Climate change

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your future prime minister. This handsome, articulate, compassionate young man or the toffee-nosed, ham-faced incumbent? No contest. (He may need to work on his dress sense, mind.)

The young man in question - my good friend Rob Buckman - is hoping to stand as a parliamentary candidate for the Green Party in Warley in May's General Election, but first needs to raise the £500 deposit. He's doing so via Crowdfunder, as are many other Green Party hopefuls - the aim being to fund their campaign without reliance on corporate donations. It'll be tough, and the budgets of the other parties are likely to dwarf the Greens', but at least it'll ensure that they won't be corporate puppets.

Meanwhile, following Thursday's disappointing news that Ofcom had judged the Greens not worthy of "major party status", there's been a positive endorsement from an apparently unlikely source. David Cameron himself has declared he won't take part in any televised debates if the Green Party are excluded. Don't mistake this for him having some laudable belief that the British public should be presented with the full spectrum of political alternatives, though - it partly gave him the opportunity to belittle the Lib Dems and UKIP as "minor parties", but it was no doubt also motivated by the knowledge that a strong showing by the Greens will take a chunk out of Labour's vote without affecting the Tories' own.

As Rob's video suggests, the Greens are eager to campaign on what ultimately matters most to the majority of the electorate - the economy - and to convince people that they are certainly no longer simply a single-issue pressure group. Nevertheless, allow me to shoehorn in a link to Going Plastic Free, which chronicles the efforts of three environmentalists (all colleagues of my mum at Northumberland Wildlife Trust) to do just that for the whole of January. It's even harder than you might think - who knew there was plastic in teabags?