I'm all ears
"I'm listening," as Frasier Crane would say. And so are others. Yesterday's Media Guardian ran an article featuring a series of the comments posted on this blog about whether journalists had been too kind or too tough in hinting at, but not exposing Charles Kennedy's drink problem. Can I recommend a read of the comments on my "Why hasn't Ruth Kelly gone?" blog for a revealing debate about the limits of ministerial responsibility (surely they can't be expected to pick safe teachers versus it's their job to carry the can) between Freddy and Ricardo and Stephen. Since starting writing this blog I've not found as much time as I would like to respond to the comments posted on it. It's been too much monologue and not enough conversation, but I have been listening and others are as well.
Let me turn over a new leaf by picking-up on a question posed by Martin - how, he asks, can you pre-announce something - as in "Downing Street pre-announced Ruth Kelly's ministerial statement" Grammatically, he's right. It's a non-word but it does have political meaning in the Westminster village.
Ministerial statements are very rarely announced in advance unless they are for a long prepared launch of a White Paper, for example. A statement made under pressure as Ruth Kelly's will be, is normally announced on the day. That's what I meant when I wrote that Downing Street had pre-announced it. It was a device - that, by the way, has worked - to try and still the daily (hourly?) demand that Ruth Kelly come clean. The aim, in part, was to calm the atmosphere before she spoke.
Incidentally, only a cynic would observe that the day the government chose clashes with the day when former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, and former aide to Cherie Blair, Fiona Millar, are due to launch an assault on Tony Blair's cherished school reforms with half of Labour's backbenchers and not a few ministers cheering them on.
I'm 
Comments
It is good that you are listening, but I’m not worried if you don’t respond to every little point. It is your fresh insight and political analysis we visit to read: not a conversation about semantics.
A question that has intrigued me for many years and perhaps we now have a journalist open enough to answer clearly.
Nick, to be the political journalist you are, you must feel the subject important. So, of course without telling us who you support could you tell us whether as a "normal person" you participate in elections like the rest of us. In other words, do you vote?
Nick, your blog is high enough quality to make even a monologue very interesting to read.
As a political journalist, the government must try to buy your loyalty by offering you special interviews, or feeding you preferential information. Obviously you have your own career to think about and being the first with a big story is a journalist's dream. So how do you manage all these pressures and produce newsworthy material without being seen to lose impartiality?
Strictly speaking, Nick, the Commons Speaker has to give permission for any Minister or Member to make a statement - Downing St or the relevant Department does not have absolute control over the news agenda in the Commons.
I know the attitude that Parliament is a quaint institution which dull and unmodernised conventions require Government to consult now and again is quite commonplace in Whitehall, but could the ´óÏó´«Ã½ indulge us traditionalists now and again (perhaps even by accepting this post, "arcane" though the point may appear?)