I am on a new platform this morning – or so they tell me. As I understand it, this means that there have been some changes made to the way the blog looks and operates. This should make it easier to read and respond to – and incorporates some exciting new features like trackback and permalink. Please don’t ask me to explain further.

I slightly regret the fact that I am in London not The Hague this morning. I had been thinking of going to cover the Dutch elections. But I kept reading that the Dutch crisis was over. After the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, it was back to politics as normal. Naturally, that is excellent news – if true. But it has to be admitted that it made the election a less interesting story.

As it turns out, however, the poll results have shown that “fringe” parties are gaining in support – which hardly suggests complete contentment with the current status quo. The biggest gainer was the left-wing Socialist Party led by the charismatic Jan Marijnissen, who became something of a star by the leading the opposition to the EU constitution – in the Dutch referendum of last year. His party is now the third biggest in Parliament.

The Pim Fortuyn list, named after the murdered anti-immigration leader, has lost all its seats. But they seem to have simply transferred across to another Islam-allergic party, the Freedom party, led by Geert Wilders – who advocates an immigration freeze and a ban on the building of new mosques

I read in the FT this morning that Wilders is still living in hiding. It seems to me a disgrace that the Dutch government is unable to take the necessary security measures to ensure that its leading politicians are able to live in their own homes. I met Wilders a couple of years ago and he complained to me then that he was having to live at secret addresses  – and was being moved every night – for fear that he would be murdered by radical Islamists. Even then, it seemed extraordinary testimony both to the level of the threat – and to the Dutch inability to cope with it. This after all was the country which was once famous for the fact that its royal family cycled around town on bicycles.

Surely this swing from complete relaxation about security to complete paranoia is excessive. After all, British politicians were almost always able to live in their own homes throughout the period of IRA terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. My assumption was that the Dutch would have got their act together by now. Apparently not. Under the circumstances, it’s almost surprising that Wilders did not get a larger sympathy vote.

Finally, it struck me that the last two subjects I’ve written about – Lebanon and Russia – have a certain similarity. It is not just that in both cases an assassination or attempted assassination was at the heart of the story. It is also that they are both parts of the world which attract extraordinary conspiracy theories.

When it comes to poor Alexander Litvinenko – and the news on him this morning is not good – it has been suggested to me that it is way too obvious to suggest that friends of Vladimir Putin might be behind the attempted killing. On the contrary, some Russians suggest, the attempted murder of Litvinenko makes Putin look bad. Therefore, it must be Putin’s enemies who have done it – perhaps one of the London-based oligarchs.

A similar contorted logic is applied to the murder of Pierre Gemayel. Take a look at a posting on the subject in this blog and at this article in the Guardian. Once again, a knowing question is asked – cui bono? who stands to benefit? Because the finger for the killing is being pointed at Syria, clearly it must be Israel or the United States who are manipulating events. Well, call me naïve – but I cannot see that it is in either America or Israel’s interests to create another failed state in the Middle East.

We should know by late on Thursday night whether Ségolène Royal has got the Socialist nomination for the French presidency. Party members are voting all day Thursday and the polls close at 22.00.

A few months ago Ségolène (everyone seems to call her by her first name now, like Oprah) was thought to have it in the bag. But she had a tough time in the candidates’ debates with Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, and the last time I checked with the FT’s Paris office, they were refusing to predict whether Ségolène would get the 50 per cent of votes she needs to clinch the nomination. If she falls short of the 50 per cent threshold, it goes to a run-off on November 23. And that would give the “anyone but Ségolène” camp a chance to rally against her – as well as puncturing her aura of invincibility.

It still seems hard to believe that the French Socialists would do something as stupid as rejecting the one candidate they have who seems to have a genuine chance of winning. Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be a particularly odd choice. Not that I have anything against him, I’ve met him a couple of times and I thought he was charming and clever. But he is also a Euro-fanatic – which would make him an odd choice given that France voted down the EU constitution only last year.