COVER -> DAY ONE
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It was the third, the worst night of rain, so heavy that it woke me up at 03:15 local time. I went downstairs to check the flood level in the basement then I turned on the radio and heard two men in some kind of mildly cantankerous discussion about the scientific evidence for global warming.
It was only when a moderator intervened and invited final two-minute statements that I recognised I had accidentally come across the second of the Presidential Candidate debates. Dawn brought news of local severe flooding and there were no trains to London.
Meanwhile, there were calls that something must be done. Two teenage girls had been swept away during a high school organised river walk. Regulations on school outings would have to be tightened up.
Somewhere else in the digital firmament an argument was raging about the British Government's "imminent" announcement that life assurance companies will be allowed to include questions on medical tests and take these into account in deciding on premium rates and, indeed, whether to grant a policy at all. Something must be done; instead of allowing this to happen the Government should legislate to stop it, at once!
On another front the insurance companies issued warnings about houses built on flood plains and the Government promised tighter regulation on such building.
As all this was going on I couldn't get George W. Bush out of my head.
He had apparently triumphed in the second debate because he had managed to depict Vice President Gore as an adherent of "Big Government"; you know, the sort that controls the excesses of insurance companies, formulates regulations to try to protect teenage girls from being drowned in swollen rivers and controls the building of domestic housing in areas vulnerable to flooding.
Or, to put it another way, red tape saves lives. Governor Bush and his sort are intensely interested in the rich and the powerful but what they are saying is that the poor and the weak, bereft of public protection and concern, must fend for themselves.
There was a fascinating variant on this theory of governance from the maddest person to achieve top ranking status in British politics since, well, last year.
Ann Widdecombe, responsible for the Conservative opposition's policy on domestic affairs, let such a very large cat out of the bag that mothers would be well advised to keep their children in after dark.
Ms Widdecombe had announced to her Party convention that anyone in possession of the tiniest amount of cannabis should be subject to an immediate fine with no discretion granted to the police. Setting aside the crass stupidity of the proposal which is what led to the siege of Widdecombe, it is her reaction when trapped which fascinates.
She said that a difference had to be drawn between intellectuals at universities smoking pot (her political colleagues) and poor people living in ghettos.
There is, of course, a very great difference in outcome depending upon whether you take forbidden or highly taxed drugs to provide mild relief and pleasure or whether they are a means of escape from an intolerable life.
But the answer surely cannot be to legislate according to the wealth and intelligence of the citizenry. Still, I regard this aberration as a simple icon of Conservative unfitness to govern which will preserve the wavering Prime Minister Blair in office.
One can't hope for the same outcome in the forthcoming United States elections; unfitness to govern has never been a bar to the Presidency.
Bush was, to use the word literally, totally incredible in the second debate if press accounts are anything to go by. He had two central tenets: that the Democratic President had not done enough about anything; and that the essence of governance, including the Presidency, was that it should do less.
It would be instructive for us on both sides of the Atlantic to be given a list, presumably a very short one, of what the current crop of 'libertarian' politicians think that governments should do. From then on we have every right to expect that they will consult such a list in opposition before calling for something or other to be done.
Posing any discussion of the exercise of power as a tension between the public sector and the individual is, of course, a piece of fascinating --- but irrelevant --- political theory.
The main source of tension throughout the past two decades has been between the public sector and the commercial private sector and revolves around the extent to which commerce and industry should be regulated and taxed.
In an average day the power of big business affects the quality of my life to a much greater extent than the proceedings of Parliament and the pronouncement of Government Ministers.
I generally feel that chemical plants should not be allowed to do to our rivers what they have done to America's Great Lakes. On the whole I prefer to know what chemicals have been shoved into my bread and whether there really is any meat in that burger.
I have an irrational concern to protect my brethren from being blown up in fireworks factories or sliced in packaging plants and I am sure my American cousins are not totally foolish in worrying about the performance of tyres on Ford automobiles.
In other words, when you think about it only momentarily, it is easy to recognise that "small government" is code for untrammelled greed and exploitation, not at all the supposed democratic ideal.
Without the moderating influence of government, unable to create and prevent but mightily powerful at moderating or heightening socio-economic trends, the fortunate will soon be cocooned in pearls of prosperity connected by freeways and airways, surrounded on all sides by an urban jungle of deprivation, depravity and hate; a fine legacy for an upright Christian organisation like the GOP.
