If you can't say anything good...

I was rather surprised at the level of venom which greeted Hugo Chavez's visit to London. He was called a friend of Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe, accused of being completely undemocratic and a Latin American dictator. Pretty incredible when you consider that unelected dictators and monarchs visit London every week without a murmur of dissent from the media.

Chavez's success at trying to alleviate poverty and illiteracy in Venezuela is obviously enough to bring out media opposition and indeed government loyalists. Prize for brass neck must go to Denis MacShane, who as foreign office minister rushed to welcome an attmepted coup against Chavez two years ago, only to discover that it had been unsuccessful. He made no mention of this as he praised Chile and Brazil as reasonable Latin American regimes in preference to Venezuela.

I was invited to the lunch with Chavez hosted by Ken Livingstone at City Hall on Monday and along with the other 100 guests heard him make an impressive (and compared to the previous day short) speech which talked about among other things London's radical tradition, paid tribute to Tony Benn and spoke of his opposition to Bush's foreign policy.

That is the real reason for the bad press: he is very open and up front about his opposition to the new imperialism which is why he commands support and respect on a global scale.

Meanwhile, I see that Britain's entry to the Eurovision song contest is blaming Blair for projected failure this weekend. Daz Sampson says people won't vote for Britain because of our policy of bombing other people's countries. It was after all just after the Iraq war when Britain got nul points. So I think Daz has a point himself.

Message today about a debate at the Oxford Union, with my colleague Andrew Murray, about humanitarian intervention. Dress code black tie, it says. Oh dear I haven't got one.