Tweeting President Stan

I have undergone a sort of transformation this week. It's almost been a kind of reverse-Damascene conversion. I have discovered Talk Sport. Or, that should be, talkSPORT ("the radio station for men who know how to put a shelf up") (Man-sized tissues provided to wipe off the testosterone spurting out of the speakers at you).

I have had to do a lot of driving this week. Something I hate. And, tired of listening to music, I tried talk radio. After exhausting my patience with Five Live, I noticed that I was getting tweeted a lot by Stan Collymore. Or, that should be, @stancollymore .

There is no end to Cannock Collymore's
tweeting, particularly in the morning. And it isn't just on the subject of football (bearing in mind that talkSPORT is the radio station where each phone caller is introduced with their name and the football team they support, even if the discussion is on gynaecology (which is almost never is)).

I got drawn into a classic debate this week about the monarchy.

Old Stan boy is a bit of a republican. His co-presenter Mike Parry is a demented monarchist. Chaos ensued. Suffice it to say, at one point Stan Collymore's wife twittered him to say "Calm down, Stan".

But it was a wondrously uninformed debate. For example, the final tussle was over how Berlusconi in Italy showed how you end up with terrible heads of state if you have a republic. No mention then, that Berlusconi...er....isn't Italy's head of state.

And Mike Parry kept on saying that we'd end up with a "Franco" in charge of our country if we got rid of the monarchy. I countered this by twittering about Ireland and Robinson/Macleese being excellent head of state exemplars. Immediately after reading out my twitter, Collymore was challenged by Parry "OK then , name the President of Ireland". Sadly, poor old Stan didn't realise that I had helpfully provided him with the name, which he had read out just several seconds before. (Later I tweeted Stan the man to say I'd vote for him to be President) (All this tweeting was done in lay-bys or service areas I hasten to add).

Oh, and at one point Parry added the absolute clincher that the Royalists had the best fashion sense during the Civil War. However, Collymore riposted that he quite liked the Roundheads' get-up - especially those round helmets. It was all getting strangely male fashion-orientated for the normally very butch talkSPORT.

It was a blast. We don't get that quality of debate at LibDem conferences....