Michael White hears Alan Johnson get a kicking over C difficile in NHS hospitals and watches the ''tank-top for the top tank'' awards. He also wonders what David Dimbleby meant about that BBC row with the Queen?
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Breakfast, west London
When things go wrong for governments they go wrong all over the place. Today was Alan Johnson's turn to take a Radio 4 kicking from Grumpy Humpy. Why? Because three hospitals in Kent let C difficile get out of control and 90 people died.
The Healthcare Commission seems to be suggesting that managers at the hospitals were so obsessed with government targets, both financial and the waiting time kind, that they let hygiene slip out of control in ways Ms Nightingale would not have permitted. Nor Mary Seacole neither.
Johnson, who is settling in very slowly as health secretary, protests in vain on the Today programme that this was an "absolute failure" of management at a pretty basic level. Anyone who has been on an NHS hospital ward lately will know the main culprit is usually lax nursing standards. Even doctors have to shout to get things done.
So when I visited my wife in a top NHS hospital in London last week I was delighted to be instructed to rub my hands in an alcohol gel on entering the ward - for the first time ever. "Well done and about bloody time," I told the usual gaggle of doctors and nurses hanging around the desk. Mrs White later told me they had taken swabs too, to make sure she hadn't brought MRSA in with her to spread around the ward. Good. In the old days everyone smoked in hospitals- but they were still cleaner.
Back at the workface I round off yesterday by attending two political events, but arrive late, as usual. As a result I do not catch potentially controversial remarks by David Dimbleby at Sovereign Strategy, the Geordie-based lobbying firm run by Alan Donnelly, a street-smart ex-MEP and ace networker.
The BBC veteran is in the cellars of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) to talk about Dimbleby Cancer Care, the family charity set up 40 years ago in memory of his late father, Richard, once the BBC's most famous face. It is now focused on funding research into cancer care rather than treatment.
Like his dad, he is a reassuring figure. Would the BBC have avoided recent grief it David had ever been allowed to be director general or even chairman? Or is that naïve?
He makes plain his distress that Peter Fincham was forced out as controller of BBC1 over the faked-up trailer of the Queen "storming out" of a photoshoot, though he knew nothing of what an independent outfit had done.
A "sacrificial lamb" to protect the senior suits, Dimbleby seems to be saying. "No one is asking why she came IN in a strop - because the matter is closed," a chum reports him saying as I arrive.
Later I go a few yards along the Strand to King's College to have a glass of wine and several sausage rolls at the grandly-titled Thinktank of the Year awards organised by Prospect, the brainy mag I admire but rarely find time to read.
I am a sceptic about the awards racket which thrives in every branch of contemporary life from the Booker downwards, though I will exempt the Nobel , which usually - usually - reflects genuine distinction.
At King's the Guardian's David Walker, who chaired the judging, reports that "the menagerie of thinkers and doers that nestles under the thinktank table has got bigger" in the past year.
By that he means that Demos, a fashionable tank in the early Blair era, has opened offices in Paris, Moscow and elsewhere, that Chatham House - the oldest of them all - is on the up and the aforementioned RSA is reviving under Matthew Taylor, ex-No 10 Blair policy wonk.
Both these events represent perfect examples of what Tory columnist, Peter Oborne, calls The Triumph of the Political Class in the new book of that name which I am currently reviewing; namely a self-selective cross-party coterie of political professionals who drift around Whitehall between academe, politics, the tanks and the media.
It's an interesting thesis, though Oborne takes it too far - as usual. This year's winner in the international category is Charles Grant's Centre for European Reform described by Walker as "an island of sobriety amid the Eurosceptic froth".
Grant is sporting the finest black eye I have ever seen. He jokingly blames it on the Eurosceptics, though my neighbour at the back says he was attacked in the street at non-political random. He complains that Britain's political classes are not interested enough in "abroad" and that many commentators and political editors know little about "the world outside the UK". This is, alas, true. We are all guilty.
The domestic prize, won last year by the Tory outfit, Policy Exchange, is wrestled back by what we call "the left-leaning" ippr, founded in the Kinnock era to generate ideas. Since Nick Pierce, its last boss, went into Brown's No 10 shortly after his predecessor, Matthew Taylor, left Blair's No 10, ippr has been a job-share between Lisa Harker and Carey Oppenheimer.
They are pleasingly glamorous (wonks can do glam!), certainly more so than Ed Balls who gives out the prizes as ippr's claque cheers loudly and sets off party crackers in the Great Hall. Policy Exchange's man belatedly hands over the sacred "tank top for the top tank" - a grubby woolly which belonged to David Goodhart, Prospect's founder.
Balls does tell a good story about how Gordon Brown once rang to tell him he was rated second most influential policy maker in Britain by the Economist, and to complain that he himself was only 19th - " I can see why Tony Blair is above me, but why is Margaret Beckett?" Balls replied:" Gordon, I think you will find it is alphabetical" Gerry Adams came top.
As he leaves Balls comes over to say hello. But I suspect this is because I am talking to Charlotte Leslie, who sports the most glamorous candidate's photo I have seen since Julie Kirkbride MP snaffled a safe seat under under the noses of brainier Telegraph colleagues like Boris the Beast in 1997.
Charlotte, who edits Crossbow, the mag of the Sixties Tory reformers, hails from Bristol, where she is standing in the winnable marginal of Bristol NW. Within five minutes she skilfully allows me to discover that she read Classics at brainy Balliol College Oxford and was also a swimming blue. Dave has need of all your skills, Charlotte.
6.30 p.m Westminster: Ministers are still in the mire over C difficile, Northern Rock and the rest. A new Mori poll for tomorrow's Sun apparently puts the Tories ahead, but the details are under embargo. . The lads share our usual shaming panic about how to calculate a swing. Innumerate or what?
Tonight the Commons European scrutiny committee, which doesn't normally get much attention as it pores over the small print, has thumped ministers for the second time this week.
Its Labour chairman, Michael Connarty, has written to David Miliband asking if the Blair opt-in procedure for justice and home affairs matters will only be temporary, only for five years. There's a good case for closer working with Europe over crime and terrorism, the new big thing, as there is over climate change and much else. But Gordon Brown's defensiveness makes it hard to sell.
By coincidence I had lunch today with a visiting minister at the French ambassador's grand residence overlooking Kensington Gardens on ''Embassy Row.'' He doesn't tell us much but the food is lovely, albeit in small portions: I leave space on my plate for veggies and realise that's it.
The proposed EU reform treaty is different from the constitution because a treaty can be amended by another one. ''A constitution is in marble,'' he says. Hmm. He also offers elaborate reasons for supporting Robert Mugabe's invitation to the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon. Best not to make him a martyr or ruin the summit, he suggests. Africans have complex feelings about outside interference. But it's all awful.
On our way back to the office from the Tube station Colin Brown of the Indy and I bump into Lord Geoffrey Howe, the former Tory chancellor (1979-83), who is shuffling amiably down the street.
Reminiscing, as old men do, Howe recalls saying in his first budget that ''finance must govern expenditure'' - not the other way round. Jacques Delors, the EU commission president, later nicked it.
I tell him that I too remember his first budget. I wrote that after being under Mrs Thatcher's shadow for so long ''he is now a menace in his own right.'' Yes, my brother drew my attention to that, he says, though not unkindly.
