The Dimbledance

This dance would certainly have livened up at least the opening moments of what was a rather dull BBC Question Time yesterday evening...



I was co-moderating contributions as usual, and am now getting sufficiently skilled with the somewhat clumsy "producer's console" that I was able to participate myself much more than I had done previously as a moderator – it had been essentially one or the other but not both together (not helped by my evening medication beforehand).

David Davis was very good indeed, even getting a fair amount of applause from the (bussed-in public sector-plus-students) strongly Left-leaning audience, and Melissa Kite was generally okay too. Despite all the (increasingly blatant) wangles, fixes and other manipulations to rig the programme to suit their own political agenda, even their carefully-selected audiences have over the last few months often failed to behave as Auntie had planned.

It's yet another (and in this case big) indication that the British public has turned a corner and is waking up to reality with greater understanding, aided by the Information Age's everyday facilities that are nowadays available to all, readily and relatively cheaply. At Question Time all the plotting and preparation still pay off to some extent, but the trend appears to be consistently in the direction of "less effective".

Thus even the current polling high for Labour (at last more than a point or two lead) – which is largely because of inertia in the sheer mass of the public-at-large – will probably collapse again within the next few weeks; and this time it might even vanish altogether and permanently.