Treegate: the disaster unfolds!

If there was one satisfying part of the wake, it was breaking the news to Jon Rogers that his secret plans for more trees on Bristol's streets were recorded -and seeing the despair on his face without him noticing the camera was out again!

(photo removed as we got pissed off about people using it without permission. We'll happily send you photos of other politicians, but this was taken at Chris's funeral, and to use it just to slag off the LibDem policies isn't fair. Not the criticism, just the photo)

He was devastated. After Bigotgate, after Twittergate, now this, Treegate, could be what decides the vote in Bristol.

If there is one thing that cheers us up even more, it is the Daily Telegraph Motorist's Interview with David Cameron, with some lovely quotes

One of Cameron's minders tries to warn him that he's probably said enough, but he ignores her, looks me in the eye and says: "I'm a friend of the motorist. Why wouldn't I be? Like I said, I'm a motorist myself."

What's more, he's not embarrassed by the fact that he is good friends with an unapologetic, politically incorrect petrolhead named Jeremy Clarkson.

It's not my job to suggest which way you might vote next Thursday. But of all the would-be or serving prime ministers (including Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Blair) I've interviewed over three decades, I can honestly say I've never met one as pro-motorist as David Cameron.

We also like Cameron's proposal of a fair use tax on foreign lorries, though it fails to include extending the tax to cyclists, or pedestrians, with that big slice of the road "The pavement" which is denied us except in Montpelier, Southville and bits of Fishponds. Even then, it lacks the formal painting of parking bays the way Waltham Forest has. Maybe a tax on bicycles and pedestrians was the secret "hard decisions" he was being so vague about on TV last night. We hope so.

That and the thought of John Redwood being a position of power and appearing on TV to tell off the single mothers for having their husbands leave them and the poor people off for not being born into wealthy families made us so tingly we had to nip off to that special Stokes Croft massage parlour where for an extra fee they wear fox-hunting clothes as they beat you.

The whole Telegraph interview is pretty heart-warming, and we particularly like the way the paper recognises it's really spin doctors who are trying to make Cameron seem friendly to city-folk, places where someone riding a bicycle or two men holding hands aren't considered legitimate-in-a-court-of-law reasons for you to go back to your Range Rover and get the shotgun out. But even so, the paper has a concern:

Cameron spoils it by admitting that he will start building a high-speed rail line between London and, eventually, the far north of Britain

That would really spoil it for us drivers: a fast alternative to the M1/M6 where non-drivers can drink their lattes as they check their emails on their laptops. Have you ever tried to do the M5/M6/M74 run while writing a set of powerpoint slides and steering with the knees while texting ahead your schedule? The laptop batteries never last past Lancashire and you have to pull off at Chernobyl-B services to charge them up again. A high speed train link would give the tax dodgers an edge, and that would never do.