Any other business

In the media age, life is a soap opera. For a time we are obsessed with a particular storyline. Then it is resolved, we move on to the next story, new characters are introduced, and the old characters on whose every word we once hung are phased out and forgotten. Two months ago the country was convulsed with 'Cheriegate', and it seemed that nothing else in the world mattered. Day after day the tabloids and broadsheets screamed their headlines, which said that Cherie was not telling the truth and that the Prime Minister himself was threatened. Pages one to ten were cleared. Andrew Marr and Adam Boulton camped outside No. 10. Then Peter Foster made his statement, in effect exonerating the Blairs, and we moved on to something else.

James Tooley recently wrote in these pages of the success of private schools in Africa and India, which in the past few years have exploded in number, offering an education for as little as £3 a term - which even the poor of Somalia can afford. In contrast, he recounted how pupils of government schools in Ghana are left waiting on the doorstep while their teachers play truant, and how pupils of government schools in Hyderabad are forbidden to learn English and are forced instead to do the domestic chores of the teachers. Having made a convincing case for private education, Mr Tooley ended his piece with the question, 'What on earth is government doing in education at all?

Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, is an opponent of the coming war against Iraq. Fair enough. Many of us are unhappy about it. But he has taken his opposition to extreme and, I would say, imprudent lengths. To use a military analogy, he has fired off his biggest nuclear missiles without first going through the range of lesser weaponry. Last week there was an enormous picture of Tony Blair on the Mirror's front page with his hands covered in blood. It referred to an inside rant by John Pilger. The previous day the front-page headline had told George Bush to 'Cool it, Cowboy'. Day after day the paper inveighs against war. Most of its readers may be sceptics, but I cannot believe that they relish coverage that is both hysterical and obsessional.

A very high-minded European recently complained to me about British newspapers. Why are they all so awful, he asked? Even the so-called serious ones look like comics, with their pictures of footballers and half-naked actresses on the masthead. As for the tabloids, he went on, their venom, iconoclasm and sheer beastliness, not to mention their obsession with third-rate celebrities, were incroyable. France had a truly intellectual newspaper in Le Monde, whose cultural, foreign and political coverage surpassed anything available in Britain. And Germany, Italy and Spain boasted several almost equally fine papers, and had nothing which remotely compared to our trashy tabloids. He looked at me with pity, and I muttered that maybe he had a point.

The appointment of Rebekah Wade as the editor of the Sun has given rise to much baseless speculation. It has been suggested that she may swing the paper behind the euro. We are told she may ditch Page Three girls, to whom she is said to have a feminist aversion. She is, says my esteemed colleague Roy Campbell-Greenslade in the Guardian, a former young Tory who may be 'ready to cut the umbilical cord with Downing Street' and support Iain Duncan Smith or whoever may succeed him. All these theories ignore a simple fact. It is Rupert Murdoch, not Rebekah Wade, who will determine the editorial policy and future political allegiances of the Sun. I don't doubt that she will have a say at the margins, but she is not going to be allowed to do what Mr Murdoch does not want her to.

Seldom does the European Union miss an opportunity to pursue its protectionist agenda. No sooner had the first slugs of crude oil from the sunken Estonian oil tanker, the Prestige, arrived on the Spanish coast than France, Spain, Portugal and Italy moved to banish single-hulled oil-tankers of more than 15 years' vintage from European waters: which means within 200 miles of European coasts. An oil slick, of course, is an ecological disaster, but would a double hull really have prevented the sinking of the Prestige? 'A double-hulled ship has more built-in redundancy,' says Robert Saunders, technical information officer for the Royal Institution of Naval Architects. 'It is possible that a crack in an outer hull won't spread to an inner hull.

One of Richard Desmond's heroes is Rupert Murdoch, who was profiled in glowing terms in the most recent Sunday Express. The proprietor of the Express group regards the Australian-born adventurer as an outsider like himself. In fact, Desmond is far more of an outsider than Murdoch. His fortune is based on his pornographic magazines and television channels, some of which by my definition are hard-core. By comparison Murdoch - Oxford-educated, son of Sir Keith - is almost out of the top drawer. But Murdoch's Sun did take on and topple the established Daily Mirror, introducing a new brand of popular journalism including 'Page Three girls'. Desmond hopes to work a similar trick on Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail.

Ordinary life must go on, the government persuaded us while administering its warning two weeks ago of a possible terrorist attack: if we allow the threat of bombings to disrupt our normal activities, then we give the terrorists what they want. Fine words, indeed, except that they seem to apply only on British soil. If you are thinking of taking a holiday abroad, on the other hand, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is ready to bombard you with a thousand reasons not to go. Those who remember the lengths to which the government used to go to promote Britain to foreign travellers during the IRA's mainland bombing campaign could be excused a little puzzlement over the FCO's advice following the Bali bomb: 'We advise against all travel to Bali and elsewhere in Indonesia.

There is one person in the world whom I would love to meet. Or maybe two. I am thinking of the propagandist who writes the monthly front-page 'brief' in the Times extolling the paper's circulation performance. His (or her?) counterpart on the Daily Telegraph would be interesting, too, though this person has fallen rather silent recently. The genius at the Times was at work last Saturday. The general gist was that the newspaper was inexorably closing the gap on the Telegraph. A casual reader might suppose that the newspapers are neck-and-neck in the circulation race. This is not so. What has happened, as I suggested several weeks ago might be the case, is that the Daily Telegraph has given up the costly battle to remain above a daily sale of one million copies.

One of my wife's ancestors was consumed by cannibals in the South Seas in the mid-18th century. I don't think the government of Tonga, or wherever the meal took place, would be terribly impressed if a lawsuit arrived on its desk demanding reparations. If you are descended from a black American slave, on the other hand, it may well be worth your while dropping a line to the city authorities in Chicago where a law has just been passed demanding that any company seeking a contract from the city will have to declare any profits that they may have made from owning, insuring or trading in slaves. They now face having to pay levies to the survivors of slaves - no matter that the recipients themselves will never have known forced labour.