What would it take to see the New Labour cabinet split? When neither going to war, adding tuition fees, introducing id cards, or holding suspects without charge for up to three months has done nothing to cause New Labour to contemplate just how truly Tory they are? Smoking. Or more particularly a bad on smoking in public places. That's done it. And it's done it in exactly a Tory-esque way: interference, impact on enterprise, can't work. Nanny state, etc etc -
Never mind the fact that apparently 91% of, say, Northern Ireland, supports a total ban, and that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are bringing in or have brought in total bans, or that great swaths of North America have done likewise, with consequent benefits to health and enjoyment. Nope. Doesn't matter. There are principles at stake here - or something.
Or maybe it's just politics - Blair doesn't care that ex health minister John Reid and health minister Patricia Hewitt are going at it publicly about full ban / half ban.
Or maybe, pardon the pun, it's a carefully orchestrated smoke screen to keep public gaze away from the new parts of the "terrorism legislation" (why is it called terrorism legislation rather than anti-terrorism legislation): while the media watches the cabinet bun fight, the home secretary and prime minister can make id cards and prolonged detention without charge a below the fold story.
Meanwhile, the Lords reconsider whether or not evidence produced from torture - as long as the uk was not involved - can be used as evidence in a uk court. Musn't use wiretaps. no no. But third party torture reports? Please feel free to smoke while you read.
It's just one track, the first single from Kate Bush's new album. It's called King of the Mountain. The first pass is "well it sure sounds like Kate Bush" and that has its own reassurance. But it's not a big sound piece: it's subtle, musically, lyrically.
The video is equally seemingly simple: the video story seems to be of one of Elvis's Vegas white suits searching for Elvis ( i won't spoil the ending) while the song's lyrics ask Elvis about rumours of various Elvis sightings, imagining him as King of the Mountain. There is no major video trickery, just an intriguing use of black and white, shift to color and inexpensive sets and props: Bush dancing with clothing; laundry lines of pegged clothes, reaching out to the suit flying above them. Bush wearing a trench coat and a cheap guitar strapped to her back.
The thing about the piece itself is that it is so subtle. It takes several listens - either with the traditional "play it loud" Bush stereo cranked - or with headphones - to get the quality of both the instrumentation and the variations in the piece itself. Effectively two choruses, and half a dozen variants on the main chorus theme, "the wind it blows / through the house"
- the sense of emptiness or longingness as the wind, investigates what is or is no longer there is an ingenious ingenious counterpoint to the Elvis trope of the second chorus You're King of the Mountatin/You're a happy man. Whose loss vs whose happiness?
The instrumentation again is rich while being held back. A quiet percussive loop - is it foot steps? rain? - plays through the track. When the bass and drums come in, they sound like they're played by real human musicians; the layered vocals carry through the feel of the wind blowing (in harmony), yearning.
If this is just the first track of an album that's been more than a decade in the making, this last week before Aerial's release is going to be the longest one in 12 years.
What does it say about a nation, a govn't, a party, a leader, that an 82 year old man who raised his voice in critique at a party convention was (a) man handled by volunteer "security" (whether these volunteers wore brown shirts is as yet unclear) and then was (b) held by the state under the terrorism act? The terrorism act? for heckling? a politician?
"At first Sussex police denied that Mr Wolfgang had been detained or searched but a spokesman later admitted that he had been issued with a section 44 stop and search form under the Terrorism Act."
Whatever it says, what is more facinating is who's at least talking about it. The telegraph has covered it. But the Guardian, supposedly the paper of the left, seems to have nothing to say.
It's incidents like the terrible threat posed by Mr Wolfgang that demonstrate the Prime Minister's call to change the law of the land from protection of the individual to protection of the state first. Indeed.