Student politics

There's nothing I can add to the McBride of Dreapergate affair. I regret to admit there is some lurid fascination in watching this grubby business take its toll of its own proponents. Like watching armed bank raiders jump into a faulty stolen car and plough at speed into an unforgiving brick wall.

But this is not the type of politics that gives me any intellectual pleasure. I would describe it as like the worst kind of student politics were it not so serious, emanating as it does from the Prime Minister's right hand.

Perhaps this is just what we might expect from the dying days of those managing the NewLab project. As the tawdry self-serving edifice crumbles down about their ears, they rely on the only consistent feature throughout their administration: that of truth-denying spin. But with no further hope of spinning their way out of their national political disasters, as a last gasp they turn their dark arts onto the opposition. "If we're sinking then we'll take the opposition down with us."

It's tawdry, sick and not worthy of the title 'politics'. And I wish I could just leave that as NewLab's appropriate epitaph.

But over at our friend Donal Blaney's Blarney there's more student politics going on.

I do hope Donal doesn't spend his days trawling through Facebook looking for victims for his clunking fist, as his latest target suggests. So far, whatever his errors, I think the young undergraduate, who is the focus of Donal's latest attentions, manages to stay on the moral high-ground against threats of expensive legal action from the Blarney man.

Donal can do as he wishes, and he usually does. But I've no time for irritating, poisonous, personality-based student politics – from left or right.