A week in Floyd

SOME rich people have to pay hundreds of pounds an hour to sit on a couch unleashing their bitterness and bile on bemused but highly paid shrinks.

Not former director general of the BBC Greg Dyke. Mr Dyke, who has a fluctuating policy on facial hair, was given no less than four pages of Sunday's Observer to vent his autobiographical spleen in the direction of the new Labour government that he helped to bankroll into existence.

The funniest excerpt by far was the point at which the man behind Roland Rat revealed his key role in the founding of new Labour.

This is Greg's report of a conversation with Peter Mandelson: "I explained that my experience at Harvard has given me a new vision for the party. The world's most successful companies, I told him, were treating staff in the way we, on the left, had always argued that people should be treated."

Thus, Greg goes on to explain the revolutionary theory of the mixed economy, which he invented in 1989 in discussion with Roland Rat and Kevin the Gerbil.

Of course, this type of creativity was legendary in the 1980s. Who can forget when DJ Robert Elms teamed up with Sade to invent jazz?

Dyke is clearly a delusional idiot, but if you've been reading or listening to anti-war liberal commentators recently, you could be forgiven for thinking that he moonlights as some sort of left-wing martyr. He doesn't.

He's a millionaire businessman who fully supports the capitalist status quo. His falling out with Blair has nothing whatsoever to do with political principle and everything to do with Dyke being cast out of Big Tony's modern social democratic Garden of Eden.

I'm not a supporter of Alastair Campbell's approach to the BBC, but surely the likes of Dyke and Gavyn Davies were largely responsible for inspiring the aggressive media management techniques that were ultimately used to stab them in the back. Wasn't it them who wanted the party to be media savvy?

Dyke may be our enemy's enemy, but then so is Osama bin Laden and I don't support him. If Dyke really wants to be helpful, he should put his bile back in his stomach and go off and invent a plan for a publicly owned railway system.

THE Republican convention in New York this week must've been a hoot.

Hopefully, they had a speech from a foetus as the Republicans are well known for having far more interest in the rights of unborn US citizens than poor people and foetuses are well known for knowing more about politics than Governor Schwarzenegger.

More likely Boy George, flanked by The Terminator, will have been setting out an extremely muddled and misleading vision for the US and the wider world, with the only liberal thing in evidence being the doses of threats and violence on offer to back up the imperialist vision.

The big problem is that, despite his tragi-comic combination of foreign-policy malice and domestic economic incompetence, Bush is not stupid and he is going to win re-election in November.

I'm sorry if anyone finds this shocking, but it's true. John Kerry will not be the next president of the US.

US presidential elections are not about politics. The policies of the parties are generally very similar, even compared to Britain.

The main difference between Bush and Kerry is that the former knows what he's doing and he does it very well.

He's got the buzz words - God, evil, folks, enemies, freedom - and he serves them up in feelgood, bite-size chunks for all the family.

In contrast to Bush's folksy charms, Kerry is considerably more wooden than your average coffee table and has no clear message other than "vote for me, I'm not George Bush."

If I'd been voting in the Democratic primary, I would actually have voted for a coffee table instead of Kerry.

At least it would've been in touch with the people and, if elected, would do far less damage than either Bush or Kerry in the outside world.