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I was Managing Director, in 1972, of Bovis Homes Southern Limited, based in Uxbridge, and Milton Keynes fell into my remit.  In a more junior role, I had worked with Erskine on a Bovis development at Newmarket. And the Bovis Board (led by the charismatic Frank Sanderson) wanted to consolidate the company's link with the great Architect.  Why did Ralph Erskine practice out of a Thames barge moored near Stockholm?  Simple, really.  In 1938, having qualified as an Architect with Clifford Culpin & Partners in London, the young Ralph Erskine found himself alienated by the UK's drift to war.  An active Communist, he saw war as part of the capitalist conspiracy to keep the workers of the world in chains - he wanted none of it.  So he emigrated to a neutral country, Sweden.  He bought a London barge, converted it as a drawing-office, and sailed off to Sweden.

When I visited him in Drottningholm in 1972, he had just finished the Byker Wall, and his team were still working on the remainder of the estate from an on-site drawing-office in Byker.  My job was to answer all his questions about Bovis' new development contract with the Milton Keynes Development Corporation - which I had just won in competition, relying in part upon the company's claim to bring Ralph Erskine to Milton Keynes.  But as a committed left-winger (even if no longer the Communist activist of his youth), Ralph remained deeply sceptical of all capitalist intitutions.

His Communism shone through,

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The UK meeja are good, stuffed with able, footloose, inquiring journalists who quickly tire of themes - and face the constant challenge of "novelty" if their "title" is to continue being read, and generating income.  The BBC has in recent years joined the majority meeja newshound pack.  And the hopelessly centralised power-system of Whitehall and Westminster offers them an unending diet of drama, in-fighting, jealousy, failure tempered by some success, gossip - what a feast!  Alistair Campbell, at the Daily Mirror and a member of that hounding group of journalists, naturally become fascinated by its implications for Government itself.  He understood, as nobody else did, just how great the threat to Labour was, trapped into that Westminster cockpit, that awful bear pit.  He decided to something about it - and played distinctive roles on both sides of the fence.

But the political task is to re-design the fences.  And that can be done only by devolving substantive power to other, smaller and less destructive bear-pits.  Rhodri Morgan and Jack McConnell now have their own media bear pits, in Cardiff and Edinburgh.  And there should be other, new political foci in Bristol, Plymouth, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham and Norwich.  In the world of the future, high concentrations of power are a systemic political liability, rather than an asset - they are terrorist targets, easy meat for an aggressive meeja, easy lobbying targets for the corporate sector, and much more liable to personal corruption by virtue simply of their gigantic size.  When it comes to modern government, "Big" is a mug's game.

Political power, like wealth, needs far wider redistribution.  Monolithic, over-concentrated systems will simply not survive the competition of the 21st century.  Proper coordination is essential, for "telling the political narrative" (a telling Campbell phrase, which evinces great perception...) The great E-media should be used to coordinate dispersed power-centres where necessary - that is their political role.  Indeed, the lesson learnt by the US military with the invention of the Internet must now be learnt by our politicians and political parties.

• We are a long way behind.