Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the leader’s second son, is generally viewed as the most likely man for the job. In October, for the first time, the Colonel gave a possible clue to his wishes by making a surprise announcement proposing that Saif should be given a key official post in the Libyan government. ‘Saif al-Islam is a faithful man and loves Libya,’ he said. ‘Saif needs a position that allows him to pursue his role in carrying out his programme to further Libya’s interests.’

The announcement was a surprise not only because the King of Kings presented his wish as a request rather than simply imposing his will unilaterally, as he often does, but also because it contradicted all Saif’s statements about not being interested in political power. Nevertheless, a few days later, the Libyan media dutifully reported that Saif had been appointed Co-ordinator of Social Leaderships, a recently vacated post that has been described as the second most important job in Libyan politics. This new position wouldn’t automatically make Saif the official heir but it would give him a position of authority in the government, and it could lead to his inheriting the leadership. But after the announcement Saif himself remained oddly quiet, neither accepting nor rejecting what was being thrust upon him.

In December, when the General People’s Congress met to set the agenda for their next annual meeting, there was no mention of Saif’s new job – another surprise, since this would have been the logical place to confirm his appointment. The only plausible interpretation was that Saif had decided not to accept his father’s offer. And then, on 20 January, Asharq al-Awsat, an international Arab daily, carried news from an unnamed Libyan source that Saif was considering withdrawing from public life altogether. What could explain this coyness? And why would he defy his father’s wishes so publicly?

Saif is not unambitious: it’s just he wants power on more formal terms. His father is ready to move his son into a leadership role without any kind of parliamentary approval, but Saif wants power under the provisions of a constitution, together with some kind of public consultation, debate and even an election. This could prove tricky because a new constitution couldn’t be introduced without a fight, since it would diminish the power of the revolutionaries and ultimately threaten Libya’s entire Green Book political structure. Gaddafi himself is opposed to constitutions, preferring oral agreements and ambiguity, which is why the current draft constitution has been ‘under discussion’ for the last four years, awaiting his approval.

Saif al-Islam has calculated that being appointed constitutionally gives him the best chance of winning a genuine popular mandate to govern – which he will doubtless need in future, as even with his father’s backing the way ahead for him is by no means clear. He is already locked in squabbles with other elements in the regime. Just a few days ago the distribution of two of Saif’s newspapers was stopped (he has his own media company, Al-Ghad) by forces opposed to his – reformist – agenda. Any one of his six very unpredictable brothers may also lay claim to power.

Although he is taking pains to avoid openly clashing with his father, Saif is dragging the argument out of Gaddafi’s tent and into the public domain, the only place he has a chance of winning. He is conducting his struggle by way of a sophisticated media campaign consisting of leaks and unattributed comments, such as the anonymous source who told Asharq al-Awsat that he is no longer looking for office. As the succession issue heats up, more trouble among the Gaddafis is to be expected.

And you will know of course that all stories (including novels) need a beginning, a middle and an end. Also that short stories need to have a surprise final sentence, that all fiction must be written about what you know and rooted in your own experience and that paragraphs must never begin with ‘and’ or ‘but’.

But did you know about the redemption needed at the end of a poem? Obviously, scriptwriters must conform to this rule, and any book that has a downbeat ending is generally thought to be ‘depressing’ and therefore not good, but that redemptive kick in a poem is a new necessity to me, although, to the real benefit of the world, I don’t write poetry.

And this is the way my blog piece ends, not with a bang but a moment of uplift to suggest that all is wonderful fine in the best of all possible creative writing schools. Let the networking begin, let the creative take notes and let no one forget that what the reader needs from writers most of all is elevation from their lowdown existence.

One small question: what exactly have readers done to deserve this? Well, they’ve bought your book, read your poem, gone to your movie. And because you have left them feeling really warmed, endorphins tingling, they are ready to purchase more of the same.  More of the same. More of the same.

And life is beautiful.

LGF’s finest hour was in 2004, when an animated .gif that Johnson created helped to end the career of the CBS broadcaster Dan Rather. In 2007, though, he began to suspect that some sectors of the trans-Atlantic counterjihad movement might be inhabited by extreme right-wingers. (A ‘Counter-Jihad Conference’ in Brussels attended by a leader of Vlaams Belang, an immigrant-baiting Flemish nationalist party, provided the initial clue.) Soon he was trying to nail down his co-bloggers’ Flemish extremist connections with the same zeal he’d once brought to bear on the likes of Rachel Corrie, who was known in LGF comment threads as ‘St Pancake’.

Johnson announced that he was parting ways with the right in November 2009, having fallen out with most of his former allies and been denounced on air by Glenn Beck. ‘The way he went after people was like a mental illness,’ one counter-Islamofascist told the New York Times’s Jonathan Dee, referring to Johnson’s behaviour after his change of heart. Dee, surely joking in the penultimate phrase, adds: ‘People who have pledged their lives to fighting Islamic extremism, when asked about Charles Johnson now, unsheathe a word they do not throw around lightly: “evil.”’

Things haven’t got that bad yet for Kelly, The Onion’s editorial cartoonist, but in recent months he’s often exhibited a comparable case of ideological backsliding. Back in the day, you could count on Kelly for a red-bloodedly right-wing take on everything from conditions at Guantanamo to climate change. Occasionally he would depart a little from orthodox Republican talking points, and occasionally he seemed not to have completely understood his material. As the reprinted ‘Kelly Klassics’ showed, though, he had been in business since at least the 1980s, and knew how to deal with such phenomena as the Iraq Study Group:

Since last summer, however, there have been signs in his work that some kind of crisis is taking place in the Kelly household. Today’s selfish wives have become a frequent target, as have doctors and other types of health scold, intimidating delivery men, and the Hollywood executives responsible for burying obscure Tom Selleck movies. There are perhaps one or two indications that Kelly has once again been drinking more than is good for him in response to the cares of a late-middle-aged cartoonist:

Not a peep, however, of the teabagging, birtherism, Sarah Palin worship and Obamacare hysteria that this artist’s long-term admirers have been expecting. Either Kelly is losing his touch, or his creator, the former Village Voice cartoonist Ward Sutton, has come to feel that some things can’t easily be satirised.

A future governor of California?

America’s Fox TV network has an irritating habit of cancelling half-decent science fiction shows after only one or two seasons. The network seems especially to enjoy junking series made by Joss Whedon, who as a result is still most famous for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy ran from 1996 to 2003 but should have been cancelled sooner: the last season and a half were rubbish. The latest Whedon venture to have bitten the dust is Dollhouse, about a sinister, top-secret company that is able to erase and replace its employees’ memories, effectively turning them into different people every day. It then hires these ‘dolls’ out to its rich and secretive clients. The show was often as daft as this bald summary makes it sound, but quite a lot of the daftness was the network’s fault, demanding that it appeal to what Fox executives imagined to be the lowest common denominator. And when it was good, Dollhouse was – nearly – very very good.

Much the same goes for Josh Friedman’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Picking up not long after where Terminator 2, the movie, leaves off, the show followed the ongoing adventures of Sarah Connor and her son John in their fight against the cyborgs sent back in time from a dystopian future to murder them. This is because, as anyone who’s seen any of the movies knows, John will grow up to be the leader of the human resistance against the machines. It often suffered from clunky dialogue and robotic performances, especially from the actors who are meant to be playing people; the lead cyborgs – Summer Glau and Garret Dillahunt – act most of the human cast off the screen. All the same it was a lot better than such implausible glossy TV behemoths as 24 or Lost, both of which squandered their promise after barely a dozen episodes but have run and run for season after season.

Not the least interesting thing about Terminator was its crypto-marxist view of history. Following the premise of the original movie, the soldiers from the future, both human and machine, who show up in the present trying either to change history or to ensure it continues as before, invariably do so either by murdering someone or saving their life. But neither killing nor saving anyone in particular seems to have any significant effect on what happens in the wider scheme of things. The emergence of Skynet, the all-powerful artificial intelligence that will declare war on mankind, is inevitable, regardless of which individual human beings are actually responsible for developing it. As Steven Shapin said recently in the LRB:

It’s hard to accept that if Watson and Crick – clever and ambitious though they were – had not found the double helical structure of DNA, no one else would have done so.

Or, as Ellen Meiksins Wood put it, summarising G.A. Cohen’s account of Marx’s theory of history:

History is, even if in complex ways we still don’t understand, inevitably and naturally driven by the progress of the technical ‘forces of production’, and each prevailing social form will necessarily be replaced by another more congenial to technological improvement.

Such a view not only introduces a hefty dose of dramatic irony to Terminator but goes against the grain of everything that Hollywood stands for – which may be the underlying if unconscious reason that Fox cancelled the show.

It still leaves one large question unanswered, however. In the first episode, the Connors and their trusty – or not so trusty – reformed terminator sidekick leap a few years into the future, from 1997 to 2007, to escape their pursuers. (What do you mean it was a cheap trick to make the show easier to film?) They’re amazed by cellphones and horrified to hear about 9/11. Yet at no point do they seem in any way surprised or concerned by the identity of the governor of California.

And then there was Boris Johnson. A regular pick-up from the Angel going to Burlington House on the Strand would send me down Rosebery Avenue, where I’d often see him emerging from Amwell Street. On a particularly slow and dismal day I chased him down and said: ‘Giz a job.’

‘What do you want to do?’ he muttered as we rode down Farringdon Road, he on the inside, me circling to his right.

‘I want to write,’ I said.

It’s a strange thing to harangue a man on a bicycle. He can’t get away, and conversation has to be conducted with one eye on the road. ‘Cripes look out!’ he said – does the mask never slip? – as a bus (bendy) swerved towards us. I felt I was using the traffic to threaten him, assaulting him in an environment in which he wasn’t overly confident, and it seemed to work. ‘Email Matthew d’Ancona at the Spectator,’ he shouted as I swerved right up Clerkenwell Road and he continued down towards the river.

It seemed apposite that the exchange took place over the entombed River Fleet. I never did email the Spectator. What would I have said? After he became mayor, I saw Johnson less often, but once, on Cleveland Street, he crossed my path again. We spotted the ambush of photographers at the same time. I rode on, the wrong way down a one-way street. The mayor was obliged to get off and walk.