Americans Americans everywhere and no sense out of any of them...

I currently cannot sleep in Pristina after an amazing, if gruelling day of meetings but I will report on them later. I'll share another wee thought with you though, perhaps unfashionable in an anglophone politician: I truly could not care less about the American presidential primaries and resent the amount of time and energy the UK media in particular is devoting to covering an issue of at best peripheral relevance.

I'll start paying attention when we have two candidates and an actual election, I like the Americans, they are fine people, I spent a very happy summer working in New York back when I was a student, and I do believe the US influence on the world has been, largely, positive.

My gripe is not with the Americans, their convoluted selection process is a matter for them. My gripe is with a gushingly sycophantic UK media which seems hell bent on giving the intricate twists and turns of two ongoing internal party processes in a foreign land greater prominence than the (ongoing) war in Iraq, the (ongoing and escalating) disaster in Dharfur, the worsening crisis in Chad or any one of a hundred other issues. I do not deny, the eventual winners of hese processes and the eventual winner of the actual election will have an influence on all of these, but not yet so why are we being subjected to this tangential bilge?

I'll be the first to admit, the US process passes the "great telly" test, a phrase used in my last media training session. The larger than life characters, the glitz, the glamour, the easy answers, the made for TV sets, polls, twists and turns. Honestly it owes more to Endemol's Big Brother than anything else, or has Simon Cowell come up with a new moneymaking scheme "Presidential Idol"?

I do not go with the slightly sniffy European school that writes off US politics as facile and vulgar, the Americans are our friends and our allies and how they run their country is up to them. But our Prime Minister sits down across the negotiating table at least twice a year with the heads of governments of every EU state, to make decisions of direct and often immediate effect upon domestic policy. The inhabitant of the White House in Washington has, under the federal system, little power over the states themselves, limited power given Congress and the Senate over federal matters, and only indirect influence over foreign policy, and only then when he (perchance in the future she) shows any interest.

Yet our media is devoting saturation coverage to an ongoing contest which they themselves admit is several stages away from completion, and even more annoyingly I hear more and more of my political chums singing along with the band that pretends this soap opera is actually significant.

Personally I think it owes more to a deeply held frustration on the part of the political hacks (and not just the journalists) that they are in fact not working in the West Wing, but at least for another few months the breathless game of let's pretend can continue.

Shame it really doesn't matter.