I confess that I have an enormous interest in and appetite for news & current affairs and its alter ego history. So, when I go on holiday (I’ve just spent a week in Uzbekistan), I’m reluctant to cancel the newspapers unless I’m away for longer than a week because I don’t what to feel that I’ve missed anything in the domestic or international political scenes. Of course, this means a big catching-up process as, on my return, I skim all the papers I missed.<\/p>\n
What I really regret missing in the last week is the coverage of the Labour Party Conference in Manchester. By all acccounts, Tony Blair’s speech<\/a> – his last to conference as leader – was an impressive affair. The Gordon Brown speech<\/a> was always going to be a difficult balancing act, but seemingly he ticked all the boxes. However, someone who was at the conference told me that John Prescott’s speech<\/a> was the one which moved him most.<\/p>\n This coming week it’s the Tories turn. Whatever his polices (or lack of them), I admire David Cameron for repositioning his party so rapidly and so effectively and he is a really fine speaker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I confess that I have an enormous interest in and appetite for news & current affairs and its alter ego history. So, when I go on holiday (I’ve just spent a week in Uzbekistan), I’m reluctant to cancel the newspapers unless I’m away for longer than a week because I don’t what to feel that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1828,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/1828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}