Day 2 - August 9th - London

Arriving in London, there is only one subject on the lips of just about everyone, the London riots. At home people seem very worried about my safety. Yet in all my time in London I saw no sign of any damage. That's because I am in the central city whereas the damage is in the suburbs.

That being the case I have no great insight to relay on the subject. I offered to do something for Morning Report and spent some time gathering some information but in the end, they didn't need me and I don't blame them. 

The media coverage was very good. I listened a fair bit to the radio and I do think radio comes into its own on these occasions as they can move to different locations with greater flexibility. But the newspaper and TV reporting was good too.

Still I wanted to read some good analysis, to understand what was happening. Of that there was very little. There was plenty of commentary, of course - indeed many papers seem to offer more opinion columns than reporting after the first couple of days. But they were uniformly awful.

If the columnist was on the left, the riots demonstrated how bad the Government's spending cuts were, and how alienated youth are in a time of high unemployment. If the columnist was on the right, the riots showed how PC the police are, how soft the pollies are and how the current crisis has been coming for years because of soft moral leadership.

I like reading columns, but it seems to me that any column has to have an original thought or be based on original research or original reporting. We used to have a columnist at the Evening Post who told us writing columns was simple - he just ranted into a tape recorder for 15 minutes and got his secretary to type it up. That was what every column I read sounded like. They read as if the writer could - and probably had - written the same column many times and just rewritten the intro to talk about the riots.

Take this, written by John McTernan, the lead columnist the other day in the Daily Telegraph. Is there anything in it he has not written before? And despite all the talk of a lack of leadership, he never gets to the point of saying what it was he would have liked the current leadership to do. If I had been his editor, I would have thrown it back at him.

The lack of good commentary is important, I think. Because it is sometimes said that good analysis is what will keep newspapers in particular alive. They can't hope to break much news in the future, in the instantaneous news environment. But people will turn to them for quality analysis. If that is so, readers would have been disappointed this week.

Mind you I do find British politicians - well - too staged. It feels vaguely like you are watching a play about politics, rather than real passionate politics. David Cameron looks and acts like a Prime Minister, but you don't get any feeling that he is truly engaged with what he is saying. Ed Miliband acts like an outraged Opposition leader but doesn't really have anything to say either. Is this the way modern politics works perhaps? Political leaders as the products of communications gurus - the emphasis being on being safe and reassuring. Cameron seems very popular and I doubt he will lose ground over the riots. But I find myself wondering what he really believes and why. What he really cares about, apart from winning. I'd love to know.