A message home

One of the joys - and occasional pains - or working from home is that I get to see lots of my two boys. It has really spoiled me as it makes me quite unused to not being around them.

This week I was in Frankfurt with work. It's an annual event for me and one that I quite enjoy. However I'm conscious that me being away for a few days seems like quite a long time for them. It probably seems even longer for my wife who has the wrangle them single handedly for a week.

Last year I hit on the idea of leaving them a little daily message, just a little hello, a bit of Clip Art and cryptic clue pointing to a little treat that I had left them (not that cryptic - they are five and three). The treat can be a craft item from Wilkinsons, a few sweets or a Lego Minifigure (top prize for the day before I come home). It's as much for their mum as for them. They get inordinately excited at such little things at their age and it buys her a little extra time and niceness from them before they hit the cranky stage in the day.

Clip Art: kids love it

This year I've been Skyping them for the first time. I've never really bothered before as the phone seemed contact enough. I think they liked the experience although I could tell they were more interested in seeing themselves onscreen than me. I'm not as entertaining as Messrs Maker, Tumble or Bloom, the characters they are more used to seeing on screen.

It's also a little embarrassing when they call during the working day and you have to go from kicking ass and taking names boss to being Silly Old Daddy. Actually, who am I kidding? I loved it, and it was almost as much of a stress reliever as a large glass of fine German beer.

Almost. Prost!

Thatch

There was a time when news of great import was broken with gravitas. TV programmes simply shut down. There was a breathless message from a faceless announcer of special news whereupon the BBC's spinning globe, or its successors appeared before Huw Edwards, John Humphrys or Angela Rippon appeared on screen looking as nervous as you suddenly felt.

What had happened?

Monday's news of Margaret Thatcher's death broke like a damp squib. To me anyway. In the modern manner I was alerted by a Facebook status update:

"Thatchers snuffed it." (No apostrophe! At a time like this).

Three words. 18 letters. No possibility of any misunderstanding.

In some ways it's like she's been dead for more than 20 years anyway. After she was shuffled out of Downing Street she didn't hang around in the public eye much. Not in this country anyway. Although for successive Tory leaders she remained overly visible. A reminder of what they wanted to move on from.

Even Cameron, in his eulogy to her outside Number 10 admitted she was a divisive figure. It was practically the first thing he said. Admittedly he became more gushing after that, but I bet her legions of fans among the Tory faithful were marking him down as a traitor for even hinting at less than complete devotion to the legacy of the leaderene. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would have been more unequivocally positive.

There has been acres of newsprint about Thatch in the past few days, lots of it very thought provoking. One of the best pieces I've read was Russell Brand's article in the Guardian which had quite a personal perspective. Good and also a bit annoying as I was planning to write something from a similar angle examining what I remember about her and what I thought of her.

I don't think I have the energy for that now and since Russell has beaten me to it, there's no need. Just read what he said. My piece would have been almost as good I'm sure, but I was churning out turgid copy for cash while he was conjuring metaphors on his chaise longue, sipping mint tee through a silver straw.

So, well done Russell - you win.

The 1979 election that brought Thatcher to power is the first I remember very well. The Tories actually did pretty well in Scotland - 22 out of 72 seats. However I can remember Thatcher already being extremely disliked North of the Border. Part of this was traditional anti-English sentiment, and part was misogyny, but there was another element in play.

Mrs T wasn't very likable, and to a Scots mindset, she was even less so. The hectoring school teacher tone, the lack of any discernible sense of humility, the lack of a sense of humour, and the patent arrogance all cast her as a villain from day one.

It's been interesting hearing recordings of the best of Thatch in the past week, to be reminded how unlike politicians of today she was. She really didn't care what people thought of her - or at least that's what it sounded like. It's no wonder that she periodically creeps up as an icon in punk. They may not have liked her, but they liked that she didn't give a fuck. No wonder John Lydon is sticking up for her today.

But it was quickly apparent that Thatcher wasn't a Prime Minister for Scotland, or for the North of England for that matter. Or for the working classes. Or for the poor. Or for young people. Or gay people. Or ethnic minorities. The list goes on.

She was PM from when I was 12 until I was 23. That's a long time to feel you don't matter. My family didn't even benefit from the much vaunted sale of council houses. We moved from our 'coonsell hoose' in Scotland to England in 1979 and couldn't get another council house. Instead we were renting from a housing association, which were still fairly novel at the time I think. It was a fairly nice house on a pleasant estate with lots of other young families, but my dad wanted to buy his own place, like we were all being encouraged to do. Renting was dead money. But prices kept rising and we never managed it while he was around.

Bedfordshire, where we lived, was a Tory heartland and I grew up thinking the Tories were unassailable. Even when the economy was down in the Eighties and people in their droves were handing back keys to houses they could no longer afford, I couldn't see anybody else breaking through. I never really understood the SDP. They were just the party that was made fun of in Not the Nine O'Clock News. I understood the Labour Party, but I understood that they were unlikely to break through the Iron Lady's carapace. Not then.

Even when they ditched her in 1990 and Kinnock's Labour seemed on the verge of power in 1991, I couldn't believe that the Tories would ever be removed. It took five grey years of John Major hanging on by his finger nails, the death of John Smith and the rise of Tony Blair before I started to think that change could come.

And I wasn't alone. I can never be as harsh on Blair as some people will always be, because he really was the future once - as Cameron will be too when his cheap line is forgotten. He did seem like a new dawn. Some of it was spin and presentation but I have never doubted that the aspirations of New Labour aligned more closely with me and mine than Thatcher's ever did.

Thatcher's biggest legacy for me was the way she snuffed out the hopes of large swathes of the population of the country she purported to love. In doing so she sowed the seeds of political apathy that we see today. Politicians of all stripe find it very hard to turn back the economic clock in areas that she consigned to the economic dustbin. It's much harder to create jobs than to destroy them. Britain did have to move on from the Seventies, but it could have been managed so much better.

I'm not dancing on her grave, but I won't miss her.

The last post

Remember these?

I was clearing out a drawer at the weekend and found a sheet of unused stamps from the Christmas before last. My first thought was to wonder whether they can still be used since they were bought at one price and second class postage has since increased in price. It seems that they are, and an inflation busting investment at that. Second class remains second class no matter what you originally paid for it.
My next consideration is more problematic. When am I going to use them?
Stamps used to be an essential component of a well run household. You needed them on hand for birthday cards, thank you notes, letters and for paying bills.
You could even, as David Brent pointed out, use them as legal tender. I did this a few times myself in my teens before I had a bank account, sending off for badges of bands I liked through dodgy small ads in the back of Sounds magazine. You could get a postal order, but they seemed a bit more faffy, and I didn't want to ask my mum to write me a cheque as she'd inevitably want to know why I wanted a large embroidered patch with 'Black Sabbath: Heaven and Hell' on it anyway.
I had money, thanks to my paper round, but no means to spending it beyond face to face transactions in my immediate vicinity. Stamps did the trick. They were almost like a precursor to Paypal, enabling micropayments for the financially disenfranchised.
When I went to university, stamps became an even more important currency, enabling communication with my mates who had been scattered to the four corners of the UK.
I don't think I've ever written as much as I did in my first year at college. Despite making new friendships, I missed my old buddies and longed to stay in contact with them, and to share some of my crazy and delinquent goings on with them.
Looking back, I think I was quite lonely, even as I seemed to have an active social life. But the initial friendships I made were fairly shallow and it's telling that only a few college friendships have really stood the test of time (hello Andrew, hello Mark).
So I reached out towards the people I'd known from my teens. I think a lot of them felt the same given the tone and the frequency of the correspondence from them.
Letter writing became quite addictive once you realised that when you shared your feelings with someone you would get a response in kind, a few days later, or maybe after a few weeks depending on the diligence of your correspondent.
Like so much of the near past, it almost seems like another age now. Nobody I knew had a phone in their student digs, let alone a mobile. There were about 20 computers in the whole of my department and none of them were hooked up to any sort of information superhighway that we could access - this was 1985. Crikey, it seems so near, yet so far away in many ways.
Communication came in three modes:
* a personal visit. (Either back home to your parents for a feed, a delousing and a machine wash of your humming clothes pile. Or a visit to another student friend which would inevitably be a massive piss up that would carry through into a several days to shift hangover.)
* a reverse the charges phone call. (These could be sporadic. I remember one time my mum had to send a letter to find out if I was still alive, it was so long since she had heard from me. Another time I stood in a phone box for about five minutes failing to remember my own home phone number, which is still one of only a handful I can remember.)
* a letter.
The latter was the most popular because it was the cheapest. Especially if you put sellotape over the stamp making it impossible to frank properly. The resulting stamp could then ping pong back and forwards between correspondents until such time as it became indistinguishable.
I well remember the thrill of finding a letter, or even two or three in my postbox at halls of residence. You could never expect the immediate response of today's email, text or instant messaging conversations, and it was all the sweeter for it.
Waiting was part of the thrill.
It wasn't just the fact of receiving a letter. The content was often pages and pages of funny, heart rending, satirical, annoying and surreal stuff. The kind that you can only really write when you are in your late teens.
I still have a bag full of letters from friends, and one in particular (hello Trevor, wherever you are) who was as verbose and as prolific as I was. They read like strange, one-sided conversations where the points in your previous letter are replied to sandwiched between flights of fantasy, and the latest tales and triumphs, real or imagined, .
It's such powerful stuff that I don't look at them very often. It's probably mainly rubbish and I don't especially want to tarnish the memory of what it was like by reading between the lines.
Letter writing continued for a good few years after university. Friends were still fairly dispersed. None of us were that well off, so often didn't have phones, or didn't want to run up big bills. People went travelling and writing remained an important connection to friends and family.
Do young people still write?
I'm sure they must, although they don't need to in the way we did.
My son, who is five, is starting to become quite the scribe. As his language improves he is discovering the joy of putting his thoughts down on a piece of paper. He can make people laugh, puzzle them, and make them like him. Powerful stuff.
Will he be doing it in his teens and twenties? I doubt it actually. And even if he is, I don't think it will have quite the same effect on him as it did on my generation because there probably won't 't be many elements of the message that haven't already been leaked to him across the other media platforms that he will undoubtedly use.
But times change and I don't doubt that his generation's form of communication will be every bit as compelling to him as mine was to me.
They'll probably write about many of the same things: loves and hates; friends and foes, hopes and dreams.
Some things don't change.
Now, who wants a handwritten letter?

Thank you for the music

I'd forgotten that hi-fi smells.
My mum had wanted to throw out my dad's old separates system when she moved house about three years' ago. I can't blame her. It was a tower system encased in a smoked glass cabinet which would have completely taken over her new living room.
At any rate it had sat unused and unloved in the corner of the room since I'd moved out of the house. She'd traded down to a small integrated unit that my sister had no more use for (and which is now in our front room - I'm the electronics hoarder in our family).
I couldn't bear to see it thrown out though. I remember my dad buying it from John Lewis in Milton Keynes about a year after we'd moved down from Scotland. I guess he must have had a bit more disposable income and fancied splashing out on something nice. It was certainly a pretty big investment, but I reckon he was given the old soft soak treatment by the hi-fi sales guys. He was taken into one of those glass-fronted rooms where they sit you down and play different combinations of units to you.
"Sir will notice the subtle difference when the Speculum A430 amp is teamed up with the Bumf turntable."
*Dad nods vigorously*
Like many working class guys, he aspired to be a man of wealth and taste. He just needed the wealth bit.
At any rate he must have been feeling a bit flush that day as he bought a turntable, amp, tuner, cassette player - all Sansui make - as well as the aforementioned smoked glass tower and a pair of B&W DM10 speakers.
I can remember listening to our not very big music collection on it: The Drifters Greatest Hits, War of the Worlds (taped by somebody from his work), The Corries, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Elton John Greatest Hits (the first one), Billy Connolly Live ... it was an eclectic mix.
The system really did sound great. I was amazed that you could pick out individual instruments so clearly, something that was hard to do on the rudimentary integrated system we had before - Elizabethan if anybody remembers that brand.
The hi-fi was another symbol of the way things were getting better for us. We'd made the traumatic - for me initially - move to England the year before and it really was like another world in some ways. We'd come from a one shop village of council houses, a real monoculture where I was happy but which in retrospect seems like the most boring place in the world. Vandalism was about the only outlet by the time you were a teenager. You had to get out.
We moved to a small market town called Leighton Buzzard, but it might as well have been Manhattan compared to what we were used to. Life was richer. The food was different. People did different things. Pubs had garden areas so families could go to them together. There were more opportunities for all of us.
And dad was on more money, hence the swanky hifi and his first ever new car (although the latter was purchased from the money he was putting aside for a deposit on a house, something that eluded him as prices were starting to outpace his earnings in the Eighties housing boom).
He probably only enjoyed the system for around a year, maybe two before he died. After that, it was always dad's hi-fi. He liked having nice things and he liked them to be looked after. They had to be for people like us.
It's more than 30 years since he died and since he bought his musical pride and joy. Last weekend I dug it out my mum's garage and brought it home. This evening I opened the box and was hit by that smell... the circuits? Whatever it is, it took me right back to the time when he'd be cueing up a record and sitting back to enjoy it.
It still sounds great dad!

Dads in the kitchen (what am I gonna do)

Happy New Year and all. I've been too busy denying myself alcohol this month to write anything meaningful or otherwise. Normal service will be resumed etc.

So apologies dear reader for yet another cut and paste from my Colchester NCT magazine column - available in no good newsagents. This issue we're pondering the politics of food preparation a.k.a. who's making the flipping tea tonight.

Fruity platter: digital media, £45,000

When I was a child I reckon that about 90 per cent of my meals were provided by women: my mum; my gran; aunties; friends’ mums, and school dinner ladies. My dad could cook, but he kept his powder dry for special occasions, such as the Sunday roast, Christmas dinner and barbecues. He also had a penchant for exotic new dishes, such as spaghetti bolognaise, which was about as far out as things got in the area of rural Scotland where I grew up. Maybe it still is.

The everyday grind of turning out breakfast, lunch and dinner was given over to my mum, despite the fact that she also worked. It was just the way things were in those days.

As a consequence I was largely brought up on convenience food. My mum was one of the first generations of women to benefit from the widespread availability and relative cheapness of processed food. She was also a sucker for TV advertising. My sister and I used to joke that whenever there was a new product advertised on TV, we would be seeing it on our plates next week. We were brought up on fish fingers, potato waffles, crispy pancakes and frozen pizzas. Whatever veg we shuffled to the side of our plates inevitably came from a tin.

Well, it never did me no harm!

Fast forward 30 years or so, and haven’t things changed! Thanks to Jamie, Gordon and a host of other TV chefs, cooking has been reinvented as a suitably male friendly activity – it’s competitive, has lots of gadgets and even more swearing - and the kitchen is no longer a place where we dads fear to tread. Dads are as likely to be hustling everybody out of the kitchen to make room for their cheffy touches as they are to be banging cutlery on the table and demanding to be fed.

But it’s no longer enough to shuttle a frozen offering from freezer to microwave, et voila, dinner is served! Nowadays, parents can spend as long fretting about the provenance of the food they serve their children as they do cooking it. Is it local enough; is it GM free; is it Fairtrade? And that’s before it has even felt the hot side of a frying pan.

I’m as guilty of this as the next new man. I’ve certainly gone down a different route to that taken by my parents. By and large we cook meals from scratch, try and use fresh vegetables as much as possible, and try to all eat together. And I do a lot of the cooking. It’s something I love to do.

One of the reasons, besides innate greed, is that it’s a great way of bonding with our kids. Like many NCT parented children, both of our boys were breast fed, for the first year, which seems to have given them a great start.

It does however limit a dad’s involvement in the early stages of childhood. Unless your wife or partner is expressing milk, or you are mixing feeding, there isn’t a lot dad can do to interject into this cosy little relationship.

So the introduction of solids is a happy time for dads, as they can start to become more involved with feeding. This is probably of great relief to partners as well, as they can share a bit more of the burden. It’s a time for dads to step up to the hot plate and start showing off their finely honed chef skills.

Or maybe not. In as much as cooking for children can be fun and fulfilling, it can also be a soul destroying affair. There is little appreciation of your efforts and little discernment. A carefully crafted, nutritious, homemade meal will inevitably be trumped by a turkey twizzler and chips. Kids don't really care about provenance or how long it took to make. They care about having something that they recognise and having it now, or five minutes ago.

Food in the early stages of weaning also bears little resemblance to anything you might want to eat yourself. I couldn’t believe it when our eldest actually liked Annabel Karmel’s misleadingly named ‘lovely lentils’. There was little to love as far as I could see, but as he seemed to appreciate them, I cooked up a vat and froze huge quantities for future meals. Job done!

Except that as quickly as he’d taken to them, he went off them. I still recall the look on Jamie’s face as he decided to eject them from his mouth – never again. I can’t remember what we did with the rest of the batch.

Tastes change though and soon enough children start to eat similar foods to us. It’s not just food as fuel though. Food is also part of bonding. I used to take Jamie to a singing class when he was a toddler. Afterwards we would head to the local playground and then to a lakeside café where we’d always eat the same thing – a shared plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on toast. I was inordinately pleased at his sophisticated tastes. I had no idea that salmon came in any other form than canned until I was a lot older. Each time we went to the café he’d eat a bit more and I’d have less.

As the children get older, cooking becomes another of the activities that we enjoy together. Just occasionally mind you. I’m too much of a prissy chef to let them run riot too often. Cakes are a favourite, unsurprisingly, particularly licking the spoon and bowl clean. What child hasn’t enjoyed that?

For dads who work unsociable hours, cooking is a great way to show that you know that family meals are important. Doing a bit of cooking can give your partner a break and brings you closer to your children. Even if you’re not much of a cook you can rustle up a signature dish or two that only you can do just how the children like it. As much as the temptation may be to sit back and wait for somebody else to cook the bacon you have brought home, it can be much more fulfilling to prepare the food that your children are going to eat.

And if the resulting mealtime is loud, chaotic and messy, who’d have it any other way?

Dads, don’t miss out

My latest column for Colchester NCT magazine, for anybody who missed the print edition.

This autumn my eldest son started school and like many parents I’m catching my breath thinking, “Wow. How did that happen?”

It really doesn’t seem that long since we were looking at the Clearblue stick trying to work out whether it really was a positive. Can it really be almost five years since he first came into our lives?

From the moment of his birth, the milestones have fairly whizzed past. First smile, first word, walking, talking, solids, teeth, nursery, terrible twos, potty training… it never ends. And then the next one came along. Whenever I find myself wishing a certain phase was over and that we could move on to the next ‘easier’ bit, I try to remind myself that I wanted children – warts and all. Not that they have warts yet.

Children are a work in progress, which for uptight perfectionists like me, can be torture. It’s very difficult to sit back and have a moment of self-congratulation at a job well done as there’s another calling on your time. But of course, that’s the joy of parenthood. The important thing is to enjoy the journey rather than to fixate on some end point when everything will be ‘just right’.

It’s being around for these little accomplishments that makes all the hard bits of parenting worthwhile, but it’s where a lot of dads miss out due to their jobs.

Work-life balance is a naff phrase, but it’s an important concept, especially for parents. However, for many dads it is something to aspire to rather than actually achieve. Whatever the steps taken to try and create a more Scandinavian model of shared parenting in this country, the reality is that the majority of dads maintain a fairly traditional work life.

They work during the week, seeing less of their children than their partners who are closer to home, either looking after the children full-time, or combining work with childcare.

In a commuter town like Colchester it’s even tougher for many dads. Travel takes a big chunk out of the day. You might make it home in time for bedtime and stories, but given the vagaries of the railways, you may not.

I’m not saying that working dads are bad dads – far from it. Being a breadwinner is a vitally important role. But I sometimes wonder if we should periodically take stock of what’s most important.

When I was a child, my dad worked shifts in a factory. That meant that often I would hardly see him during the week as he’d either be at work or asleep during the day after working nights. Even at quite a young age I knew that he was doing something important and that although he didn’t like working such unsocial hours, he was doing it for us.

It didn’t really make it much easier though. I just wanted him to spend more time with us.

But the time that he did spend with us was all the more precious because of it, and he really went out of his way to make sure that he used it in the most fun way. I have great memories of holidays, day trips and times with family and friends. Now that he is no longer here, those memories are all the more important to me.

I work from home, something that I feel very fortunate to do. Because of this I have been able to see up close the development of both of my sons. I won’t deny that there have been times when I would rather have been at the other end of a railway line, but generally it has been a rather wonderful thing.

When J was just over a year old, my wife went back to work. We put him in nursery three days a week and I was to look after him for the other two.

In the lead up to this handover I was remarkably relaxed about what was imminent, probably because I didn’t really know how hard it was going to be. Of course I had changed nappies, I had fed J as he moved on to solid food, I played with him, but all of these activities took part with the support blanket of my wife nearby. It really was a bit of a steep learning curve when it was just him and me.

Every little task seemed to take twice or three times as long as it should have. Simply leaving the house was a logistical challenge as there was so much stuff you needed to have with you. I’d leave, get fifty yards down the road and have to go back for the nappies. Then for the spare clothes, then for something else.

I was stunned by how tough everything was – I was shattered at the end of the day with this one year old. All the time I’d been watching from the sidelines, my wife seemed to manage it effortlessly. When it came to my turn, I sort of managed to do everything that has to be done, but in the manner of the 20-stone guy who finishes a marathon in eight hours, sweating profusely and with bleeding nipples. Mission accomplished, but he’s hardly going to worry Paula Radcliffe.

What this taught me was a respect for the partner who does stay at home with the kids. Anybody who doesn’t count this as real work had obviously not spent a full day with a demanding toddler.

But it’s great too, and something more dads should try out. It’s not possible for everyone, but parents do have the option of asking their employers for more family friendly working terms. It can be easy to kid yourself that you won’t get them, or that you need the money more than time with your child. But at the end of the day, you only get to be a dad once. What do you value most?

US elections - some observations

So it's four more years for Obama.

Viewed from this side of the pond, it's been a funny old election. For one thing it all seems to have happened a lot quicker than usual. maybe that's just a function of me getting older, and time whizzing by. Or it may be that for so long it seemed a bit of a non-contest.

Even with the economy in the karzee (American reader - 'the john'), Obama seemed a shoe in for a second term. The Republicans were in such a mess for the majority of the past couple of years - the Tea Party contingent has thrown a hand grenade into the party machine. The Democrats must have been rubbing their hands at the prospect of Sarah Palin fronting up for the GOP.

As it was, when it got down to the serious candidates, they did a great job of pulling themselves apart before they even started to challenge the president. Then Romney, once chosen, kept stuffing his size 10s (American reader - size 10.5s) in his mouth with his '47%' and 'binders full of women' blunders.

In the end, the race only came to life after Romney took Obama to the cleaners in the first debate.

Now that Obama has won, it's interesting to see how the conventions of US elections play out. For a nation so divided, it's notable the way there are certain touchstones that remain immutable, namely god and the American Dream.

Over here, overt religious devotion is something that is viewed with suspicion. Has there ever been a presidential candidate who was agnostic? It would probably be electorally unpalatable, although we would once have thought that of a black candidate. [Note to self: actually, the US is probably ahead of the UK in the status of its black leaders. It has Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Jesse Jackson, as well as BO himself. We've got Diane Abbott, Keith Vaz and Baroness Warsi].

Americans are always calling on the benign deity to bless their country, but not all Americans are religious. What is the etiquette for atheist patriots? "Nice one America", "Well done America", "Wassup America", seriously, what do you say?

The whole American Dream thing is a bit weird to me too. I get the aspirational message and the whole tired, huddled masses thing, but this is the 21st Century. I know that Obama has to give the country a bit of boost now that he's back in, but for me, the "you can make it in America" shtick is a bit disingenuous.

I'm Scottish, so genetically designed to piss on your chips and behead tall poppies on sight, but as I see it, the American Dream is a myth. It's not really for everyone. In a capitalist society not everybody can be a winner. There need to be enough losers to fuel the winners - that's how it is. Yet in the US, there seems to be a massive buy in to this belief, not least from those who probably have the most to gain from 'big government'.

Based on the anecdotal evidence from newscasts (hey, my on the ground resources were scare) opposition to 'socialistic' initiatives such as healthcare and higher taxes for the wealthy are as high among the less well off as other groups. Because, hey man, they're gonna make it one day too. Just a matter of time! Getting rich a dollar at a time!

How refreshing it would have been for Obama to come out and say that the next four years will be tough, so it's probably best that you put your Donald Trump ambitions on hold for a while, buckle in for a rocky ride, and if you are well off, prepare to dig deeper. Manage expectations.

Or you can just keep on with that old time religion. Work hard and you can make it here? Well, plenty of people work hard and are still picking up rations at food banks.

We have a name for people who believe all this guff over here - Del Boys.

Incidentally, my tip for the Republican candidate for 2016 is Jeb Bush. Based on nothing more than a Newsnight interview, he came across remarkably well - slightly humble, non-partisan, and no obvious Bushisms.

But what do I know?