I could probably get a vote in tomorrow’s special Lib Dem conference fairly easily; it has been called at such short notice that I doubt that all the voting reps of the Brussels branch of the party will be able to go, and substitutes will probably be welcome. I won’t go, as I am not sufficiently active in the party these days and also have other plans. But if I were going, I think I would be going as a neutral leaning to yes vote.

It took me several days to come around. I wasn’t especially shocked by the fact that the deal was with the Tories rather than Labour, as the arithmetic pointed that way; I have not been particularly surprised by the howls of outrage from Labour supporters who feel nobody else deserves to be in power. But I started as a coalition sceptic because the deal doesn’t go far enough on electoral reform, and it seemed to me a catastrophic error to risk the Lib Dems’ reputation without getting the most significant possible gain up front.

I came around partly as a result of reading the growing debate on the proposed 55% rule. First off, I’m amazed by the wrong-headedness of some of the commentary about this; if you want fixed term parliaments, you simply have to decouple votes of confidence from dissolutions in more or less this way. Of course there are going to be ways around it, as Helmut Kohl showed in 1982, but the point is to deter a prime minister from rushing to an election when the polls look right, and to raise the political price of doing so. The 55% figure is probably a bit low, but is basically high enough to ensure that neither of the current coalition partners can easily pull the plug on the other, and to provide an incentive to stable government. ‘s analysis has already been widely linked, but if you haven’t already seen it it is here and here.

Which leads me to my reason for switching from soft no to soft yes on the deal. In my write-up of last weekend I expressed certainty that there would be another election soon, so the Lib Dems would need to get their price for coalition out of their partners early. The fixed term parliament deal kills that worry stone dead. The referendum on AV will therefore go ahead as normal government business rather than as part of the run-up to the next election campaign. I am not a huge fan of AV, but I do buy the argument that it is a first step towards proper reform, and the removal of the prime minister’s power to run to the voters on a whim is sufficient compensation for me, for now.

There are other aspects of the package I don’t like. I’m a sceptic on electing the Lords, so I hope that the coalition parties implement the first half (appointing enough members now to reflect party support at the election) and forget the second half of the plan. Of course, I have the luxury of not living in the UK so I can pick and choose the bits I like to comment on – the economics will make very little difference to me.

I’m alarmed by the lack of reference to international affairs or Europe in the coalition agreement (keep Trident, stay out of the euro, that’s it). Also the Lib Dems have not done well on the international affairs portfolios – nobody in DFiD, and I’ve never heard of Jeremy Browne, the junior minister at the FCO who is still in his 30s. (Nick Harvey gets to be armed forces minister; I quite like him but have no idea of his suitability for the job.) But I can’t honestly say that the Lib Dems have had much of substance to offer on British foreign policy recently other than on cases which actually shade into civil liberties (where the coalition agend is much more robust, and Labour particularly awful), so perhaps it’s only to be expected.

I shall email my views to my local conference reps, as well as sharing them here. But I expect the package will get a thumping endorsement at tomorrow’s conference.

Once again I managed to wipe my draft of this post when I was halfway through watching the last of these six stories, so it’s not quite as fresh as I would have preferred.

The Dominators was not as bad as I remembered, though this is admittedly rather faint praise. It’s a decent sfnal plot of Team Tardis averting an alien invasion, though it’s worth noting that Dulcis is the first planet with a living indigenous culture of humanoids who are not explicitly Earth colonists since The Savages.

The worst bit is the costuming of the Dulcians: the men are wearing what looks like a cross between a maternity dress and a small curtain, while the women’s tops obviously won a prize for combining the maximum of exposed skin while being not sexy at all. The Dominators were presumably meant to look threatening and also slightly tortoise-like, but this is a difficult trick to pull off and they just look like they are wearing giant shoulder pads. But there are lots of exciting bangs and blowing stuff up, and an interesting contrast between the passive Dulcians and the vicious Dominators which is probably deliberately reminiscent of The Daleks.

The Mind Robber is one of the most extraordinary Who stories ever. The first episode, bolted onto Peter Ling’s script at the last minute by Derrick Sherwin, is full of wonderful moments of inspired lunacy; the only single episode that does a better job of dimension-hopping is Part One of The Space Museum, and it of course is let down by the rest of that story. In The Mind Robber we have the paradoxical idea of fictional characters (the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe) trying to avoid becoming fictional characters (like Gulliver, Rapunzel and Cyrano de Bergerac). Jamie’s temporary change of body – made necessary by circumstances totally outside anyone’s control – adds an extra element of surrealism to the mix. My one quibble is that the ending is a bit abrupt, and we never see what happens to the Master of the Land of Fiction.

Bernard Horsfall is particularly memorable here as Gulliver, aggravating the Doctor in a world of the mind as he was to do again under David Moloney’s direction in The Deadly Assassin. And having griped about the costumes for The Dominators, those for The Mind Robber – produced by the same designer – are superb; particularly Zoe’s catsuit. The moment when she is shot from behind clinging to the console of the destroyed Tardis is a moment when Doctor Who starts to grow up. Or at least enter adolescence.

The Cybermen are back (though not reallly for long) in The Invasion, and so are the villain and one of the heroes from The Daleks’ Master Plan, Kevin Stoney appearing as the rich mad industrialist Tobias Vaughn, and Nicholas Courtney making a return as Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, now promoted to Brigadier. (The first surviving shot of the latter is of his backside as he emerges from a piece of equipment).

Given how little we actually see of the Cybermen here, it feels more like The Avengers, with the Brigadier trying to stop Vaughn’s plan, though eventually relying on Zoe to destroy the approaching fleet (seen only on radar) and on the Doctor to talk Vaughn into renouncing his allies. Taking a longer view, it’s the most New Who-ish story so far, with an alien threat to contemporary Earth (which never happened in the Hartnell era, and only three times out of 21 Troughton stories, though it was a staple storyline of both the Pertwee years and of RTD) combined with recurring characters and family dynamics among the Doctor’s allies.

It’s a very slashtastic story as well, with the strongly sapphic dynamic between Zoe and Isobel Watkins matched by the Doctor and Jamie playing around in canals and tunnels (the Brigadier being the gooseberry) and even the weird powerplay between Vaughn and his increasingly panicky security man, Packer. The music is also particularly good, with the notable exception of the jaunty military theme which destroys the tension of crucial scenes in the last couple of episodes.

The Krotons was another story whose merits were more apparent to me round. When I first saw it in 1981 I really didn’t know what to make of it, but it makes a lot more sense in context. Again referring back to The Space Museum, we have the Doctor and friends leading a revolt of the enslaved against their masters; this time the story is much more interesting, and though the Krotons themselves are a bit crap, they are generally shot from angles that minimise that problem, and they curiously spend a lot of time watching events (and trying to influence them) on television, a theme that has sensitised me to.

Apart from the Krotons themselves, the rest is OK, particularly Philip Madoc’s Eelek, who has been displaced at the end of the story in favour of the younger, more stupid, hereditary leader; one senses that Eelek will be back in power in due course. It’s also nice to get some Doctor/Zoe time, with Jamie separated from the rest. (But why does Selris, and only Selris, have a Scottish accent?) But I do wish that the BBC had had the nerve to show The Mind Robber instead back in 1981.

Once again I felt that The Seeds of Death improved for me on this viewing. A big part of this is watching it as six separate 25-minute dramas, rather than (as we tend to in these days of DVD) as a single two-and-a-bit hour spectacle. The original plan works rather well. NB that a few months before men landed on the moon by rocket, Who is portraying a future where the moon is where your day job is and rockets are obsolete – rather audacious. (Also the only person who really understands the T-Mat system is a woman.)

The Ice Warriors are seriously vicious here, and Terry Scully’s terrified Fewsham is memorable as well. And the foam machine, which last starred in Fury From The Deep, gets another outing. Mild costume fail (though not as bad as The Dominators): the men of the future all appear to be wearing nappies.

If The Seeds of Death was Who’s answer to the real-life Moon landings, The Space Pirates must be considered an answer to Star Trek. Once again, I enjoyed it more than previously, largely because I was watching the recons rather than listening to the audios; the single most annoying aspect of the story is the decision to give ludicrous accents to Gordon Gostelow as Milo and Donald Gee as Ian (Jack May is also a bit irritating as General Hermack but was at least using his natural intonation). On the audio it’s impossible to ignore, but there are enough visual cues even in the recons of the five lost episodes to distract one’s attention.

The story has other weirdnesses. The Tardis team do not appear until almost two-thirds of the way through the first episode, and do not meet any other character until the start of episode 3 (and spend much of the rest of the time locked up). There’s a grotesque “as-you-know-Bob” moment from General Hermack in episode 1. Madeleine appears to have been working and living within a stone’s throw of her vanished father for several years without either of them moving to resolve the situation. There are a lot of comedy moustaches, Milo Clancy only narrowly beating Navigator Penn. But the incidental music is very good.

I liked all of these much more on this round of watching than I had before (with the exception of The Mind Robber, which was already one of my favourites). I think it’s partly that I have become more sensitive to and forgiving of late 1960s production values, partly also that these stories are much more varied and intesting in format than the previous season’s run of bases-under-siege, even if the experiment did not always come off. It is a bit ironic that Season Five rather accidentally hit on the base-under-siege formula, Season Six then successfully moved away from it, and Season Seven then consciously shifted again, adopting the Earthbound setting of the early Pertwee years.

I am very glad that Episode 6 of The Space Pirates is the last missing episode. The reconstructions are generally excellent efforts, but I still felt I needed to have an eye on the script while watching them. I know that not all of the Pertwee stories survive in their original form but it’s still better than the soundtrack only.

For the first time since the very first of these roundups, I have no obituaries to write for recurring characters. I will have to do four of them next time (Zoe, Jamie, the Second Doctor and Liz Shaw).

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

This happened on Tuesday morning apparently. Wish I had been there – I pass through that hall almost every day!

(hat-tip to .)

The BBC seeks expert views.

PS: I do recommend Mr D’Hondt, should you ever need his sort of services in this part of the world.

• EULEX Uncovers No Evidence KLA Trafficked Organs
  No big surprise.
  (tags: kosovo)

I shall start by making a foolish prediction, which is that there is likely to be another election in October, so party leaders will need to manoeuvre now with that in mind. Clegg has to remember that even if he does a deal with Cameron or Brown, it is the Prime Minister who will retain the ability to decide to rush to the polls the moment he sniffs the chance of a majority. Occasionally (Ireland, 1989) the electorate will punish a move like that, but more often it is the smaller party that gets blamed and thus loses seats. Clegg should therefore ensure that he gets his deliverables as early as possible, because there may not be a later.

Given the arithmetic, the Lib Dems are right to talk to the Conservatives first. But the Conservatives have no recent experience of coalitions, apart from John Major’s attempts to preserve his majority in the mid-1990s. Labour and the Lib Dems have been in coalition in Scotland and Wales, and both Scotland and Wales currently have minority governments, but the Conservatives have been in opposition throughout the existence of the devolved legislatures.

Moreover, Cameron has demonstrated that he himself is particularly bad at negotiating coalition deals. In my last post I described how his alliance with the UUP has resulted in the electoral wipeout of both parties in Northern Ireland. From the Brussels end, I have watched gobsmacked as the Tories marginalised themselves in the European Parliament by finding peculiar fringe allies rather than remaining a key faction in the largest parliamentary group. In both cases, the impetus for the deal came directly and personally from Cameron himself. In both cases, opponents of the strategy (Sylvia Hermon, Edward MacMillan-Scott) were marginalised and ignored – with the result that both left and did better outside the tent than in. I see a pattern here: that Cameron chooses his allies on instinct, without much strategic depth to his considerations; though in fairness he also seems to stick to his guns. (Another symptom of this is his loyalty to colleagues even if they are not really up to it; I haven’t been following British politics closely enough, but this may explain why the likes of George Osborne and Owen Patterson have not yet been relegated.) I deduce from this that even if Cameron strikes a coalition deal, he probably does not have the political skills to implement it in the medium to long term. As I said in a slightly different context above, this means that his partners need to extract their deliverables early in the relationship (as the UUP and Poles did, in terms of getting money and parliamentary chairmanships respectively), since there probably won’t be a later.

Not that Gordon Brown impresses me as a potential political partner either; I’ve read Paddy Ashdown’s account of Brown’s rather poisonous contribution to the Scottish coalition negotiations of 1999, and his awful behaviour even to friends and allies, let alone potential rivals, is legendary. A different Labour leader might be a different matter, but I don’t think that the timeline allows for that option. (In any case, the numbers do not really work for a Lib/Lab arrangement.)

Clegg does have experience of coalition-building from his time in Europe, probably more than Brown and certainly more than Cameron. Probably also more than most of his own party, many of whom instinctively regard both Labour and Tories as evil and have difficulty in believing that either could be a necessary evil. I quite like Clegg, but his own internal authority has surely been tarnished by a bad election result. I certainly don’t envy him.

Well, the votes are now in, and I have been grinding through them to put them up on my elections site. And my conclusions, going from hard-line Unionist to Sinn Féin, are as follows:

The Traditional Unionist Voice is finished. Even a repetition of last year’s Euro-election vote share would not have necessarily ensured viability. But none of the candidates, apart from Jim Allister in North Antrim, was even able to get enough votes for a decent shout at an Assembly seat; and Allister’s own vote had halved from its rumoured level in North Antrim last June. His concession speech sounded to me rather like a winding-up speech for the party. The fact is that few people are sufficiently outraged by the DUP/SF settlement to want to actively vote against it, and that the TUV did not offer a credible means of overthrowing it (see analysis from “Turgon”, a TUV insider, here). Lyle Cubitt, standing against both Allister and Ian Paisley junior on the platform that neither was hardline enough, got just over 500 votes.

The Democratic Unionist Party lost over a quarter of its votes and its leader’s seat. They knew this was going to be a tough election – I asked one activist why they were not working harder on South Belfast, which on the numbers should have been their top target; he replied that they were fighting a defensive campaign, without hope of gains, which of course also explains their withdrawal from North Down. Looking at it from a hard-headed strategic point of view, the votes are mostly retrievable – if the TUV disappears, they will come back naturally; also the DUP will not abstain from the fray in North Down or Fermanagh-South Tyrone in future years. The leader’s seat is a different matter. Robinson’s image among his own core constituency has obviously been irrevocably tarnished: he was simply unable to answer straight questions about the famous £5 strip of land, and his reputation as a blunt, straight talker, cultivated over many years, simply disintegrated. On the night, the DUP were clearly closing ranks to defend their wounded warrior, but I imagine that the party’s smarter members (and there are several) may like me come to the conclusion that the person, not the policy, was their problem.

For the Ulster Conservatives and Unionists – New Force, both personality and policy played a part in the debacle that saw the UUP fail to return a single member to Westminster – and let’s remember that ten years ago they held ten of the eighteen seats! So many things were wrong with their campaign that it is difficult to know where to start. The proposition that Northern Ireland’s voters actually want to participate in the politics of Great Britain always struck me as a bold proposition with little actual proof, or rather with considerable evidence against it from previous elections. As a moderate Catholic myself without strong sentiment for a united Ireland, I should surely have been part of the target audience for this project; but I never felt that Reg Empey was talking to me, and I noted that the most prominent Catholics involved a) were not very prominent and b) abandoned ship when it became clear that it was not going anywhere. Finally, the approach to the three most winnable constituencies was simply bizarre. It is not necessarily a bad thing if your candidate in the second most gainable seat is best known as a Freddy Mercury impersonator; it does become a problem if he is known for nothing else at the end of the campaign. It is also a problem if in your most gainable seat you a) can’t pick a candidate, b) sack the candidate when he has been picked for expressing views which are identical to those of Conservative front-benchers, and c) parachute in the party leader from the far side of Belfast. But both of those problems pale into insignificance beside the casual discarding of the party’s one sitting MP, and endorsing as her potential replacement a recent and visibly opportunistic defector from another party. This isn’t just a matter of poor pollicy choice (though the only policy choice that I saw being made – opposing the devolution of policing and justice – was indeed a poor one); it is a matter of lousy planning and poor leadership. Sir Reg meets his Assembly team tomorrow, and I expect he will be discussing the timetable of the election of his successor with them. (Among the gloom, Danny Kennedy’s performance in Newry & Armagh stands out as a bright spot; but Mike Nesbitt’s similar uptick in Strangford is probably a more transient result of the Robinson factor.) See more insider discussion here.

I know little about the Rodney Connor campaign in Fermanagh-South Tyrone, but I was surprised that he didn’t win. The well-informed Turgon comments that Connor may have been unable to motivate all of his potential voters because, in essence, he had a reputation for being too nice to Catholics. If there are indeed five voters who failed to vote for him for that reason, they fully deserve the representation that they got. One other conclusion to be drawn here, at a point when there is lots of talk about Unionist unity, is that the one specific initiative of that nature in this campaign actually failed.

Lady Sylvia Hermon actually got fewer votes than Connor, but was more fortunate in her geography and opponents. Her 63% vote share, compared to the 2005 figures, clearly came about 30% from the DUP, 31% from her own support last time, and 2% from further squeezing of the other parties with candidates. It was a storming performance, and it looks like the seat is hers as long as she wants it.

Alliance got its best percentage result in a Westminster election since 1997, total votes up by about 50% from 2005, and most particularly got deputy leader Naomi Long elected, the first time the party has had an MP since the brief defection of Stratton Mills in the early 1970s. Combined with the appointment of party leader David Ford as minister for justice last month, it’s been an extraordinary few weeks for the party. (There are wobbles in the results for East Antrim and North Down, both explicable by local factors which will probably be less of an issue next year.)

The Green Party did not score particularly well, but there were special circumstances in their strongest area (see above under Sylvia Hermon).

The SDLP will be relieved to have held all three seats. The South Belfast result was particularly interesting, with McDonnell’s majority greater than the support of the absent Shinners, and yet Alliance doubling its vote too, with Unionist support decreasing. The slow drift of votes to SF elsewhere continues, but it’s also notable that all three SDLP seats currently benefit (though do not depend) on moderate cross-community support. The UUP need to look at why they have been unable to pull this off in the other direction. (Incidentally, the fact that the SDLP take the Labour whip is rarely cited as a factor in their support; yet further non-evidence for the idea that Northern Irish voters yearn to participate in mainland politics.)

Sinn Féin have four or five good reasons to cheer, depending on how you count: five members of parliament re-elected, and a four-vote margin for Michelle Gildernew in Fermanagh-South Tyrone. The party also begins to look serious in North Belfast, in the event of further Unionist disarray. If I were advising them, my one concern would be that turnout in Nationalist-held seats fell noticeably more than in Unionist-held seats. If your supporters start to lose the habit of voting for you, it can be difficult to woo them back.

I have seen some loose talk, as people add up the numbers, of Labour or the Conservatives doing a deal with the “Ulster Unionists” to form a government. Folks, the “Ulster Unionists” have no seats. The five Shinners will not come to the House of Commons under any conceivable circumstances – this was literally the principle that the party was founded on, it is the meaning behind their name. Labour have four certain supporters from the remaining thirteen (Sylvia Hermon and the three SDLP members). Naomi is her own woman, not in the Alliance Party’s Lib Dem wing (which is in any case not large), but she is probably closer to Clegg than to either of the other two. The eight DUP votes are genuinely up for grabs, and the obvious carrot to tempt them will be protection of Northern Ireland from the coming public spendng cuts. This won’t matter if the Tories do a deal with the Lib Dems, since the two together have a clear majority, but under almost any other scenario it becomes very important indeed.

The latest Companion Chronicle, Shadow of the Past, has Liz Shaw, reprised by Caroline John, tracking down the remains of one of her UNIT adventures in a hidden vault somewhere under London. I saw the punchline about the true identity of her interlocutor coming from some distance, but it is an enjoyable ride.

The latest in the Big Finish main sequence of stories has the Sixth Doctor encountering Jamie in a strangely altered Scotland; the City of Spires of the title is none other than Grangemouth, turned into what appears to be an oil-producing metropolis in the eighteenth century. Or is it the ninteenth? And is it really. oil? And why doesn’t Jamie even remember his meeting with the Doctor in 1745? None of these questions is actually answered, which I think is a new twist in Big Finish’s generally successful shift to producing mini-seasons of each Doctor. A special shout-out to Georgia Moffett who plays a terribly posh but very confused young woman.

The latest “lost” story, Paradise 5, was originally writter by P.J. Hammond for the slot that eventually became Terror of the Vervoids on screen. It is a real shame that it was dropped, for whatever reason. It has its problems – the rather odd way that the Doctor’s companion (originally Mel, but now Peri) is slipped into the resort satellite Paradise 5 to look for yet another old friend of the Doctor’s who we had never heard of before and will certainly never meet again; the huge resemblance of the story to Sapphire and Steel rather than to Doctor Who; but despite this is is compelling listening, with weird resonances as Gabriel and Michael, the guardians of Paradise, work out the tricky relationship between the Cherubim and Elohim – a set-up which in other hands could easily have been tacky but from Hammond, as reinterpreted by Andy Lane who is one of the best writers in the Big Finish stable, is totally compelling. One of the better stories in this sequence, even if the joins are fairly visible.

So, unusually, I think I recommend all three of these, for different reasons.

It’s Hugo season again, and I have all of this year’s nominees piled by the bed (except The City & The City, which I have already read); but I am also continuing to work through those books which received the Best Novel award in previous years. My copy of Barrayar is bound with the first Vorkosigan novel, Shards of Honor, in a 600-page omnibus volume called Cordelia’s Honor. I must say that I enjoyed this, and last month’s The Vor Game, which won the year before Barrayar sufficiently that I may go back now and reread the whole lot, perhaps just in time for the new one before it comes out.

Shards of Honor is certainly the best book to start the Vorkosigan Saga with. Its demerits become a bit more obvious on rereading – Cordelia basically has two moments of Miles-like audacity, when she disarms the rebels on Aral’s ship before escaping, and then when she again escapes from her own people; and she depends a bit on the tremendous good chance of bumping into Aral at the crucial moment of her confrontation with Vorrutyer. Also – and this is an area where Bujold distinctly improved in later books – the politics of Barrayar and more especially Beta are rather two-dimensional. But it is tremendously well told, and the two personalities of Cordelia and Aral sustain the narrative to the point where you finish the book anxious to know what happens next.

Barrayar takes up the story, concentrating much more on the unstable politics of a society in transition from experimentation with different forms of autocracy and conformity to, well, something else. Bujold gets a lot of humour from the clashing cultures of Beta and Barrayar, but also the political and personal dilemmas here are more profound, and Cordelia’s act of bravery in challenging Vordarian (including Bothari’s role in her triumph) seems much more consistent and logical given what we have already seen. It is a storming good book, though I wonder how much it could appeal to readers who had not already encountered both Cordelia and indeed Miles, who spends most of this book waiting to be born but whose later career was already well established by this stage. Still, there is no rule saying that Hugo voters must assess a work on how well it stands on its own rather than how well it develops the series, and Barrayar is definitely one of the high points of the Vorkosigan Saga.

The other books up for the Best Novel Hugo in 1992 were Bone Dance by Emma Bull, Xenocide by Orson Scott Card, All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick and The Summer Queen by Joan D. Vinge. The only one of these I have read is the Swanwick, which won that year’s Nebula, though I wasn’t wowed. I seem to remember having been definitely warned off both the Card and the McCaffrey. Is The Summer Queen a sequel to The Snow Queen?

I was prompted to get hold of these by the author’s remark, in the extras track of last month’s Big Finish audio The Architects of History, that he had used the alien shark-like Selachians in a couple of Second Doctor novels some time back. They were easy enough to acquire second-hand, and I read them on my travels over the last week.

Of the two, I preferred The Murder Game, set between The Power of the Daleks and The Highlanders. The Tardis crew land on a low-orbit satellite where a small number of people has assembled for a murder mystery weekend; not all the guests are what they seem, and the game shifts brutally from pretend to reality. Lyons captures Troughton’s Doctor well (more on this below), and likewise Polly, but the standout character is Ben, who is given a decent past, present and future, and even (albeit briefly) a love interest. I am always impressed when a writer of Who spinoff fiction succeeds in taking one of the minor canon characters and investing them with more substance, and this is a good example.

The Final Sanction is a bit more of a standard romp – Team Tardis get stuck in a space war, Zoe gets captured by one side, Jamie starts fighting for the other side, the Doctor tries to stop the war. But there are a couple of interesting points. First, the Doctor is trapped by his knowledge of the awful end of the war, yet fears punishment from the Time Lords if he interferes. Second, the full perspective of the war is well portrayed – this isn’t just two random groups of people in a fight, it’s an interplanetary conflict with a real strategic shape. So a cut above the average Who book.

Both books feature Lyons’ characterisation of the jittery Second Doctor, thoroughly loyal to his companions but prone to wail in terror at odd moments; I’m coming to the end of my rewatch of the Second Doctor stories, and am impressed by how well Lyons has actually captured him, compared with most of the other books (including particularly the novelisations). The Second Doctor is a hero slightly against his own first instincts. It’s very entertaining.

I was very interested to hear about this treatment of the 1916 Rising as a graphic novel, combining as it does two of my interests. I am afraid I was disappointed with the result. My political sympathies are in any case closer to the dispassionate analysis of Charles Townshend, but I don’t think this books will change anyone’s mind about the Rising – it may perhaps confuse them with detail (one rather small map is provided at the very end), but the reader is basically assumed to be familiar with the big picture of the story. Compared, say, with Pekar and Roberson’s Macedonia, let alone the brilliant work of Joe Sacco, Hunt doesn’t really probe very far into the human side of the conflict – British soldiers are anonymous snarls, the civilians who mock and disobey the rebels merely rabble; only the rebels themselves are given full hagiographical treatment, including curiously iconic depiction of their faces taken from the classic photographs. The central narrative is framed by Grace Gifford’s wedding to Joseph Plunkett the night before his execution, but we find out little about him and nothing about her (which is a little ironic considering her later very successful career as a cartoonist). An interesting experiment, but not a completely successful one.

I will post separately about the actual results, but wanted to jot down my impressions from last night’s TV show before the memory fades.

I’ve been recording Northern Ireland election results online in one form or another since 1994, and set up the main online elections archive in advance of the first Assembly elections under the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Back in 2001, I came over to Belfast the day after that year’s Westminster election to cover the counts for RTÉ radio. The BBC approached me several months ago to check my availability for this year’s election, and after the necessary discussion with my employer and family I agreed to do it; quite a long stretch away from home, with rehearsals on Saturday and Sunday, then a few days off (which I used for historical research at the other end of the island) before the night itself.

The rehearsals required my presence but not much of my intellect; it was mostly about the production team practising on the studio set-up. That in itself was rather interesting to watch. Most of my previous TV work has been straight interviews, either with a single cameraman or (less comfortably) down the line with a remote interviewer. Many many years ago I appeared on University Challenge, but that is a well-established, pre-recorded quiz show where we contestants were simply slotted into our seats for an hour (a few minutes of rehearsal and then the half-hour take). So this was the first time I had seen the actual creative process of a live TV show at close quarters.

What really struck me was the sheer number of people coordinating – three or four (or was it even five) cameramen, the sound guys, the technicians, the floor manager, the make-up artists coming by every so often to dab more foundation on my face, and of course I could not see or hear the hidden voices in the gallery who were giving instructions to the three BBC journalists who were fronting the show. I did meet the graphics and computer people who were all based in a large marquee constructed in the BBC’s back yard, which was also where the production team held brief post-mortems on both days of rehearsals.

The studio was split into three sections; half of it was reserved for the BBC’s Noel Thompson hosting a discussion for representatives of the political parties, the other half had Jim Fitzpatrick managing two separate panels – in one corner, three pundits talking about the results from the rest of the UK, and in the other corner (nearest the door, which oddly made me feel safer, as if I could run away and seek refuge when necessary) myself and Mark Devenport crunching the numbers as they came in – me doing the more numerical stuff, Mark reflecting on the political implications.

I did not find this difficult. I have been breathing Northern Irish elections for a long time; and there are only eighteen results to analyse (and one of those has yet to declare at time of writing). Indeed, the worst problem was when several declarations came in close together and we had to remember to go back and give decent coverage to those seats that might have got lost in the flurry.

Like everyone else, we had a couple of hours of doing very little except talking about the exit poll (issued to us under conditions of strict secrecy at a quarter to ten; none of us believed it, but it has turned out to be right). After the first three results came in from the northeast of England, the next two were both from Northern Ireland (though neither wasparticularly exciting). Then came the one huge surprise of the evening, more or less out of a clear sky: rumours and reports started reaching us that Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Peter Robinson, was facing a closer race than expected in East Belfast; then that he was actually behind the Alliance Party’s deputy leader, Naomi Long; and abruptly we got the result, that she had indeed won by over 1500 votes. It was, as was I think the first to describe it, Northern Ireland’s very own Portillo moment. Naomi had doubled the Alliance vote from the 2007 Assembly election, and indeed trebled it from the 2005 Westminster electio; I hope I shall not be accused of bias towards an old friend and former colleague when I describe it as a stunning result.

After that, the next four hours were a matter of watching the results trickle in – I had access to the BBC’s election info software which meant I could also keep tabs on the rest of the UK, in particular the generally lousy news for the Lib Dems and the failure of the Conservatives to make the breakthrough. People who follow me on Facebook and Twitter (where I am nwbrux) will have noticed that I also had full access to the internet. Mark Devenport, sitting beside me, was churning out blog entries for the BBC site.

When South Antrim was declared, Sir Reg Empey (who I had done a radio show with on Sunday) became another main party leader to fail at the polls, and it became very clear that for the first time ever, the UUP – despite their alliance with the Conservatives – would fail to win any seats at all in Northern Ireland. The UUP’s representative in the studio, perhaps unwittingly, provided the show’s one real soundbite of the night by predicting that Sir Reg’s leadership was now over. He very firmly clarified that he was not calling for his leader to resign, simply stating the facts as he saw them; but really it comes to the same thing. (The DUP’s representative in the studio, Arlene Foster, had meanwhile left early to go to her home constituency of Fermanagh-South Tyrone, where early indications were already of a very close result.)

We finished up with East Londonderry – delayed by an attempted bomb attack – at about 4.45, and I slipped across the road to my hotel; had literally just got between the sheets when the BBC phoned again to ask me to come back for their 7.30 news programme. At that stage it was in for a penny, in for a pound; I got about two hours sleep, then went back for the show (seven minutes or so live with Jim Fitzpatrick; by this stage I could do it on autopilot) and then went on to the Slugger O’Toole / Stratagem election breakfast at the Europa Hotel, nipping back again to the BBC for one more interview (jointly with Mark Devenport, on Radio Foyle). Leaving the building for the last time I was pleased to bump into Naomi and Michael Long in the foyer so that I could congratulate them in person.

So, noww I have an afternoon flight to Heathrow and an evening flight to Brussels, and then my life is back to normal. I’m lucky; for me it’s only been a week, and the only stake I had was preserving my modest reputation as an expert on matters electoral. For many other people this election campaign has started, or ended, or fundamentally changed their careers. This morning, I feel for all of them, from all parties and from none. The democratic process is a cruel refining fire, and I’m not envious of those who choose to participate rather than observe.

• Beware the Warnings of al Qaeda – International – The Atlantic
  Morocco&#039;s government may be invested in using the threat of terrorism for political and economic gain… The challenge for us in the West is to be able to live with the threat of organized terrorism without assuming its involvement in any given act of anti-state violence – and without blindly accepting, when we look to other governments&#039; responses, that their fights are the same as ours.
  (tags: westernsahara war)

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week exploring the south-eastern corner of Ireland, looking at places associated with my more or less illustrious ancestor and namesake, Sir Nicholas White of the sixteenth century.

I had not spent a lot of time in Waterford, but one thing that struck me forcefully is that the county and provincial borders, following the rivers as they do, really don’t make a lot of sense now and would have made even less sense in earlier times. The Barrow, the Nore and the Suir were channels of communication, not barriers; the economic hinterland of Waterford in former centuries must have reached at least as far, if not further, into what we now call Counties Kilkenny and Wexford than it did into County Waterford. So any appreciation of the geography has to start from Waterford as a hub for activities to the north, east and west (and south a little bit).

This is Mocollop Castle, way out west on the border between Counties Waterford and Cork; here Nicholas White distinguished himself as part of the Elizabethan forces besieging the castle in 1571. Not clear how long it has been in ruins.

Going north of Waterford across the county line to Kilkenny, this is Knocktopher Abbey, which may actually be rather more recent than its name suggests; however, not the medieval keep onto which the later building was constructed. The name of the keep? White’s Castle – apparently a base for Nicholas White (who is recorded as having established himself at “Whites Hall near Knocktopher”).

As he worked his way up the greasy pole of Elizabethan politics, White emulated the famous Jack Horner and pulled out a real plum from the aftermath of the dissolution of the monasteries. Crossing the water again to County Wexford, this is Dunbrody Abbey where he established his residence from 1569 for a few years before politics took him to Dublin. (Unfortunately closed until the summer season starts; I believe it is rather impressive to visit.)

Dunbrody Abbey’s estates included the peninsula of Duncannon, which guards the estuary leading to Waterford and parts beyond. The site already included a castle and some fortifications, but in 1587 this was actually taken away from White as the Spanish invasion loomed – because, being Irish-born and a native speaker of the language, he was not considered trustworthy enough to be in control of such an important military asset. The outer walls date from about that time (and featured in the new Count of Monte Cristo film which I might actually now go and see).

My final stop was Wexford town. White’s first serious government job, in 1568, was as Seneschal of Wexford and from 1569 Governor of Wexford Castle; I spent some time looking for said castle, but there are no remains of it visible (this is the West Gate of the old town). I guess Cromwell erased it a few decades after White’s time.

So, time well spent, from my point of view anyway.

I found this quite difficult to get into. I’m not familiar with Captain Britain as a character, and the two-paragraph synopsis was not sufficient for me to get the characters sorted out in my mind. So I spent some time wondering who I was meant to care about in the story. (And who was the rather cute woman who apparently gets torn in half on page 31, never to be mentioned again?)

Apart from that (fairly major) gripe, I did like the two main elements of the plot – the story of Captain Britain and his friends using cunning subterfuge to defeat a planned invasion of vampires from space led by Dracula, and the escape of our hero’s wife from Hell. Also I fundamentally approve of Cornell’s rewriting of Britishness as an inclusive project – here the vampires are the bigots obsessed with religious purity. And the artwork is rather gorgeous.

If you feel the need to consult my words of wisdom about today’s election, the News Letter’s supplement from last Friday is apparently online here (have not checked link for myself yet).

If you have the capacity and inclination to somehow record my contribution to Northern Irish electoral history on Thursday night in a form that can be passed to me electronically, I would be very grateful!

(Irish TV viewers will get me on BBC1 as default; cable subscribers in GB will probably find BBC 1 NI in the upper reaches of their various subscriptions.)

I have spent the morning at the Waterford Treasures Museum, which I found really rather impressive: spread over three floors of an ancient granary, full of exhibits mainly concentrating on the medieval period – apparently 20% of the original Viking town of Waterford has been excavated properly which is one of the most thorough such cases in Europe; exhibits include a half-dirham coin minted near Baghdad in 742, as well as a surprising number of leather artifacts.

Waterford claims to be the oldest city in Ireland; it was also where Strongbow married Dermot McMorrough’s daughter Aoife in 1170, to seal the Norman conquest of Ireland; later it resisted both Perkin Warbeck and Cromwell (though surrendered to Ireton). Through accidents of history the museum holds some amazing survivals – church vestments dating from the fifteenth century, a Cap of Maintenance which was given to the town, presumably after having been worn, by Henry VIII. Later centuries featured the poitician and diplomat Thomas Wyse, who married one of Napoleon’s nieces, and the growth of glass-making which culminated in Waterford Crystal.

Plus bonus Bronze Age exhibition on the ground floor – never a bad thing.

The museum isn’t perfectly organised – it has an awful lot to say, and despite the creative use of limited space it still feels a little cramped and a little crammed, and the audio tour isn’t always a perfect match to the exhibition. But it is pretty impressive. I hadn’t been to Waterford since attending the Ard Fheis of Young Fine Gael in 1996 (a story which will have to remain untold for now), but I am impressed by what has been done with its heritage.

Hosseini’s second novel tells the story of two women married to the same man in Kabul over three decades of Afghanistan’s turbulent history. I did not think it was as good as The Kite Runner