El Nino or El Dunno?

ALEX Salmond is to become the SNP's foreign-affairs spokesman at Westminster. Foreign? Do they mean us?

THE TV licence is similar to Mrs Thatcher's poll tax. Everyone, rich or poor, is expected to pay the same amount and if you don't pay up, you may go to prison. So isn't it odd that the greatest defenders of the TV licence are the same sort of people who raged against the wickedness of poll tax? As the Tories start making threatening noises about the future of the licence, the usual assortment of Beeb-adoring luvvies and liberals seem to have no problem with poor people being jailed for not paying Auntie's annual bill. Funny old world.

SCIENTISTS are warning that an El Nino event in the Pacific could give Britain a ferocious, Arctic winter. But maybe not. To put it in weatherman language, while El Nino "increases the likelihood of significant weather disruption, other factors could modify the effects." The truth is that forecasting the weather more than a week ahead is almost impossible. I am organising an outdoor event at the end of May. With less than two weeks to go, this is the latest forecast from the Met Office: "Various computer models are vaguely hinting that pressure may start to rise from the south, which would lead to increasingly dry conditions." In other words, we haven't a clue.

NOR was I impressed with one of yesterday's BBC forecasts which told us: "There will be sunshine in the sunshine."

I GOT a birthday email from GoCompare with the message: "Presents, cards, cake... whatever treats your birthday has in store, we're wishing you all the best for your special day and the year ahead." Presumably someone in the higher echelons at GoCompare thinks that showing off some of the personal information it holds on us will make us want to do business with the company. It doesn't. It just seems sinister, intrusive and downright creepy.

AND so, after a 10-year legal battle, the letters of the Prince of Wales to various government officials are laid bare. Bad luck if you hoped them to expose a meddling royal lobbyist whose partisan views threatened the very future of the monarchy and constitution, and all that stuff. Charles emerges as a concerned, well-briefed and intelligent correspondent who shares many of the worries of ordinary folk and especially the rural community. He speaks up not for big business but for the people. It is, of course, quite right that such letters are made public. But at the end of this decade-long tiger hunt, the tiger emerges as a bit of a pussy cat.

IN any case, just suppose HRH had a darker agenda. As a tireless royal researcher and historian, he knows full well that every top-secret Whitehall memo and even the most intimate royal letters eventually become public property. If Charles wanted to apply undue pressure, he would be far too savvy ever to put it in writing.

THE people's broadcaster should broadcast in the plain, straightforward English of the people. Wednesday's BBC lunchtime news began: "A tranche of statistics this morning . . ."

BUT I was impressed with some of the writing in the comedy Murder in Successville (BBC3). Raymond Chandler himself would have been proud of the line, describing an unsolved killing: "Like a rundown fairground, there wasn't much to go on."