Damn! I’m up north on Tuesday and Wednesday. Otherwise I would’ve come along. Hope it goes well.

“It is a curious fact that when people have to pay to hear me, the audiences have always been bigger than when it is free.” There’s your solution – charge them “ONLY £999.95 a ticket, just for tonight!”

Might be able to make it – cross fingers.

Dearie, dearie me.

Craig. We live in a consumerist world.

Nothing ain’t worth nothing if it’s free.

Always charge top dollar, then people will assume what you’re selling is worth it.

Better still. make it so expensive that it’s prohibitivly exclusive. Then everyone’ll want it.

It’s then you give out freebies to the movers, shakers and opinion formers.

It’s probably because if people are paying the venue will be advertising it better.

Any chance of an audio recording, transcript or video stream of the event?

Tories in total and miserable despair at Cameron’s uselessness.

Iain Dale writes movingly of the long dark night of Tory wilderness that now looks like it will continue forever:

“I won’t have to think about an election campaign I am already bored with and don’t really want to write about. Not because of the Cleggophilia or the apparent rise of the LibDems, but because I have got a dose of writer’s block. Try as I might yesterday, I couldn’t summon up an original thought in my head, and this morning’s no better. Nothing has happened over the weekend of any consequence anyway, beyond more polls showing the LibDem bubble hasn’t burst yet.”

Poor Iain thinks that because he’s depressed then everyone else must be depressed too. A classic symptom.

“The only thought that really strikes me is this: if a political nut like me is bored with the election, what on earth are normal people feeling?”

Normal people are of course ecstatic at the chance to break the authoritarian two party duopoly, once and for all.

Any chance of seeing you in Manchester?

Or the North-West of England?

This might be a good time to remind everyone of Craig’s appearance for Amnesty in Swansea on 28/4. I wonder if AI should be charging for that visit? Donations are going to be welcome, but there’s no fee on the door.

http://swansea.amnesty.org.uk/

Years ago Michael Gove used to appear with David Baddiel in a BBC production, A Stab in the Dark. It was a kind of current affairs comedy thing. Here’s an episode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ3VrC5xZ5E

In one episode Oxford educated Gove was taking the piss out of the new universities, the former polys. After a bit of a preamble he stuck his geeky face right up to the camera and smirked, “you’re still second rate”.

I surprised this clip hasn’t surfaced. The sight of this privileged geeky voiced, geeky faced geek who wishes to take responsibility for schools, dissing the majority of students in the country would surely be of interest to his political opponents.

It’s startlingly elitist, to say the least, and in dubious taste but that’s quite a feature of Cameron’s front bench.