scottish. There are a lot of questions to be answered here, but at the end of the day I can not only see "John Reid, Prime Minister" as a possibility, I can see him winning re-election in 2010.

However, my real tip for an outside bet worth keeping an eye on is Jack Straw. Straw has been around for a long time, is the ultimate internal hack, will know how to win votes among his parliamentary collegaues and the unions in Labour's complicated electoral college system, and he's redeemed himself with many of the left-wing rank and file members by getting sacked by Blair for being too pro-Palestinian. Watch Jack Straw.

What about the other parties? What about the Tories and their recovery?

The first point worth remembering is that in the latter days of Thatcher, Labour were more than 20% ahead in the polls. And even poor Iain Duncan Smith had the odd good poll. Mid-terms polls when the government is tearing itself to bits are one thing, winning elections is another. Leading mid-term polls in these circumstances by 5-9% isn't only no big deal, it's nothing of consequence at all.

Cameron has restored the Tories’ credibility with the media, yes, but has he done it with the voters? It’s far too early to tell.

As for the LibDems, ditching Kennedy was right but Ming Campbell was a desperately bad choice. He was clearly out of his depth in the leadership campaign and he can't give an interview without making a stupid policy concession to a reporter. I can't believe that many people actually voted for him as leader after seeing his lame performances on TV. However, the LibDem front-bench is strong, probably stronger than it ever has been - the more the public see of Huhne, Clegg and Davey and the less of Campbell the better it will be for them.

Oh, and does anyone really think Britain's Middle East quagmire will be forgotten about by 2010? And even if it is, Vietnam may not have cost Nixon the 1968 or 72 election, but it combined with Watergate to cost Ford 76. The LibDems are the only party who agree with the public on the seminal foreign policy question of the day. They sort of need to remember that and say it a bit more often.

All this political confusion makes me think the next General Election will produce a hung parliament, which is what I've thought since about a year before the last one.

And the great addition to the unpredictability is the continued success of 4th parties in both the polls and local elections. The Greens, UKIP and BNP between them will easily poll 10% at the next general election if they contest enough seats. That, in effect, reduces the 'winning post' in a first-past-the-post electoral system and makes the whole thing very difficult to predict, although its net effect is probably to help Labour slightly.

Also in HMV last night, I picked up John Thaw’s portrayal of Bomber Harris recorded for the BBC in, I was astonished to find, 1989. I remember watching it first time round, and with hindsight, I could have been twelve at the time but am amazed it was so long ago. Although that might explain why I remembered so little about it.

The film is essentially sympathetic to Harris, presenting him as devoted to his own men and simply doing the dirty work that he felt was necessary to win the war against Germany. It doesn’t gloss over the fact that it involved butchering a couple of thousand people but it doesn’t exactly dwell on the matter either. The Bomber Command Parson who tackled Harris directly about the ethics of area bombardment and who later invited Sir Stafford Cripps to lecture the men on how they shouldn’t silence their consciences even while, say, 20,000 feet over Berlin, comes across as cold, sanctimonious and generally unsympathetic. The film also makes its view clear that Harris was made a scapegoat for others who approved entirely of his strategy and then dumped him, friendless and honourless, when the war was over.

Many regard this as John Thaw’s tour de force, and I’m inclined to agree. Thaw acts Harris wonderfully, with some wonderful support (e.g. John Nettleton as Harry Weldon). Only Robert Hardy’s Churchill feels weak, and that may be simply the price of playing too familiar a figure.

Try as it might, however, this film can’t entirely absolve Harris from his responsibility for the horrors of Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. Harris was an enthusiast for aerial bombardment from an early stage, having been an experiementer with it in the early 1920s in Iraq and India (no-one worried too much about a few ‘natives’ getting the chop, of course). When Harris became frustrated with the limitations of targeted bombing, he turned to the idea, concocted all those years before, that blowing the smithereens out of cities was the way to shorten the war.
It didn’t shorten the war – German industrial production in 1945 was as great as it was in 1938 – and it’s difficult to make the case that it had a militarily significant effect on German morale, either.

As ThEconomist notes in an interesting article this week (subs required), Harris was the first, but hardly the last, in a line of fantasists who deluded themselves that air power made the infantry soldier obsolete. In the past few years, we’ve seen two classic examples of that delusion – the Anglo-American débâcle in Iraq, and more recently Israel’s war gone wrong against Hezbollah in South Labanon. Luckily for the human race, the Allies did have massive ground forces to hand in 1944 and ’45.

Air power is great for blowing things up, but it doesn’t actually do much if you’re trying to create something.

I'm still amazed at what the chaplain got away with though. This is a sign either of the liberality of Britain in the 1940s or the exalted position the Church of England used to have in English society. Either way, it's hard to imagine anything vaguely like it happening today.

(Pointless aside: the review of the Harris DVD on the amazon.co.uk page linked to above is clearly written about a completely different production.)

73% of 2,500+ BBC Magazine readers who responded think Uranus is now the outermost planet. Ohmigod!

Yes, Annalisa Barbieri let's push a hypothesis that we have no statistical basis for, no concrete evidence for, not even neccesarily a plausible cause and effect link for, just because it happens to suit our agenda on an entirely unrelated subject. I've no problem with the message that breast is best, just let's stick to real reasons why it's best, can we please?

GCSE exam results set a new record. Um... yes, well that's been the case in every year bar one since the GCSE was introduced in 1988. Along with a gradual drift towards more coursework, more multiple-choice exams, continual narrowing of syllabi, and a reduction of pass marks to ludicrously low levels (16% for a Grade C in one Edexcel Maths paper). Not to mention a serious decline in the numbers of pupils taking subjects with concrete objectives and measurable standards, like modern foreign languages to be replaced by record numbers studying media, film and TV studies. Not that media studies can't be a rewarding and challenging course, but at the moment it isn't so at GCSE.

How did we get here, when few people who don't have a direct interest defend the current system? Inclusivity seems to be the excuse for easier exams, but social mobility in the UK is in serious decline and the proportion of working-class children who go on to university has increased only from 6% to 9% over the past 40 years. Easier exams don't make it equally easy for everyone to pass. If you're not the brightest, but are in a small, motivated class, with motivated parents who are among the 25% of parents who send their children to private tutors, its easy to be coached through an easy exam.

If on the other hand, you're in a poorly performing schools with poor teachers teaching disruptive classes and parents who don't give a toss - well, it doesn't matter how easy the exams are, does it?

Increasingly, independent schools are either opting out of GCSEs or avoiding the most disruptive parts of the national curriculum, such as it being impossible to study Physics and Chemistry without Biology at GCSE. So, as GCSEs are devalued further employers will set more and more stock by qualifications which state schools are more or less forbidden by law from offering.

Who benefits from the current malaise - not employers or academics, who no longer have a serious benchmark of assessing intellectual capacity, nor teachers who teach less rewarding courses, nor most pupils, especially if they're from poorer homes, nor society in general. I can only think of three groups who do - politicians, who get to announce ever higher pass rates every year, independent schools, who benefit from their increasing advantage in standards, and children who attend independent schools, who ditch much of their working-class competition for university places and jobs.

The road to equality in education is leading us through some very strange places.