While I’m on the subject of Tories, this evening, I finally got round to watching the second part of the very good Michael Portillo documentary about Thatcher and the Conservative Party (The Lady’s Not For Spurning) that I downloaded from the BBC’s excellent iPlayer site. I put it off for so long because I was busy. I was able to put off for so long because I removed the Digital Rights Management (DRM) “protection” built into the download. If I hadn’t done this then the half-watched file would have “self-destructed” after a preset number of days and I would never have found out whether or not that creepy Mr Howard character beat that nice Mr Blair in the big vote.

Under Windows XP, I used FairUse4WM, which you can find and set up for yourself with a bit of rooting around the Web, to free up the video and, under Linux, used DeVeDe to convert the resulting unprotected WMV file into something I could burn to DVD for a friend overseas who can’t access the BBC’s site. According to the advert I have to sit through before I watch legitimately bought or rented DVDs, my applying this jiggery-pokery is morally equivalent to stealing a handbag from a woman in the street. Which is apt, given that it’s Thatch we’re talking about.