• Launched the Swimming Challenge Fund to support free swimming for over 60s and under 16s.
• Banned fox hunting.
• Led the campaign to win the 2012 Olympics for London.
• Free admission to our national museums and galleries.
• Devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, an elected Mayor and Assembly for London and directly-elected mayors for those cities that want them.

Earlier this evening, I was at the Jacksons Lane Community Centre to see a wonderful Bilimankhwe Young Company production of a double bill of plays by David Farr (I should, of course, declare an interest as one of Bilimankhwe’s trustees).

The plays, “The Queen Must Die” and “Ruckus in the Garden”, were performed by young people aged between 12 and 18, all of whom are in Haringey Schools.   Both plays were hilarious and were much enjoyed by the (mainly) late-teen audience.

The first is a farce set at the time of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.  The action takes place the night before the Jubilee procession in a small town, when a giant papier mache statue of the Queen is to be the centre-piece of the procession.  The statue becomes the focus for 2 groups of teenagers who have their own reasons for wanting it destroyed. The first group belong to the anti-monarchy group the ‘Popular Republican Front’ and want to destroy the statue as a symbolic act of defiance against the ‘establishment’. The second – all girls – have a serious fashion situation they need to resolve in order to hold on to their credibility. All they need to do is go to the house where the statue is being kept and get past the babysitter – Shaun ‘the lips’ Digby, played by Archie Barber.  There are fine performances all round, but notably from Fred Rich as Darren, the (self-appointed) revolutionary leader with a fine line in political rhetoric, from Chanteese Black as Shannon, the leading fashionista who transforms herself into the WAM (Women Against the Monarchy) when she thinks Darren is a real film director, and from Gulsah Akdag as Mad Mike, Darren’s Rosa Luxemburg, an animal rights activist who keeps threatening Shannon with an axe.

The second play revolves round two schools: Riverdale Comprehensive (where the chavs from the sink estate go) and St Nectan’s (not selective, but it is really, where the better-off middle classes send their children).  Both are on an educational trip to the Garden of Cecil Fortescue House. A ruckus is inevitable, as is customary when these two schools meet.  Magic waits amongst the topiary in the form of Cupid, who brings about transformations romantic – and revealing.  The action is an amalgam of a “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Romeo and Juliet”, but with a happy ending for the two sets of star-crossed lovers (excellent performances by Carla Ingram as Tamsen and Enzi Alexander as Kath, who swap bodies, to confuse James Martin as Stanley and Michael Mellor as Hugh), and for the “unexpected” couple, Faisal Bhatti as Rock and Seraphina Taylor as Maisy.  Issues of class, gender roles, violence, and prejudice are all neatly explored.

So, if I’ve whetted your appetite, there’s only one more performance and there aren’t many seats left.

• 900,000 pensioners lifted out of poverty
• 500,000 children lifted out of relative poverty and measures already in train will lift a further 500,000 children out of poverty
• free TV licences for over-75s
• the New Deal has helped over 2 million people into work
• over 3 million Child Trust Funds have been started

Smart casual requires constant effort:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rknh6kkrJ80&feature=youtube_gdata

Scott Charney, the Microsoft Vice President in charge of Trustworthy Computing, is speaking today at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.  He is re-stating both Microsoft’s commitment to “End-to-End Trust” but also the need for business, government and the public to work together to ensure that those using the internet are safe and secure.

The message is an important one: responsibility for internet security has to be shared.  The House of Lords Committee on Personal Internet Security, on which I sat, reported nearly three years ago and used a road transport analogy to make the point: safe road use requires responsible behaviour by drivers and pedestrians, but cars need to have safety features embodied in them, roads themselves need to be well-maintained and properly lit, there need to be laws regulating safe behaviour on the roads (speed limits etc) and those laws need to be properly enforced.

If anything the message has become even more important since our Committee reported.  More and more commercial and personal interactions take place on line.  Social networking sites are booming and an increasing proportion of commerce is conducted via the internet.

The threats to security have also become more pronounced.  The threats are no longer from isolated individuals, but from organised crime and it is also becoming abundantly apparent that some nation states are operating in the same way to infiltrate commercial and government networks for their own purposes.

And the technology itself is developing.  Cloud computing is becoming the norm and this presents its own challenges.  Certainly, this has raised the issue of security for many people (although it is not automatically a given that the security of data held in a cloud is necessarily worse than if it is held on your own servers, particularly if it turns out that they are inadequately protected).

So how do we move forward?

Partnership is certainly essential.  Governments have to work together in setting an international framework for collaboration and for law enforcement.  And at a national level they must also work with IT service providers and with business in general.

But above all, the individual user must be at the heart of all this.  Sensible security arrangements that make sense to the individual have to be devised.  It needs to be acknowledged that most individual users of the internet, whether they are trying to do their weekly shopping or organise their social lives, are rushed and busy.  Moreover, they are not technological experts.  They have inadequate levels of knowledge, so an error message or system alert that makes sense to an IT professional will probably be gibberish to most of us.

And critical to all of this is the need for robust identity management.

Surely, it is not too much to ask that people can feel confident that their personal details are secure, that they can communicate with others secure in the knowledge that the person or organisation with which they are communicating is who it says it is, and that when they are asked to identify themselves they need reveal no more about themselves than is necessary for the transaction concerned.

If today’s discussions at the RSA Conference take us further towards those objectives, we will be making real progress and we can all feel more hopeful that a trusted and secure internet environment is being built.

I have always taken the view that there will be scepticism and cynicism in any Host City about hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games until just a week or two before the Games start and then it will vanish and everyone will suddenly be a convert.  I confidently expect that to be the process in London as we get closer to 2012, unless Mayor Boris Johnson fails to invest properly over the next two years and himself builds cynicism rather than enthusiasm.

I am therefore very pleased to have had the opportunity to be in Vancouver for a few days with only three weeks to go before the City hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics, so that I can see whether my theory is borne out.

On balance, I think it is.  There is no doubt that local enthusiam is building: young people are excited and it is mainly locals that are currently swamping the Official Merchandise outlets (where they are finding that they can only buy using cash or a VISA cards – as VISA is an official sponsor, Mastercard and American Express are forbidden).

Businesses are preparing for the rush of visitors and are expecting a serious boost to the provincial economy.  Meanwhile, the Cultural Olympiad is in full swing – with an impressive emphasis on events with a link to Canada’s First Nations (the indigenous Indian communities prior to colonial invasion).

So has cynicism disappeared?  Not entirely.  One cause is the weather: it is simply too warm.  One of the Olympic ski runs has had to be closed because of warm weather and heavy rain.  And the cynics tell me that this was entirely predictable.  This is an El Nino year when warmer ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific bring a milder winter to Western Canada.  (An El Nino year is usually preceded the previous year with a colder-than-normal winter and this is what happened in 2009 when Vancouver was totally snow-bound in January.)  These meteorological events are on a five-year cycle (or so I was told) and it should have been obvious to all concerned when Vancouver was bidding for 2010 that a mild winter would be on the cards – now in 2014 (the winter before the next El Nino year) would have been an ideal Games to bid for ….

And there are moans at the Mayor (so this is probably another reason why Boris Johnson won’t stand again in May 2012) for the proposed road closures and the extra costs falling on the City.

And there is still a legacy from the February 2003 plebiscite called in Vancouver on whether to support the Bid.  This was before the final decision by the International Olympic Committee was taken on the location of the 2010 Games, but after Vancouver was named as a candidate city and had signed legal agreements committing it to host the games if selected.  Fortunately, citizens of the City voted heavily in favour of proceeding with the Bid, but the manouevre was seen as deeply cynical: only citizens of Vancouver itself (and not those from the rest of Greater Vancouver) could vote; it could easily have had a negative impact on the IOC vote (which would have meant all the bid costs would have been in vain); and above all it would have been impossible to pull out if the plebiscite vote had gone the other way.  Apparently, the Mayor “was just playing politics” – now where have we heard that before?

I too like Dr Who.  However, I am not quite as much of a fanatic on the subject as is my (no relation) namesake Tom Harris MP (and indeed my favourite Doctor would be Patrick Troughton rather than Tom Baker – it’s an age thing).

Over the weekend Tom Harris recorded what thirty-five years ago would have been every male adolescent’s wet dream: a meeting with Dr Who companion, Katy Manning – and yes he is right she was the definitive Dr Who companion.

And note in the second photograph where Katy Manning has put her hand ……

The good news is that Tom Harris would have been only nine years old in 1973.

There is always a surreal air about aspects of the Annual Dinner hosted by the (unelected) Lord Mayor of London in the City’s Mansion House for the (elected) Mayor of London and the “Governing Bodies of London”.  And tonight’s was no exception.

The surrealism began with a Grace from the Lord Mayor’s Chaplain that seemed to be based entirely on a song by Noel Coward – an innovation too far even for the New Model Conservative Leader of Hammersmith and Fulham, Stephen Greenhalgh, or at least for his phone which warbled its protest whilst the Chaplain was speaking (Greenhalgh tried ineffectually to silence it..).

Meanwhile nearby, discontent simmered amongst Mayor Johnson’s Deputy Mayors about the seating arrangements: why had (unelected) Deputy Mayor Sir Simon (rumoured soon to be Lord) Milton been given such a prominent seat allocation, compared with the two other (elected) Deputy Mayors?  (Milton was at the centre of the top-table at the left hand of God himself or more precisely at the left hand of  Stuart Fraser, the (unelected) Chairman of the Corporation’s Policy and Resources Committee.)

And then, of course, there was the speech from Mayor Boris Johnson himself.  Surreally praising those present for braving the snow and ice – the snow and ice itself being a tribute to the success of the team from City Hall that had gone to the Copenhagen to reverse global warming (“How successful they were and so quickly”).

He then moved rapidly on to an argument that the success (sic) of London in coping with the snow and ice was itself a metaphor for the success that London was having in weathering the recession(sic, sic).

This elided into a paeon of praise for the decision he had himself announced that in future all the data held by the GLA would be made freely available on the internet.  This in itself would transform the economic prospects of London (if not the Universe).

And then after a brief digression on how his heart goes out to those poor MPs caught up in the expenses scandals “for buying themselves a pepperami” (sic) and how the GLA decision, if adopted by Parliament, would have averted the scandal because the afore-mentioned pepperamis would not have been purchased.  At least, I think that was the argument.

Finally, the great champion of openness informed his audience that he could tell us that he had seen the proposed 2012 Olympics mascot but that he couldn’t tell us anything about it – we were not permitted to know whether it was an animal or not, what its gender was, or its sexual orientation.  All he could say was that it would be “a howling success”.  And what is more, if by the time it is unveiled in May, Gordon Brown has been sent to a salt-mine (there was a sub-theme of the evening relating to salt and grit) the Olympics mascot will be temporary Leader of the Labour Party.  Now as everyone knows, if the Leadership of the Labour Party becomes vacant, the post is automatically filled by the Deputy Leader of the Party until a successor is elected – so presumably this was Mayor Boris Johnson’s way of telling us that the 2012 Olympics mascot will in fact be the Right Honourable Harriet Harman MP.

As the Governing Bodies of London filed out of the Mansion House into the snow and ice (which amazingly still remained), you could hear the murmur of confusion/buzz of excitement about the sweeping vision of London’s future that they had just heard from Mayor Johnson.

I should declare an interest:  “Twelfth Night” is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays – mainly because it is the play I know best, having studied it for my GCE O-level (what would now be GCSE) in English Literature (I got a Grade 2, since you ask)  at the same time as my English teacher directed it as the school play. As a result, I approach every production I see with a very critical eye. And I am pleased to say that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production, currently at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, very much met with my approval (I am sure this will be an enormous relief for the RSC).

The production gave a proper weight to the different characters and the quality of the acting meant that even the more minor parts had a vitality and wholeness that is often missing.  Thus, Fabian, played by Tony Jayawardena, seemed to have a real role in the action with his own separate motivations, rather than being a makeweight character created when Shakespeare realised that he couldn’t have Feste appearing so frequently at both Orsino’s Court and in Olivia’s household without having him absent some of the time (thereby requiring an additional character for a number of the scenes).  And Feste, played by Miltos Yerolemou (adding an additional frisson when Sebastian calls him a “foolish Greek”), himself was excellent, capturing the viciousness implicit in some of the clowning and the fool’s own insecurity.  Pamela Nomvete’s Maria was also fine with a clear hint at the end that she ultimately rejects Sir Toby (Richard McCabe).

The main set-piece scenes were well handled.  In particular, the second embassy scene where Olivia’s desire for Viola/Cesario (Nancy Carroll) was marvellously conjured up by Alexandra Gilbreath and the letter scene where Richard Wilson’s timing as Malvolio and the reactions from the box tree were impeccable.  (I was relieved there was no “I don’t believe it” moment to placate the many Richard Wilson groupies of a certain age in the audience, although had there been it would have no doubt completely baffled the equal number of Americans).

Enjoy!

I’ve just returned from the Hackney Empire, where this year’s pantomime, Aladdin, was noisily enjoyed by a full house and proving yet again that you don’t need either Pamela Anderson or a theatrical knight playing the dame to deliver the best seasonal entertainment in London.

And at the risk of sounding pious, multi-ethnic Hackney (which becomes that well-known suburb on the eastern side of Peking, Ha-ka-ney) and the melting-pot of cultures that make up modern London are not only appropriately reflected in the mixture of musical styles and language of the performance but enhance its vitality and humour.

What is more, tonight’s entertainment was enlivened by the sight of no less a personage than Professor Tony Travers, Director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, sitting in the stalls – and desperately  trying to maintain his customary gravitas while joining in the words (and the actions) of “The Panda Mime Song”.