Bagehot's notebook

MY PRINT column this week considers the political implications in Britain of the deepening euro crisis:

DAVID CAMERON does not want Britain to leave the European Union, though he finds it exasperating and fears euro-zone meltdown could cost him re-election. His Liberal Democrat coalition partner, Nick Clegg, is a pro-European. Nor does the Labour opposition leader, Ed Miliband, want out. Mr Miliband is a European social democrat by instinct (his relatives were refugees from the Holocaust) and by judgment, seeing the EU as a way of delivering public goods such as action on climate change.

MY COLUMN this week is about UKIP, the British political party campaigning for withdrawal from the EU.

ANGRY insurgents rarely prosper in British politics. Two big things help explain this: voting rules and sniggering. Britain's first-past-the-post voting system is rather brutal to small parties. And if electoral rules do not snare a would-be demagogue then mocking laughter probably will. It is a brave politician who stands before British voters, face red and voice shaking with fury. There is always the risk that at some climactic moment a heckler will interrupt, posing a variant on the ancient British question: just who do you think you are?

MY PRINT column this week is a profile of John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons:

NOTHING in Britain's constitutional traditions obliges the Speaker of the House of Commons to woo voters. Within the Gothic halls of the Palace of Westminster, the Speaker is a mini-monarch, escorted to the chamber by a mace-bearer, a doorkeeper and a chaplain, while a policeman shouts at people to remove their hats. From his canopied chair, the Speaker can summon the prime minister to explain himself and silence the mightiest office-holder with a glance.

IT BEING Friday, I hope readers will tolerate a snippet of breaking news from the streets of South Kensington, nerve centre of the French expatriate community in London. Bicycling down the Fulham Road a short while ago, Bagehot was passed by a gleaming Aston Martin, twin exhausts rumbling like a freight train, and French number plates (33 code, so from Bordeaux, at a guess). I was all ready to shout: "Bloody asylum seekers" at the driver, but decided the gag might not work in translation.

MY PRINT column this week looks at the politics of House of Lords reform, and suggests that this dry-sounding subject is actually a rather important clash about power and its transmission.

SOME years back the BBC enjoyed a surprise hit with a spoof chat-show presented by Mrs Merton, a fictional northern housewife whose trick was skewering guests with mock-naive questions. One noted interview, with a willowy beauty married to a diminutive magician, featured the query: “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” The concept of the “Mrs Merton question” duly entered the national lexicon.

DESPITE stiff competition from local and mayoral election results involving almost 200 local authorities across England, Wales and Scotland, Peter Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, co-inventor of Blairism and ex-European Union trade commissioner, is set to make headlines this afternoon by calling for Britain to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership.

Voices on the Tory right have already reacted with enthusiasm, with ConservativeHome arguing that David Cameron should follow Lord Mandelson's lead and announce an in-out referendum.

TOM Watson, the Labour MP who has done more than most members of the British Parliament to uncover wrongdoing within the media companies run by Rupert Murdoch, likes to compare the Murdoch press to an organised crime gang. Tiring of claims by James Murdoch—the patriarch's son and a former boss of the firm's British media interests—that he knew nothing of illegal behaviour in his firm's tabloid newsrooms, Mr Watson famously called him “the first mafia boss in history who didn't know he was running a criminal enterprise”.