What’s to write about?

Not much. And it’s not just me. Perusal of other political blogs and Britain’s quality newspapers’ sites confirms that politics junkies are having a lean time.

The middle-east is far too complex, scary and unsettling for most to tackle. But, sadly and predictably, those simple-minded souls who believe that every fault in the Universe is the personal responsibility of Tony Blair and/or George W Bush see the misery in Lebanon as another excuse for ranting. Mick Hume in his Times Notebook notes that “It seems strange that almost the only people who still share Tony Blair’s egocentric belief in his own power to heal the world are members of the antiwar movement”. He’s right that it’s curious how so many of the PM’s critics haven’t woken up to the diminished influence that a British PM can command since the Empire went but he’s wrong to imply that Mr Blair hasn’t noticed!

Elsewhere rightwing journalists and bloggers scramble for feeble little gossipy stories which they think show sleaze. But they’re tediously repetitive and play largely to their own crowd and the sort of people who phone talk radio shows or think the Daily Mail’s a soft-hearted liberal rag.

Other journalists fall back on stuff about Tony Blair but there’s nothing new to read. What will they write about when he finally goes and is no longer ‘facing the worst week / crisis of his premiership’? Sound and fury signifying nothing.

The jouro-bloggers are struggling too; for example poor old Baron Rees-Mogg of Hinton Blewitt is reduced to writing about the outcome of the next general election even though it’s barely a year since the last one.

And what of Hughes Views / About Whose News? Spasmodic at best. Vaguely interesting that the site gets almost as many hits when I’m not writing as when I am. ‘Bertie bus’ and ‘whatever happened to bird flu’ seem the most popular Google searches which bring readers but Bob Neill’s also brought a few......