Any other business

The Burrell affair illustrates how much the press has changed over the past 20 or 30 years, and how powerful it has become. Not very long ago the majority of newspapers would have given the Queen the benefit of the doubt in such a matter. As it was, only the Daily Telegraph jumped unhesitatingly to her defence. It simply did not occur to the paper that she might have been at fault in coming forward at the eleventh hour with information that stopped Paul Burrell's trial, and so it naturally looked for others to blame. In this it was alone, which certainly would not have been the case 20 years ago. The Times, which once could have been counted on to mount the Establishment defence, asked several awkward questions which the royal family may have regarded as unseemly.

Female models, responsible for draping themselves over new cars and appearing in their underwear in advertisements to promote this year's British International Motor Show in Birmingham, would describe as 'out-of-date' and 'pathetic' the government's stereotyping of women into becoming politicians. It follows the case of Miss Estelle Morris who was browbeaten into becoming secretary of state for education when she would obviously have been happier reclining across the bonnet of the new Mini. Nonetheless, 'out-of-date' and 'pathetic' was how Mrs Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, in an interview, described those girls. She called for more women engineers in the car industry.

My colleague Stuart Reid has been urging me to write about the Times for weeks. 'There's a buzz on the streets,' he says. 'Oh, yeah?' 'Yes, people are saying that the Times is improving under its new editor.' 'Really?' 'Yes, that is the word. The Times is getting better. Not much, but a little. It's getting more serious. That is what they say.' Are they right? Unlike Stuart, I haven't met many of these people. I haven't heard the buzz. But it is time we considered the question. For there is no doubt that Robert Thomson, who has been editor of the Times for nearly eight months, wants to take it upmarket. He has even told a couple of friends of mine that Rupert Murdoch, the paper's proprietor, shares his dream.

Is the Daily Mirror for sale? It is, according to a well-placed City source. He says it is being offered around to 'the buy-out boys'. My instinct is that he is right, and that Trinity Mirror wants to offload its troubled national daily, as well as its other national titles. Until 1999 Trinity Mirror was Trinity, a strong group publishing profitable regional titles. Then it made what has turned out to be the serious mistake of buying Mirror Group Newspapers. For although Trinity had plenty of experience with regionals such as the Birmingham Post and the Liverpool Echo, it knew little or nothing about the very different business of publishing red-top national newspapers.

So, the United Nations weapons inspectors are ready to go in, and this time they are not going to be put off their scent by feeble excuses. They will not be satisfied until every single weapon has been destroyed. Every slipper, every cane, every outstretched bare hand must go: the UN committee on the rights of the child has ruled Mr Blair's government to be an international pariah because it has failed to ban the smacking of children. 'We are talking about alternative forms of disciplining children because we are not saying children should not be disciplined,' the committee chairman, Jacob Doek, told reporters last week. 'But is it necessary to hit them over the head or kick them in the butt?

Prince Charles's leaked letter to Tony Blair has not done him any good. The Mail on Sunday, whose first edition broke the story on Sunday, seemed to think that the letter did him great credit. One can certainly see what he was getting at. But to compare farmers with gays or immigrant communities, and to suggest that they are less well treated, was not spot-on. As has been pointed out, farmers, impoverished though many of them may now be, receive much bigger government handouts than either of the other groups. More damaging still than the letter was his reported remark that if fox-hunting were banned he might as well spend the rest of his life skiing abroad. Again, one sees what he means.

It has come down, it seems, to two related but separate issues: there is a 'should' issue, and a 'would' issue. Should the Americans attack Iraq? Would they win a quick and relatively bloodless victory if they did - the 'less' in 'bloodless' being concerned with their forces' blood rather than Iraq's.... The 'should' question is a moral question, the 'would' a strategic one. It is the latter which concerns me here. How easily can Saddam's forces be overcome? Would he really lure the Americans and the British into the cities, including Baghdad? If he is confident that they would fight, that would be his tactic. His hope would be that, enticed into street-fighting, the Americans would not fight house-to-house with infantry.

Newspapers, as we know, love truth. They castigate evasive politicians and track down dodgy businessmen. They deliver ringing lectures in their editorial columns when ministers do not come clean. And yet this love of truth has one blind spot. When newspapers - and I would say in particular broadsheet newspapers - come to present their own circulation figures, they become considerably more economical with the truth than the slippery politicians whom they are wont to criticise. In the hands of a skilled propagandist, a small decline in a paper's monthly sales can be made to look like an impressive increase. The same propagandist can represent a rival title's modest gains as a catastrophic setback.

The very name of Soham induces a strange mixture of disgust, boredom and pity. I return to it with reluctance. But we have to consider the conduct of the media, and in particular the criticisms made about the press by the Cambridgeshire coroner, David Morris, and by the Cambridgeshire police. I'm certainly not going to defend the worst excesses of the media. The rewards offered by some newspapers are said to have encouraged hundreds of gold-digging callers to clog up police telephone lines. Some papers printed details I would very much rather not have read. The News of the World's renewed call for 'Sarah's Law', which would give parents the right to know the identity of sex offenders living in their area, seems to be a case of jumping on the wrong bandwagon at the wrong time.

One might have thought that the case of Christopher Lillie and Dawn Reed - recently awarded £200,000 each in libel damages against the authors of a local government report which made fantastic claims of child abuse - would sound a warning to the government to avoid joining the general hysteria about paedophilia. But not a bit of it. The Home Office's taskforce on child protection has proposed to make it a criminal offence to 'groom' children via the Internet with intent to commit a sexual offence. Nobody doubts that the Internet has been used by paedophiles to make contact with children, and it is of course vital for parents to supervise their children's use of a computer.

'Fair trade' coffee has become as much a staple of the middle-class kitchen as organic carrots and free-range eggs. But, for the fair-trade lobby, voluntary gestures are not enough. They are lobbying the US government, with some signs of success, to establish a 'coffee purity act'. Under these provisions, all raw or 'green' coffee imported to America would have to show a moisture content of between 8 and 13 per cent and would have to contain no extraneous matter such as leaves and twigs. Few would fancy a twig or two floating around in their cappuccino, but that is not the point.