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I was supporting Manchester United at the League Cup game at Barnsley last night, where eight fans were arrested after trouble and violence.

In the second half a long line of police appeared in front of the United end, dressed in full flourescent riot gear and helmets, and accompanied by several nasty-looking police dogs.

Many United supporters were unaware of the trouble that had occurred elsewhere at half time, and felt this sudden police display just in front of them was a gross over-reaction by the forces of law and order.

So the following response suddenly erupted from United fans:

"We pay for your hats. What a waste of council tax!" they chanted. "We pay for your hats!"

And later, a modification on that:

"We pay for your dogs. What a waste of council tax! We pay for your dogs!"

So the political debate about public spending priorities even seems to have entered the consciousness of football fans!

Tony Blair's hopes of becoming the new president of the European Union have hit a small snag.

In the last few weeks Mr Blair's former chief of staff during his decade in Downing Street, Jonathan Powell, a former diplomat, has been doing a sterling job for his old boss, quietly co-ordinating his campaign behind the scenes, privately sounding out the 27 governments around Europe.

And, I'm sure that if Mr Blair was to win the new position Mr Powell would be line for a key post at his side in Brussels.

But this week Mr Powell is suffering from a slight distraction from the Blair effort which is rather hindering any attempt to canvass support, at least during office hours.

He's been called up for jury service.

Spot the difference(s)

Case A: Alan Bown gave a political party £363,697

1) It was his money
2) He had a business trading in this country, making him eligible to donate money
3) He was not on the electoral register when he donated although he was the year before, and also the year afterwards.

Case B: Michael Brown gave a political party £2.4m
1) It was not his money, he had defrauded it
2) His business was not trading in the UK, so therefore he was ineligible to donate money
3) He was not on the electoral register; neither was he the year afterwards, nor the year before.

Do you see the difference(s)?
Well the main difference is that the Electoral Commission has doggedly pursued the Alan Bown donation, and today won an appeal forcing the party to give up the money, despite a judge previously ruling that the political party that received it had acted in good faith.

In the Michael Brown case the Electoral Commission has always maintained the political party acted in good faith and need not repay money. Although following the criminal proceedings against Mr Brown they have re-opened an investigation, it has not had yet had any result and they have not managed to say when, if ever, it will.

Oh yes there is one other difference:

This year the Political Parties and Elections Act went through Parliament, and among other things it restructured the Electoral Commission and gave it new funding and powers.

The political party in Case A, UKIP, has no MPs and only three representatives in the House of Lords (where the government has no majority and is particularly vulnerable to amendments).

The political party in Case B, the Liberal Democrats, has 63 MPs and 71 members of the House of Lords (where the Government has no majority and is particularly vulnerable to amendments).

At least those are the difference that I can see. Perhaps you can you suggest others?

I bumped into one of John Major's old Cabinet colleagues this afternoon and ran past him my theory that this government may partly be exhausted because so many of them have young children.

"Oh yes," he said. "In my day you could simply farm all that out to your wife."

Monday's row between Ed Balls and Barry Sheerman on the new Children's Commissioner Maggie Atkinson is partly about the respective ambitions of Mr Balls and Mr Sheerman, of course, and underlying tensions over Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

But there is also a question about the power of select committees, much championed by Mr Brown in his early days as PM.

One of the most interesting developments at Westminster this autumn will be the proposals from the committee chaired by Tony Wright on reform of the House of Commons which was set up in July.

In particular, they are chewing over an idea that has become highly fashionable in recent months - that members of Parliamentary select committees, and the committee chairmen, should all be elected by secret ballot of the whole house.

Secret ballots are now in vogue, of course, following the election of the new Speaker by that process over the summer - for the very first time.

Such a reform could hugely reduce the power of the whips - not just in ending their ability to appoint the members of select committees, whose job is to examine the work of government (in effect the government picking its own scrutineers).

It would also in reduce the whips' overall power exercised through patronage. Until now, troublesome MPs could often be brought into line with the enticement, for example, of a place on the paper clips select committee.

Mr Wright's committee is going to have to get a move on. A big issue is how to set up elections by secret ballot without granting a simple monopoly to the party which has the most MPs (and is therefore the government party).

At present the system allows for the opposition party to chair some select committees, and even the odd Lib Dem (such as Alan Beith and Phil Willis).

So Mr Wright's committee has enlisted the help of two academics from Nuffield College, Oxford - Iain Mclean, politics professor at Oxford, and Scott Moser, a young American mathematician who specialises in game theory and the politics of choice.

They are trying to devise various election systems, using clever mathematical formulae, which would share out the committee chairs and the committee memberships so as broadly to reflect the composition of the House of Commons.

Contrary to what one might think, it is a lot easier to devise a fair system to elect members of the committees secretly than it is to elect chairmen by secret ballot.

Once you have decided the proportions of each party on each committee - a ratio of 10:7:2, for example - it is fairly easy to arrange for each party's MPs then to decide by secret ballot who serves on that committee for their own party.

Much harder is how to choose committee chairs by secret ballot. How does one share out the chairmanships? Who is to decide which chairmanship should go to which party, and how precisely is that decision made?

Also, there is the problem of what to do about the smaller parties - the SNP, DUP, Plaid Cymru and so on - as well as the increasing number of independent MPs.

How do these smaller entities get their fair share of chairmanships? There is a danger they will fall victim to a stitch-up up the big three - Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems.

Meanwhile some Commons committee clerks fear that if chairmen are chosen by secret ballot the MPs elected to such posts may not always mesh easily with the members of the committee (also elected by secret ballot), and one could see a clash of mandates.

Some clerks fear secret ballot elections might also attract unsuitable big-name, publicity-seeking MPs to go for these increasingly high-profile posts - members who do not have a command of the subject area or the respect of the other members of the committee.

Mr Wright, who is standing down at the next election, carries a huge responsibility in his final months in Parliament.

There is a big mood in the current climate for radical reforms, and I suspect most MPs would agree in principle with the idea of secret ballots for both the chairs and members of select committees.

If Mr Wright and his colleagues get the system right then it could radically shift the balance of power between Parliament and the government, between the legislature and the executive.

The trouble is it is all being dreamt up very quickly. Prof McLean and Dr Moser plan to report to Mr Wright by the end of this month, ready for him to deliver his report in November.

Following the controversial news that David Cameron has recruited the former army chief Sir Richard Dannatt as a defence adviser and Conservative peer (and possible future minister), the Conservatives have now also enlisted the help of Dannatt's predecessor as chief of the general staff, General Sir Mike Jackson.

OK, I admit, it's in not quite such a high-profile role. The chairman of the Devizes Conservatives, Ken Carter, tells me that Gen Jackson will be acting as their "moderator" when local members in the Wiltshire constituency meet on 1 November to choose as successor to Sir Michael Ancram as their candidate.

Gen Jackson, who lives in the constituency, in the village of Great Bedwyn, will in effect chair the selection meeting, which is likely to be hotly contested, since it is a safe seat (with a majority of 13,194).

Mr Carter doesn't know if Gen Jackson is a member of the Conservative party, but the question surely now arises as to whether Sir Mike is about to follow Gen Dannatt and come out in support of Mr Cameron and his team.

I think it most unlikely, however, that Gen Jackson will follow Gen Dannatt and back the Conservatives quite so publicly as he did, since he was very unhappy about the way Gen Dannatt behaved earlier this month in hitching his wagon to Mr Cameron's party amid such great fanfare.

The Labour MP and former minister Malcolm Wicks admitted yesterday that "there is a widespread perception that Labour... is intellectually exhausted".

And, one might add, not just "intellectually exhausted". Exhausted full stop.

Personally I blame the kids. No seriously. An interesting feature of the Blair and Brown governments is just how many leading ministers have young children (by which I mean children under 10).

Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been in this category, of course, and among Mr Brown's senior colleagues, both of the Milibands, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Douglas Alexander all have young children, and those are just the ministers I can think of off the top of my head.

I cannot think of any previous government where this is true. Indeed I can hardly think of any Cabinet ministers in any previous government who had young kids, though there must have been some. The current situation is the product of two trends.

First, the tendency of middle class couples to have children much later - in their 30s and 40s rather than their 20s - and conversely the declining age of Cabinet ministers.

At one point Mr Brown had six Cabinet members under 40.

In the past the children of leading politicians tended to be either teenagers or grown up. And there is another obvious factor, too. These days fathers are expected to play a much bigger role in childcare. Children cannot just be left with the wife or nanny all day, and every day.

I know, as the father of a three-year old, just how difficult it is to get any time to do serious reading at home, let alone have a quiet think and plan ahead. Weekends are fully occupied, and the only spare time is the late evenings when one is already pretty tired. It must be a lot worse for busy ministers with full diaries, constant public pressure, media attention and constituency duties.

Young children are no great respecters of parental sleep. You have to wake up when they wake up. Worse still are those occasions in the middle of the night when they insist on clambering into bed with you, as happens, I'm told, with one senior minister.

Come to think of it, it is remarkable after 12 years in office, that Cabinet members think of anything new, and do not live in a daze of total exhaustion, sleep deprivation and intellectual paralysis. Or some critics might say...

But things could be almost as bad if the Conerservatives are elected next year. Both David Cameron and George Osborne have young children, and so does another leading player Michael Gove.

And just to be balanced, I ought to point out that Nick Clegg has young kids too. Indeed has there ever been a time in British history when all three main party leaders had children?

All week the hunt has been on at Westminster to find any MP who has been told by Sir Thomas Legg to pay back more than £12,400 - the sum which Prime Minister Gordon Brown has agreed to pay back to cover claims deemed by Sir Thomas to be excessive, to cover cleaning and gardening and a twice-claimed decorating bill.

Obviously it is very embarrassing for Mr Brown and his party that he should be standing on top of the league table of demands, or at least those which are publicly known so far.

It appears some small relief for Mr Brown may be on the way. I was told last night that there is one Labour MP who has been asked to pay back more than Mr Brown.

But unlike the prime minister, this MP, I am told, is resisting the demand, and taking legal advice on how to do so.

Further to my blog about "Modern Conservatives", a couple of friends have reminded me that David Davis got there first, using the phrase in his leadership campaigns in both 2001 and 2005.

And my old friend Tom Fairbrother also points out that the other phrase used by George Osborne yesterday was previously used by Enoch Powell in the 1960s - in defence of the capitalist system and the necessity for profit...

So much for modern Conservatism! But, as Tom points out, very few slogans in politics are new.

I'm sitting in the middle of the conference hall here in Manchester listening to Chris Grayling open the law and order debate.

In the past this debate at a Conservative conference would have been packed and heaving - it was always one of the highlight of the week, with party activists cheering any call for capital or corporal punishment.

Yet at this moment, with the shadow home secretary speaking, the hall is not even half full. Long rows of seats are empty.

A striking aspect of George Osborne's speech yesterday is how often he used the term "Modern Conservatives", and used it as a means of showing the modernised Cameron party is much more compassionate and inclusive than Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher and others.

It reminded me of the way Tony Blair and Gordon Brown started calling their party "New Labour" in the mid-90s, with much the same purpose.

Mr Osborne used the term with great effect, I felt.

Indeed the thought occurred to me - is the phrase being tested? And might "Modern Conservatives" be slowly adopted as the party's unofficial title in the run-up to the election?

It was a very strange experience.

I went to the National Theatre last Friday and suddenly and totally unexpectedly saw portrayed on stage, by a professional actor, my Newsnight colleague Paul Mason.

He was appearing in a preview I was attending of David Hare's new play The Power of Yes, along with various other people I know - among them Howard Davies, Adair Turner and Jon Cruddas. The play officially opens tonight.

It was an odd play. The story of Hare interviewing all sorts of experts to try and understand the financial crisis. It was more documentary journalism than stage drama. But an excellent, enjoyable production, and worth seeing.

And Paul was portrayed very accurately.

Only three hours after hearing about Betsy Duncan Smith, I hear news that the former Labour fund-raiser Lord (Michael) Levy has had a double heart by-pass operation.

My best wishes to him too.

I attended a fringe meeting last night held by Iain Duncan Smith's Commission on Social Justice, hoping to hear a speech by IDS himself.

But the audience was then told that IDS couldn't come because his wife Betsy had been undergoing chemotherapy yesterday - for cancer that was diagnosed in June.

Indeed IDS may not be able to attend the conference at all this year as, quite understandably, he is looking after his wife.

I went along to the meeting because IDS has had a remarkable renaissance as a politician after his resignation as Conservative leader in 2003 - with his ground-breaking work on inner-city poverty and social justice.

He hasn't sat on the front bench since 2003, but has been hugely influential on Conservative policy, and I expect him to get a job in a Cameron government.

Like everyone else at this conference, and throughout politics, I wish Betsy Duncan Smith a speedy recovery.

It was only on reading his obituary in today's Guardian that I noticed that the former Labour MP Francis Noel-Baker died last week.

He was the youngest MP in 1945, the son of the famous peace campaigner Philip Noel- Baker, and was one of the last three surviving members of the 1945 parliamentary intake.

So only Michael Foot and John Freeman are still alive from the 625 or so MPs elected in 1945.

And they have a fair bit in common. Both were early TV stars, both edited left-wing weeklies (Tribune and the New Statesman respectively), and both were extremely close friends of Barbara Castle.

There is hardly anybody left at the Labour conference here in Brighton.

Most people left yesterday or even earlier in the week. At 6pm last night there were only two people in the bar of the Old Ship, which is usually a bustling hotel during a Labour conference.

Party officials are today denying that they have been shipping in party activists to fill the empty seats in the hall.

It would be too difficult to get last-minute security clearance, they say, and process their conference passes.

However several local activists have told me that last week party officials were phoning individual party members at home and urging them to come to Brighton today, and offering them free admission.

This would have given the party enough time to get secure clearance and credentials processed.