Preparing for Emergencies

One of the funniest websites I have seen in a very long time is:

http://www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk/

This is parody of the Government's rather lacklustre update of "Protect and Survive", the 19 year old student who created the site has already had a letter from the powers that be asking him to take it down, if the link is broken that will be the reason.

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Today I drove down to Okehampton in Devon to visit the City and County of Bristol Army Cadet Force on annual camp. The cadet force recruits from the same area as half of my battery so I am keen to maintain the link and provide training support where possible. I am always impressed by the level of dedication that is displayed by the children and their instructors.

They were taking part in climbing, abseiling, amp reading, first aid training and a host of other activities, they were clearly enjoying themselves. I hope that the cadets and other youth organisations are not destroyed by the current trend to litigation everywhere.

Four generations of Cleverlys

Sunday was spent at my aunt and uncles new house in Sussex, a very impressive house built just before WW1 from beams and other timber originating from a 16th century farmhouse. The weather held out for us and we were able to sit in the garden all afternoon, Freddy is showing some natural aptitude for golf. With a bit of luck he'll be the next Tiger Woods and can keep us all.

The one of the best things about the day was that Great Aunt Mary (or Great, Great Aunt Mary to Freddy) was able to come. She is 89 and her presence meant that there were four generations of our family together, the younger generation were a bit of a handful for her but her home made honey biscuits went down very well. She is a remarkable woman, she still lives independently and drove herself from Wiltshire to be at the gathering, if I can talk as eloquently in my late 80s as she can I will be very happy. To be honest if I could talk as eloquently now as she does I would be happy.

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I was very interested to see that the Labour government are looking into sending British troops to Sudan, a low tech, infantry orientated operation in the very week that they have announced the decision to cut the number of infantry battalions and spend a larger proportion of money on high tech weaponry. It beggars belief.

Drinks with army mate

Paul arrived from Iraq mid-week and after a respectable amount of time spent with his wife and son decided it was time for us to catch up and have a drink. So Friday evening found us both in the Princess of Wales on Blackheath, it was not a heavy night's drinking by anybody's standards. Paul had not had a drink in four months and between family, work and politics I don't get out much either. I have no intention of going into the details of what Paul has been up to both because it would be boring to most of you and also to maintain operational security.

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Despite only having a few pints on Friday I still woke on Saturday morning with a hangover, canvassing in one of the hillier parts of the constituency in the sun soon shook that off.

Drinks with Nick Soames

I spent the evening in Haywards Heath, Mid Sussex. It is both the town of my wife's birth and the centre of Nick Soames' constituency. I was attending a function organized by the Conservative Futures team down there, in a small and rather warm bar Nick spoke about international relations, defence, Zimbabwe and a range of other subjects to an audience mostly in their early twenties. It showed me two things. 1 - The range of political interests that young people hold is very wide. 2 - Nick Soames is very good at talking to young people.

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A good friend of mine has just arrived from Iraq for a couple of weeks of leave. He flew in just as the Defence Secretary announced widespread cuts in our armed forces, you can imagine his reaction.

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For those of you who follow this BLOG mainly to get updates on my son's toiletry habits I will not disappoint. He has now mastered the art of standing up to wee although he struggles to pull him pants back up unaided. Rosey, the dog, also seems to have grasped the idea of not weeing in the house. They both have the shared disadvantage of being young and having small bladders so neither can yet make it the whole way through the night without having to wee. Freddy does it in his nappy, Rosey does it on newspaper on the kitchen floor.

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On the subject of my dog and not wishing to alienate big chunks of the electorate, why oh why do people who are afraid of dogs walk through the dog exercise area in the park?

Giving a local MP a hard time on the BBC

The Ray Woolford, the proprietor of the Lewisham Independent, called me on Friday to say that he had been working on a story which had been picked up by the BBC, they were looking at the health, wealth and happiness of Lewisham's residents 7 years after Labour came to power. The BBC needed someone to represent the Conservatives in a live debate on Sunday morning.
So at 11 this morning a Ford Galaxy came to pick me up and take me to City Hall. City Hall on a Sunday is a ghostly place, with the exception of the TV crew and a couple of security people there was no one around and the open glass structure reinforced the lack of people.

The feature itself was quite interesting, although I thought that the preamble was a little on the negative side. The debate with Jim Dowd MP and Tom Brake MP went well, I got across the points that I wanted to get across including the recent announcement of Ladywell Pool's closure and I didn't trip over my words too much. Neither of the others hit any big blows, so on the whole a good appearance.

Are we surprised?

Watching the TV documentary on the BNP last night I was disappointed, saddened and sickened but not surprised. Nick Griffin and the other members of his party came across exactly as I would expect them to come across, ill informed, highly opinionated and obsessed with the Asian community.

I remember only distantly the National Front marches through Lewisham when I was a child, it seems that the focus of hatred has shifted to the Muslim community, back in 1977 it was Lewisham's black community that was hated. Times move on and the views of sad individuals like Nick Griffin will wither on the vine, in the mean time it is incumbent on all of us to exercise our right to vote and make sure the BNP don't slip in through the back door.

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My battery recruiting team are set up at RAF Fairford for the International Air Tattoo and I went down to see them today. It was a very impressive show, I'm not really into aircraft but seeing that many that close is still head turning. Today was youth day and the place was filled with cadets, school kids and pilots.

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I'm on TV tomorrow so I hope that you all tune in to watch BBC Parliament at 12.00, unless I'm awful in which case watch the golf.

What the Butler Saw

Tony "Teflon" Blair. Another enquiry report and another get out of jail card for Tony. The Butler enquiry was less critical the its US equivalent but more hard hitting than the Hutton, what it highlights is a fundamental flaw in the way that Blair runs the government. It seems that the cabinet have been relegated to yes men rather than their proper function of discussing and scrutinizing the plans of government.

This all seems to show that the decision to go to war was made then the intelligence was collated to justify the action rather than using the intelligence as part of the decision making process. I am also sickened by the way Blair has detached himself from the intelligence, the initial intelligence report was flawed but contained qualifications and warnings of its limitations. When the government put the JIC report into the public domain for its own ends none of the caveats were present, where did they go? Who took them out? Why?

Leicester and Lewisham

Saturday morning saw Brian Chipps and me driving up to Leicester South to help Chris Heaton-Harris with the Leicester South by-election. The atmosphere up at the campaign headquarters was fantastic, there must have been 20-30 people turning up while I was there all helping out with the campaign.

The weather was OK, we had blue skies in the morning and only light rain over lunch. Poor old Sir Peter Soulsby, the Labour candidate, his HQ was being besieged by pension protesters. Still if you pillage peoples pensions you will get the fall out.

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This afternoon I went to Lewisham People's Day with Susie, Freddy and Rosie. I wasn't trying to make a "political event" of it rather just have an afternoon out with the family, good job too because if an aspiring politician wants to get any attention having a toddler and a puppy with you is not the best way to go about it.


It rained. Of course it did, it is the middle of the summer and a huge amount of time and money has been invested in an outdoor event, it was always going to rain.

Education, Education, Education

This is the topic of the moment, the battle lines of the two main parties have been drawn. We Conservatives want parents to have the right to choose how and where their children are educated, we want to see schools with the freedom to make decisions, we want to see a significant increase in quality. The Labour party seem to want the same thing, good on them.

The main difference is the caveats that Labour want to put in place. Parents with the right to choose but only from the state sector. Schools with freedom, unless their policies conflict with left wing dogma. Increases in quality as long as all schools are at the same level. The Labour party has yet again mistaken equality with uniformity and uniformity at the lowest common denominator at that.

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The education on my son continues at a pace. I don't want to tempt fate but the toilet training seems to be going better than we have any right to expect. At just over 26 months old he has mastered the habit of telling us when he needs to go to the loo and even wees standing up! It looks as though we might be getting completely dry nights before he is 3.

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I am also in the middle of training our puppy Rosie, this is not going quite so well as with Freddy. I may be expecting too much from her at only 12 weeks but it is very infuriating when she bounds off and refuses to come back, I have decided to look into the option of professional help. I was thinking about using this website to solicit advice but if my experience of the advice that we received when Freddy was born is anything to go by I'll never finish reading all the responses.

Two weeks in the sun

Majorca, Florida, Portugal and numerous other places around the world had two weeks of glorious sunshine. The Otterburn Military Training Area in Northumbria however did not.

The reason that there has been a big gap in the BLOG entries is because I have spent the last two weeks on exercise with my regiment, 100 (Yeomanry) Regiment Royal Artillery (Volunteers) in Northumbria and Scotland.

I do not feel that many of the readers of this BLOG would find much of interest in the detail of the exercise, suffice to say that midges, rain and very little sleep all had a major part to play in the proceedings. My Battery won the regimental best battery competition and one of the gun detachments from my Battery won the best detachment competition. I was very pleased with how the guys performed.

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I did feel rather guilty about introducing a new puppy into the household and then disappearing for two weeks, if the tearful messages on my mobile were anything to go by Susie was having a much harder time in South London than I was having "up north". She was, as always, able to rise above the situation and deal with it all with dignity. (If you think that I am being so flattering to get myself off the hook, you're right. Still, it doesn't mean it's not true)

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Being away meant that I missed most of the European Cup but enough coverage got through Clydebank to see that the Scots were so very pleased with the nature of England's departure from the competition. I am sure that Anglophobia isn't universal north of the border but it is certainly common and make one want to say "grow up!", this allied with the ongoing saga of the Scottish Parliament building gives a lot of ammunition to the "they're unfit to govern themselves" camp. I would say to the Scottish people, as someone who has lived in the country and has a positive predisposition towards the Scots, be less concerned with hating the English and you will find that the English are far more proud of you than you think.