We met, fifty old friends and family, up in Westminster, to remember David Risner, last Saturday lunchtime. He died twenty years ago this month. He was one of the best – husband, father, publisher, friend – but none of that captures it.  David had integrity, loyalty, a sense of fun, he was clever, clued in, and good company. We worked together for four years so or, and I’ve had no better friend in all my years in publishing. David, we miss you still, and honour your memory.

Shame about John Bercow. Here’s me trying to defend MPs as honourable gentlemen and ladies and in a few cases right honourable, and they go and vote in a non-entity for rotten reasons at an important time in British politics. From what I can see he ain’t much charisma and the Tories, whence he came, loathe him, and Labour have voted him in to needle the Tories.  I feel let down, I do.

Sir George Young (Sir is almost a Christian name in his case – he’s always been Sir George)  would have had a certain kind of Tory grandee shuffling old-school honesty about him, and he’d have got on jolly well with David, being from the same posh educational establishment, though George must be about twice David’s age. With Boris installed as mayor, we could have had the born-to-rule brigade actually ruling, and given that all three are Liberal Tories that would really have upset the Telegraph on the one side, and those unhappy souls who were peddling socialist mags outside Hammersmith station this evening on the other. (You’d have thought they’d have realised they were on to a loser by now.)

I like my politics old-style, capitalist against socialist, so maybe I should take up peddling socialist mags to even things up a bit. It’s also a good time to be an anarchist. Everyone hates MPs, ergo, we don’t want them, we don’t need them, and let’s set up Berlin-style anarchist communes instead. I think that was the gist of one radio interview I heard.

So what kind of reform will we get? Let’s hope for Whip-free election to select committees, and the house insisting that announcements are made to them first and overall the Whips being less able to corral votes.  We now know that Speakers can be made to resign, so I’d be worried for my job already if I was Mr Bercow. He hasn’t got it in him to personify parliament as Betty Boothroyd did, and if his authority slips at all PMs, Brown or Cameron, and MPs will ride roughshod over him.

Another scenario of course is that the people of London  march on parliament and force itself to vote itself out of existence. Communes take over, the monarchy is abolished, and a guillotine is set up at Tyburn.

For the Zen Politics blog this is a matter of real concern.

President Obama brought, with a well-timed swat, the life of this  (rather large, I admit) fly to an early end. The news-clip is dramatic. As an example of macho politics it was impressive. It was only sad that he wasn’t discussing North Korea or Iran or Sudan at the time, though some would have then argued it was staged, with the fly, maybe slightly doped, being introduced into the interview at a strategic moment.

Ahmadinejad …  swat!

Kim Jong-Il … swat! Though Jong-Il’s dad, Kim Il-Sung, has been elevated to ‘Eternal president’ by the Koreans , so it may take more than a swat.

But to return to the issue. … Well, no, I won’t. Ever the pragmatist, I think this fly HAD TO GO. You don’t mess with the Pres.

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One further thought: what would our brave leaders do, when faced with a fly?

Brown wouldn’t see it, or maybe the fly would resign, solving the problem

Cameron would put the boot in, that being a favourite recent activity

Clegg (no flies on me, guv) would hit out and miss altogether…

Have we any politicians who could Obama-style successfully deal with a fly?

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Gordon Brown doesn’t want to apportion blame.

Nick Clegg wants to apportion blame, and apportion it now. He thinks he knows what the outcome of the enquiry will be.

David Cameron doesn’t mention blame. He has to be careful, given the Tories were supporters of the war.

Brown wants answers. Clegg wants retribution. Cameron isn’t quite certain what he wants, but whatever he wants he wants it in part in public, because that’s the way the wind is blowing.

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Let’s imagine a public enquiry, with lawyers and affidavits, and public interrogations. If all the evidence was stacked one way, maybe there’d be a steamroller and the enquiry would be over quickly, the guilty would be disgraced, sink out of sight, never to be seen in public again. But the evidence won’t all be stacked all one way. Will Tony Blair or Geoff Hoon roll over quietly? Even Jack Straw would feel he has to fight for his reputation. They’d all have lawyers.  So too would the military men, because the enquiry will take in the way the war was fought, how effective it was, armament and transport, strategy and planning and tactics on the ground in Basra.

If the Bloody Sunday enquiry into one day can take years and cost hundreds of millions of pounds, how much will this cost?

And don’t tell me it need only last six months.

Hold it in public and everyone will be in protective mode. It will be argument and counter-argument, virulent attack, passionate defence. It might even be fun. It would be a media show. We’d all get wound up and talk about it. We’d leap to conclusions, probably based on our existing pre-conceptions. We’d talk about it lots. But would it help us finds the answers to what really happened, would it point up lessons for the future, would it heal wounds? No, it wouldn’t. It’s the worst possible way of doing it.

I’ve heard talk today of the healing a public enquiry would bring. I don’t believe it. Passions once roused would be hard to douse, on both sides. Watching others hit the self-destruct button is a good spectator sport, not too far from reality TV. But not if we’re the sport. Not too good if we want to have a positive influence in the world.

There’s a lot of talk about openness and accountability. The two don’t necessarily go together. Openness isn’t going to mean that those we would wish to be held to account will be held to account. Truth isn’t such a simple black-and-white beast. Like the Bloody Sunday enquiry we may be no clearer at the end than at the beginning, or we’ll find that we’re entrenched in the positions we started in.

No, Nick, it’s not simple, no-one’s going to roll over.

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For my part, I loathed the war, and loathed Blair for taking us into it. I’d have had Blair impeached if that has been an option under our political system. For misleading the public and parliament, if he didn’t lie as such, for taking us into an ill-conceived war, and for sheer gullibility (not an impeachable offence, I admit) when faced with Bush and the neo-cons.

But I’d have had that done in parliament, not in a media-goaded bear pit. There are ways and means for getting at the truth. A public enquiry just isn’t one of them. The terms of reference of the enquiry as now proposed are what we should be focusing on, but these will have to wait for another time, or another post.

Stick to your guns, Gordon.

The Times TV correspondent was doing his ironing watching The Apprentice. An interesting insight into who does TV reviewing these days. Young kids earning extra dosh at uni? I’ve often wondered how sanity survives in the reviewer’s job, and I can now see that moonlighting doing the ironing, or doing the ironing and moonlighting watching TV, is how they do it. With so much stuff sent out in advance by the TV companies, you can probably get by with half-watching. You can half-watch TV but dangerous to half-iron. Easy that way to become a decamisado, a shirtless one, whereas reviewing will always keep a shirt on your back… no matter what you turn out.

Here beginneth….

I read today about the Slow movement which till now had passed me by. I need to check out on its international spokesperson, one Carl Honore, author of In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. If I buy it, and it passes muster, I will put it on the shelf next to E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.

Slowing down and downsizing. It’s what we do as we get older. I don’t think I’m 6ft 1in anymore though my passport says I am. And I run more slowly. Probably think more slowly too. (At which point, a pause, as I gather my thoughts). I now live in a flat, and the family home is a memory. My car is smaller. But, my car isn’t slower. No, at the age of 62 I bought a faster car, and speeded up, almost imperceptibly to me but not to that roadside camera that caught me speeding last month.

There are it seems two kinds of slowness, that brought on by age and circumstances, and the slowness that I (or when I’m driving I don’t) choose for myself. The latter I can do at any age. In all the whirl of activity we get up to in our teens and twenties we don’t normally appreciate the virtues of slowing down, but nonetheless it’s an option for everyone.

There’s that old W.H. Davies poem, ‘What is this life so full of care, we have no time to stand and stare’. I thought that might be a nice neat poetic summary of the idea, but it’s not. That’s about stopping and starting, and maybe increasing the amount we stop…

No, this is about slowness, about taking in and enjoying the world as we travel through it, being mindful of it, finding our own pace, not been swept along at someone else’s pace.  Curiously, by this definition you can do slowness at speed.

A river runs through my girlfriend’s garden. On a bad day it ran though the house, but that’s another story. It’s faster and muddier after rain, slower and clearer in drier spells. But it’s pace is steady.

Schumacher has a chapter called Buddhist economics. We define ourselves by who we are, not by what we possess.I’d forgotten about Buddhist economics when I called this blog Zen Politics. So there’s a challenge. How can Zen work not just in everyday life, but in political life? And can we talk about it without being incredibly boring?  John Humphries should be nice to everyone, David Cameron should be nice to Gordon Brown, we should all be nice to Nick Griffin, and even forgive the guy, we should learn to love the Barclay brothers (pet dislike), owners of the Telegraph.

If I can find anything useful to say on the subject you’ll hear more from me!!