Competition (4): tension mounts

Just one day and a bit to go, as I am reminded by the arrival of a brand new copy, albeit slightly battered in the post, of one of the prizes.

You still have between now and teatime today - 6pm French time - to e-mail the name of the ungovernable French cat, and/or a copy of the Salut! home page capturing the moment we passed 50,000 hits last week, to colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr



No disadvantage applies to anyone who is late in supplying the right answer. You could even be last and win.

If you haven't been paying attention, and wish to enter, a simple search of Salut! or a less simple one of my old Telegraph blog (since it is hidden away in the Telegraph site's sinbin) should lead to the cat's identity.

As for the picture, it is election time in France and she may or may not be making a political statement with her choice of colour, or making the natural response to much of the debate in a somewhat drab campaign.

An announcement as to prize winners will appear here as soon after that time as possible and in any event by tomorrow morning.

Polls built from straw?

parisdailyphoto

Each time the temptation arises to be sniffy about opinion polls, I take care to remind myself that in a past life, I had regular dealings with pollsters.

Once a month, Anthony King, gentleman, scholar and highly entertaining company, would call at the Telegraph offices in Canary Wharf with a couple of executives from YouGov to discuss future polls.

Guests and assorted hacks alike would be offered champagne on arrival for lunch, and good wine was then served in reasonable though hardly excessive quantities throughout the convivial meal that invariably followed. Ideas would be tossed around until some firm plan evolved.

In an austere new world, a stop was soon put to the champagne and wine, of course, though I am glad to say that Britain and I had parted company by then.

The conviviality, I am sure, survived the prissy change and the lunches will doubtless have remained as businesslike and productive as before, though I am prepared to bet they are not more so.

Professor King - or better, Tony - takes a highly methodical approach to his preparation of polls, and the analysis of their findings.

Viewers will know all about that if they have tuned in on election night and seen him assessing the exit polls and early declarations from places like Sunderland South (honest - they're always first or nearly first) and Billericay.

With his photographic memory and grasp of detail, Tony is a sort of Canadian Leslie Welch of politics and psephology.

He was a great fan of YouGov, which conducts its surveys via the internet.

I was always a little less convinced by this method of monitoring public opinion; the cyber age was not at that point so firmly established as it is now and whole swathes of voters were necessarily excluded.

When I suggested a poll of British Muslim attitudes on such issues as citizenship, loyalty and terrorism in the aftermath to Sept 11 and military action in Afghanistan, the problems of creating a viable sample very nearly proved fatal to the exercise.

In the event, the YouGov findings - though based on a sample as low as it could get before the level at which Tony would have advised against going ahead - mirrored those of subsequent polls on the same subject carried out by more conventional means and with many more respondents.

Pollsters know the science of their métier, and will usually argue that it gives a very reasonable prospect of an accurate reflection of public opinion.

But in the case of my Muslim poll, I felt very strongly at the time that the most valuable part of the project was the work of two reporters of Asian background who were sent off to canvass views in towns with large Muslim populations.

One of them turned in a weighty tome running to thousands of words which I had to whittle down to a few hundred. Useful as his research was in shaping our coverage, I remember hoping that he would find a home for an uncut version of his extraordinarily detailed epic.

My doubts about polls do not end with the internet since there are other ways in which the process of choosing a sample is flawed, a view reinforced by a small article seen in Le Canard Enchainé on the train from Toulon to Paris (a visit that may explain my silence here since Monday).

If the old Chained Duck is to be believed, and often it can, French polling institutions routinely exclude 31 per cent of the French from their telephone surveys, for the simple reason that those taking part are selected from listed, fixed-line subscribers.

Yet there is an army of people out there that has no phones of any kind, makes all or virtually all its calls on mobiles or uses internet phone services such as Skype. Young voters and people on modest incomes are said to be particularly likely to fall into one of these categories.

Add to that the obvious fact that not everyone likes being bothered by cold callers - and as many as 30 per cent refuse to take part - and you begin to see the fault lines developing.

The margin of error surely gets wider if you take account of such drawbacks, and there are at least three other complications affecting the French presidential elections:
* large numbers of apparently undecided voters
* the emergence of a strong third contender (Le Pen in 2002, Bayrou this time)
* the exclusion of French citizens - 2.3 million of them - living in the Dom-Toms, overseas departments and territories.

Does it matter? Well, yes it does. I see weight to the argument that polls have an ability to shape - in other words distort - the public view, or to encourage tactical voting that might not otherwise have occurred.

It is just as well, as I said in a piece at the Guardian Comment Is Free site, that France bans opinion polls in the last week of campaigning.

But, repeating from that item what I take to be the logical follow-up question, would it not make the democratic process a shade more democratic if we were to impose a much longer ban?

We are within six weeks of the first round of the presidential elections, and François Bayrou's success as Third Way candidate is inspiring all sorts of mathematical as well as political calculation.

How much healthier it would seem if we knew there wouldn't be another poll from a week on Saturday until the real votes were cast on April 22.

Pottering about in the Guardian

First a few words of reassurance. My appearances elsewhere in cyberspace do not mean that Salut!'s days are numbered, or not yet at any rate. Especially since I now see that my advertising earnings have crept up to an average of 17 cents a day.

Picture: Si1very

But regulars around these parts may be interested to learn that I have found one or two other journalistic outlets to satisfy myself that, all that "garden leave" now over, there is indeed life beyond the Telegraph.

The First Post, a newsy site which already appears to be a home for other former colleagues, has already run a few articles.

There have been two or three on the presidential elections, naturally, but also one apiece on the French smoking ban and a couple of villas that Saddam Hussein's regime bought in the south of France with money that, arguably, could have been better spent in Iraq.

As of tonight, I am also a contributor to CommentIsFree, a talkative and animated corner of the Guardian's website. Ségolène's continuing struggles preoccupied me today, but my hope is to broaden the range of topics much as I try to do here. That link now seems to work.

At my leaving party - sorry, one of my leaving parties, this one in the Cheshire Cheese pub off Fleet Street - I began by condemning my former employers for their cruel and vindictive decision to give me more time to spend with Sunderland football club.

Those with my best interests at heart will be relieved to hear that I have found something more thoughtful than Salut!'s football offshoot to help occupy my time.

No offence (2)

The response to my posting about the Mohammed cartoons, and the preposterous trial their publication prompted in Paris, has been a disappointment.

Islam will dominate
Picture (and caption): El Marco.

This is not to say that I mind a serious topic being hijacked in the comments section for a spot of backbiting between feuding readers.

You do not actually have to wade through much of that to find some perfectly sensible and thought-provoking opinions and assertions posted here over the past 18/24 hours.

It just seems a little incomplete to have no one writing in to challenge my basic proposition: namely, that Muslims (and Roman Catholics, and Protestants and so on) have no right to demand the suppression of words and images about them or Islam (or other groups of believers, or their faiths) unless criminal incitement is involved.

The advantage of blogging for the Telegraph was that a big newspaper site was always likely to attract readers of all types.

Salut! has highly respectable levels of readership - well over 700 visits yesterday alone - and it boasts comment statistics most Telegraph bloggers can but dream of.

But it would benefit from some diversification among the ranks of readers willing to step forward, identified or otherwise, to let off steam.

With comments in response to No offence nudging 50 as I write, the nearest we have had to a Muslim point of view opposing my argument was the following, signed by an anonymous contributor:

As the comments seem to be a private conversation, (I) am a little wary of pointing out that the reason Muslims are offended by the cartoons, is not that they are terrorists, but that Islam proscribes pictorial representations of Mohammed, Xtianity on the other hand is full of icons, false or otherwise.

That comment could have been posted by a Muslim, though my guess is that it was not.

The obvious reply, incidentally, is that Muslims are fully entitled to expect one another to observe the rules of their faith, whether on pictorial representation of Mohammed or anything else.

They are not entitled to require others, outside their faith, to do likewise. That is where the trouble tends to start; many, many Muslims - and whoever said France has four or five million is almost certainly underestimating the true figure - do see Islam as so superior that it will one day rule the world whether the world likes it or not.

And that view is by no means restricted to extremists.

As for the quality of debate inspired by my blog, that is a matter I am perfectly happy to leave to you. My policy on censorship was established very early.

Only when a comment gives me serious cause for legal or other concerns will I step in. It has happened on perhaps three or four occasions, once or twice when I put on my media lawyer's hat, and otherwise when remarks about my former employers - and believe me, my own powers of self-restraint have been sorely tested - went too far.

* And for those who missed my update, the prosecutor in the Paris trial made the commonsense decision to urge the court to dismiss the charges.

Adieu to the rue de Rivoli

Only three weeks to go so we invited the concierge and his wife to our farewell to Paris party. They couldn't make it, though the crown princess who will one day rule as Queen Victoria came instead.

But that's being extravagant with the truth.


The lovely Princess Victoria of Sweden was indeed in our building on the rue de Rivoli, the Daily Telegraph office-cum-apartment that has been our home, shared with a procession of colleagues from London, for two-and-a-half years.

But the nearest she came to attending my shindig was when she bowled over to my wife at the bottom of the lift shaft, assuming her to be part of the Parisian Swedish Circle's welcoming party.

We'd agreed to take it in turns to make sure guests to each function were ushered to the right one.



As it happens, and despite the fact that we were able to secure the presence of not only two ambassadors but the charming and witty Petite Anglaise (leading me to speculate that this must surely outrank one Scandinavian princess), it was not too difficult to make the distinction.

None of those attending our party wore formal evening dress. And, as a mark of the leaner times upon which their hosts had fallen, our guests were mostly carrying bottles or titbits of food, or both.


  
"Il y a un petit problème," the concierge had said when I asked him to join us and our friends and colleagues for Saturday's modest soirée to mark the end of two eras - mine as a Telegraph journalist and the Telegraph's (rather longer) presence in two of Paris's most chic arrondissements, the 1st and the 8th.

The Swedes had their royal reception, the concierge added in worried tones, and the strict security measures included the stipulation No Press.

Luckily, our neighbours saw the funny side of one minor snag: the majority of our people were indeed likely to be press. In the end, the building somehow accommodated all their guests and all of ours. The sifting process at the lift worked a treat.

To the horror of one or two French friends, we'd promised only a "light buffet" and the more sensible guests dined out before arriving. But the light buffet stretched an awful long way and I fear I shall be eating the remains - cheese, crisps and charcuterie - until we leave for the Var immediately after Christmas.

Living at the office has been a far from ideal arrangement.

But when you peer out from the living room, directly opposite the Tuileries, you get as good a view as you'll find in most parts of Paris.

It runs from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower and takes in all the landmarks in between, and we have been fortunate - despite those benign invasions of our privacy from London - to experience it.

Successive Telegraph correspondents, dating from before the Second World War, have had similar luck, being based in a series of imposing offices in the 1st and 8th arrondissements. Soon, for us, it is to be adieu to the rue de Rivoli, au revoir to Paris.

Among regrets, one sticks out. Why didn't I put more pressure on the mayor of the 14th arrondissement to order the demolition of the Tour Montparnasse, the one ghastly blot on the landscape as seen from our room with a view*.

* Captured here, in photos two and three, by one Bill Taylor, who may have a flawed outlook on penal matters but knows a bit about photography. The first is mine and the last, a family snap taken by me on Tour de France finale day, shows how thin you'd need to be to dine on the balcony.