Catching up on various post, I see from the newsletter for former pupils that the late cricket coach Bob Woolmer studied at my old school.

Now that I’ve read it, it’s jogged a memory of my dad (knowledgeable about both cricket and my school’s alumni) telling me the same many years ago, when I wouldn’t have known who Bob Woolmer was.

Other illustrious ex-pupils include the actor Alec McCowen, Doctor Who stunt man Tip Tipping, and, er, TV presenter Nick Knowles.

I was reminded this week, thanks to Labour’s deputy leadership contest, quite what a sham “one member, one vote” in the Labour Party is.

Back in 1993, John Smith convinced the party to end trade union block voting in leadership elections and instead allow each union member their own vote in the election, cutting at a stroke the power of the union bosses. While that sounds democratic, the current system is only marginally more democratic than block voting because one person can be a member in more than one way.

Not only does the electoral college – where votes are weighted three ways between those cast by MPs, by party members and by members of affiliated trade unions – mean that your average MP gets three votes (one in each part of the electoral college, assuming they belong to one union) – but being a member of several unions (and paying the political levy) gives you multiple union votes. Presumably you could have as many votes in this part of the electoral college as there are affiliated unions.

This was brought home to me by a status update from one of my Cruddas-supporting Facebook friends, who proudly declared “voted 7 times for Jon”. I’m pleased to be a member of a party where “one member, one vote” for leadership elections really means what it says.

One of the Liberal Democrat websites I work on is Corruption is a Crime. It focuses on the Al Yamamah arms deal between BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia, which has been hitting the headlines this week.

We run Google ads on the site to help raise funds for the party. These are contextual ads which analyse the page content and attempt to display appropriate adverts. For example, here’s an ad for travel to Saudi Arabia:

Every now and again, though, the ads seem slightly unfortunate. I’m not sure that it’s the best site, perhaps, for BAE to be recruiting on:

There are also some strange ones. This morning there was a big ad for vacuum cleaning – presumably in response to the headline “Ming Campbell calls on Attorney General to come clean over Al Yamamah”!

Another couple of hours on internet TV channel 18 Doughty Street yesterday. You can watch the first hour – Vox Politix – here. Particular nod to fellow panellist James Oates, of Cicero’s Songs, who writes a top LibDem blog and who I met for the first time last night.