Howling Gale

There's no question that many people with a rounded knowledge of African affairs have elected to assume a relatively sceptical position on the likely efficacy of Live8.

And if the campaign were targeted at Central America instead of Sub-Saharan Africa, I'd surely be amongst those expressing the view that debt cancellation and premium aid packages are likely to make bog-all immediate difference to the endemically poor in that region.

But when it comes to contemporary political consciousness perhaps the blunt instrument
(or as Bob would have it, the incoming gale at Gleneagles) is the best we have.

"We used to have movements, now we have moments", observed Andrew Marr to Jonathan Ross on Saturday. Yet he remains an cautious enthusiast of these "new politics".

Bob's basic belief in the wrongness of children going to sleep hungry feeds an eucumenical, ideology-flexible campaign that seems like the only available antidote to the apathy generated by unmediated complexity in an otherwise trivial culture.

Yet I've noted before that there's just something rather jarring about the fact that it's the most ephemeral aspect of pop culture that is shaping this particular 'higher-level' political discourse.