Columns

‘How the Guardianistas changed their tune,’ was the heading to a Sunday Times factbox published in the paper last weekend. The intention was to mock those Fleet Street columnists, erstwhile fans of Gordon Brown, who have turned against their former hero. ‘Only five more dreaming days until Gordon Brown’s coronation,’ the famously independent-minded and fiercely left-of-centre Brown loyalist, Polly Toynbee, was quoted as having written a year ago. ‘Brown’s first month looks like a striking success,’ Jonathan Freedland, always a thoughtful and progressive voice, had written a month later. Hopeful, trusting voices, both. No longer. ‘On current evidence he is simply not up to the job,’ thought Mr Freedland on 18 June this year.

‘You have reminded me, Mr Speaker, that for a minister resigning, permission to make a Personal Statement to the House is granted entirely at your discretion and should be of an explanatory nature. With the speech of the Noble Lord, Lord Howe, in mind, I too will keep mine short: to a thousand words. Members opposite will forgive me if the burden of what I have to say is addressed to my own party even if the implications are perhaps of interest to a wider audience. ‘I can no longer serve as a minister in this Cabinet. I have come to doubt I should have accepted office in the first place. I was unsure my party was doing the right thing last year in effectively replacing one prime minister with another without a contest either within our party or at the polls.

Gordon can barely speak English either, so why don’t we swap him for Sarkozy? Say what you like about Nicolas Sarkozy, but he’s a feisty little tyke, isn’t he? Apparently, he put himself through an hour-long grilling on French TV last week. We’ve got our issues with the strange angry man in Downing Street, but the French, they loathe Sarkozy. According to the blogs, he bore up pretty well. At one point, he responded to calls for a new dialogue with the Taleban. ‘Open a dialogue?’ he said. ‘With people who amputate the hand of a woman because she had varnish on her nails? Who have stopped millions of little girls from going to school? Who brought down Buddhas with hundreds of years of history? Who stone a so-called adulterous woman?

My heart bleeds for cold-callers — it must be the most depressing job in the world It’s always happening. It happened again last Friday. I had finished my Times column for Saturday and, taking advantage of the two hours left of daylight, fetched the wheelbarrow, pick and spade and set to work finishing the construction of a stone table outside our house in Derbyshire. But hardly had I started work than from inside the house I heard the telephone ring. Downing tools, running up from the garden, shedding gloves and kicking off boots I reached it, breathless but just in time. ‘Good afternoon, have you thought about a new kitchen? Our company would be happy to visit free of charge and give you a quote...’.

Political wisdom coming from Robert Mugabe is hard to swallow. Nonetheless, I think the leathery old butcher might be on to something. ‘Gordon Brown,’ he said last week, ‘is a tiny dot on this world.’ From some people, that might be mere insult. Yet, when foul Bob describes Gordon Brown as a dot on the face of this world, one cannot help but consider that other unexpected dot, on the face of Robert Mugabe. Is it a moustache, do you think? I’m not sure. Ask many professed Africa experts about Robert Mugabe’s moustache, and about half of them will say, ‘He hasn’t got a moustache, are you thinking of Daniel arap Moi?’ It’s a tiny thing, nestling in the dimple of his upper lip.

Nick Clegg’s sex confession shows why politicians should never try to look normal It was the 14 pints, I always thought, that ultimately did it for William Hague. That was the beginning of the end. There must have been teenagers out there in the 1970s who did, indeed, drink 14 pints a day. It’s just that they probably weren’t the same teenagers who, aged 16, spent their spare time practising a piping address for the Conservative party conference. Hague said he drank 14 pints; Britain thought ‘nah’. Britain thought, ‘Come out to the pub with me, you baldy wee pluke, and I bet you couldn’t handle more than four.’ The problem wasn’t that he was being overly confessional, it was more the opposite.

Rather less than two years ago, bored and with time to kill at a Conservative party conference, I decided to do what is for a British journalist a rather unusual thing. I decided to read a whole speech, a long speech by a politician, a speech with no particular news value. I decided to read every word. The full text happened to be lying on my bed. I had taken it from a huge pile left largely untouched on the counter of the Press Office. It was Senator John McCain’s speech to the Tory conference. I knew that it had not caused much of a stir, had said nothing new, and that fellow-journalists had reported it as ponderous, overlong and dull. So I read it. And it was ponderous, overlong and often dull. Nor did the speech say anything surprising or new.

Do you reckon they told all the royals? Seriously? All of them? Even the flaky minor ones, like Fergie? Or has she been gossiping with the Countess of Wessex and the bafflingly female Princess Michael of Kent, these past three months, wondering where Harry was, and whether this time he’d done something really bad? ‘Has he eloped with a butler?’ ‘Is he in a Thai jail?’ ‘Is he doing that Winehouse girl, do you think?’ Hey, they didn’t tell everybody. They certainly didn’t tell me. And I have a sneaking suspicion that they didn’t tell Jon Snow, either. That would explain a lot. Hell hath no fury like the media stalwart ignored.