Sunder Katwala, at Next Left, reports on what John Denham, the communities secretary, said at the Vote for a Change rally.
"Changing the electoral system has long seemed to me to be central to changing the way that people think about politics," Denham said, because the electoral system was driving an ever narrower political contest targeted on small but decisive groups of marginal voters."A system that gives those key voters 10, 15 or 20 times the power of other voters, is a real problem if parties then recognise and respond to that with ever greater sophistication, as we do."
Christopher Caldwell profiles David Cameron in the New York Times magazine.
Maybe Cameron's popularity means that the public is falling back into what the historian RH Tawney called "that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position ... which is still the characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen". But maybe a shared consumerism is making people think about class less in terms of power than of lifestyle.
Jeff Randall, in the Telegraph, is not impressed by Alistair Darling's plans to reform financial regulation.
Either Mr Darling is indulging a newly discovered sense of mischief or he has lost his faculty for spotting irony.Three proposals in particular are worthy of sketchwriters on Have I Got News For You: a clampdown on executive pay, the need for greater competition in financial markets, and a demand that banks hoard more capital during fine times to protect them from storms.
Jill Kirby, in the Independent, identifies five ways government disguises failure as success.
First, moving goalposts. In the dilution of standards, selective use of statistics and manipulation of targets, the government has relied on bending the rules of the game in order to claim success.
Judith Woods, in the Telegraph, says Sarah Brown has become Gordon's greatest asset.
She's the latest arrival on the celebrity circuit, a new best friend of Paris Hilton and Kevin Spacey, who tweets endlessly about her life and is such a fixture on the scene that she's No 2 on Tatler's Most Invited list, just below newly eligible bachelor Guy Ritchie.
Douglas Carswell MP, on his blog, wonders what the point of the G8 is.
Politicians like G8 summits because they think it makes them look important (cracking a joke with Barack) and decisive (deciding to abolish climate change) and in control (ditto global poverty). Diplomats like these summits because it's their job to.
