The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” is supremely powerful.

The violence erupts on stage with a vicious street brawl between the Montagues and Capulets making the subsequent tragedy all the more believable.

Mariah Gale’s Juliet is particularly fine, evoking the sulky teenager uttering the Shakespearean equivalent of “Whatever” as her parents plot her marriage, but maturing first into a flirtatious girl and then into a sensual and passionate young woman as she falls in love with Sam Troughton’s hoodied Romeo (and yes, he is the grandson of Patrick Troughton, the greatest Dr Who of them all).  Strong performances also from Noma Dumezwemi as the Nurse, Forbes Masson as Friar Laurence, and Jonjo O’Neill as Mercutio.

Well worth it.

Is David Cameron planning to heap embarrassment on the Queen if the General Election this week produces an inconclusive result?

This is not because of his continued defence of his PR guru, Andy Coulson, whose tenure as News of the World editor was apparently – according to reports this morning – even more sullied by its role in apparently actively commissioning the illegal interception of royal messages.

No, it is because of the plans disclosed this morning for the Conservatives to  ignore the rules drawn up by the Cabinet Secretary on what is to happen in the event of a “hung Parliament”.

According to Nicholas Watt the Guardian’s Chief Political Correspondent:

“The Queen does not summon a prime minister to resign; convention dictates that is for the prime minister to tender his or her resignation. Cameron indicated yesterday that he is prepared to challenge this convention.”

Presumably, the plan is for David Cameron to turn up unannounced at Buckingham Palace and demand to see the Queen, tell her to tell Gordon Brown that he is no longer Prime Minister, and then instruct her to invite someone else (ie D Cameron) to form a Government.

The whole point of the Cabinet Secretary drawing up a procedural document was to avoid Her Majesty being drawn into political controversy.  This does not seem to be something that worries Cameron’s Conservatives.  Apparently, they will be quite happy to embarrass the Queen and trample over constitutional convention.

And the reason for this?

“Senior Tories believe Cameron will require political momentum if he wins the largest number of votes but falls short of an outright majority.”

Political momentum?

Either you have it or you don’t.

And, if you have to embarrass the Queen and ignore the constitution to get what you want, you probably don’t.

After the dissection of the Tory manifesto by Sir Humphrey Appleby (courtesy of BBC Newsnight, now it is the LibDems turn.

See it here.

And this is how the civil service would have dealt with the Sky News feed …..

BBC’s Newsnight, demonstrating that their editors can still take what Sir Humphrey himself might have called “a brave – if not career-limiting – decision”, have produced (in the style of  “Yes Minister“) a brilliant dissection of the Tory manifesto.

See it here.

In fact, senior mandarins have already put the finishing touches on their memos for incoming Ministers.  As one proudly told me a few days ago: 

“New Ministers in my Department are going to be faced with three really urgent and unbelievably difficult decisions as soon as they arrive and they’ll have to deal with those before we can even start to consider their manifesto commitments.”

I have just spoken at a Smith Institute debate on whether the 2010 election will be the “IT” election.

The Smith Institute invite explains:

“This will be the first election campaign where ‘tweeting’, ‘social networking’ and ‘blogging’ will be in eveidence. But how much of a role will the new information technology play, and do the politicians really understand it? This debate will address these and other related issues concerning the use of new technology in election campaigning.”

I have to admit that when I heard the topic with IT shown as “IT”, my mind was inevitably drawn to the Wikipedia definition of an “IT” girl:

“An It girl or It-girl is a charming, sexy young woman who receives intense media coverage unrelated or disproportional to personal achievements. The reign of an “It girl” is usually temporary; some of the rising It girls will either become fully-fledged celebrities or their popularity will fade. The term “It boy”, much less frequently used, is the male equivalent. This term is unrelated to the abbreviation IT.”

I don’t know about IT or its proponents in the next election being charming or sexy, but they are certainly receiving intense media attention and in my view it is probably disproportionate to likely achievement.

And indeed my view is that 2010 is not going to be the General Election where the result will be determined by bloggers, Twitter or social media.  This opinion is no doubt a jaundiced one, but there were similar claims about the significance of IT before previous General Elections.  Some will remember the claims made for the Labour Party’s Excalibur system in the run up to the 1997 Election …..

My argument is that 95% of the electorate will cast their votes in blissful ignorance of what has been going on in the blogosphere and – as in previous Elections – their votes will be influenced by their past allegiances, their perceptions of what the Parties stand for in policy terms, and their assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the different Party leaderships.

So the question is what influences those perceptions and assessments – what creates the zeitgeist?  The answer is still predominantly television, radio and newspapers.

Over time this changes: television was not a factor in the elections of 1950 and 1951 and probably did not become really significant until 1964; newspapers are no longer decisive (The Sun may have boasted that it won it in 1992, but I doubt that the same will be plausible in 2010.).

People are increasingly getting their news and opinion in new ways.  However, the old media – at present, at least – are still central.  Nevertheless, politicians need to adapt to the changing media landscape and master the new ways of communicating – as Roosevelt did with radio in the 1930s and as Wilson and later Blair did with television in this country.

But – and it is a big but – even though the new media are not yet decisive and mastery of them is not yet obligatory for an effective politician, new media will have a significant indirect impact on the forthcoming Election.  This will be manifested in the way they impact on the terms of the debate reported by the traditional media.

Individual bloggers will from time to time set the agenda, rumours in hyperspace will eventually get reported, bloggers will subject policy statements from the main Parties to rigorous analysis and fact-checking, and the speed of the blogosphere and the rapidity with which material (particularly “gaffes”) can be spread on YouTube and via Twitter will challenge the traditional media and require a more fleet-of-foot response from the political parties and from politicians.

There will be a premium on seeding material in the blogosphere and on harvesting useful information or arguments that emerge there.  Political parties will be able to energise their supporters and communicate with them more rapidly.  And there will undoubtedly be benefits for those individual politicians who can communicate effectively in the new media, retaining their own authenticity whilst avoiding creating (too many)  hostages to fortune.

Are the political parties and our leading politicians going to be able to meet this challenge?  Well, we will soon find out.

• Created a new right of pedestrian access to the English coast, so that every family has the opportunity to enjoy the length and breadth of our coastline.
• In the last four years Labour’s work overseas has helped over 7 million people in sub-Saharan Africa access clean water and sanitation.
• In Europe we signed the Social Chapter and introduced measures including four weeks’ paid holiday, a right to parental leave, extended maternity leave, a new right to request flexible working, and the same protection for part-time  workers as full-time workers.
• We led efforts to agree a new international convention banning all cluster munitions.
• We introduced the first ever British Armed Forces and Veterans Day to honour the achievements of our armed forces – both past and present.

• 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