Diary

I used to be amused and appalled by the Pentagon-speak which developed during the Vietnam war. But now the almost Stalinist euphemisms and aggressive acronyms have given way to a less extreme form - a military version of corporate-speak. Perhaps this is Donald Rumsfeld's influence. The new form of allied blitzkrieg is termed Rapid Decisive Operations. A few years ago, it would have been Rod or Raid. But these terminological subtleties make little difference to the grunt on the ground: he is just trying to cope with the shock of war. 'You go through all that training,' said one American the other day after coming under fire for the first time. 'You know you are in Iraq, but until you hear bullets and see those tracers, you don't think any of it is real.

Breakfast with Frost (the actual breakfast, not the programme which precedes it) is usually a rather jolly affair. Uniquely in today's cost-conscious BBC - where, if you're lucky, you'll get a plastic cup of some thin brown liquid called 'coffee' and a dusty artefact described as a 'bun' - Sir David's star status entitles him, J.-Lo. style, to accountant-mocking extravagances. Like, for example, the Great British Breakfast Fry-Up, complete with fine napery and waitresses; amazingly, for the sternly non-smoking BBC, heretical ashtrays are scattered everywhere. Sir David is partial to a breakfast cigar or two, which allows us lesser mortals to indulge in a quick drag on a fag once the great man has lit up.

One day last August, with the dust-motes swirling in the summer heat, I ran into Robin Cook in a corridor of the House of Commons. The place was almost deserted during the long recess, whose length Cook later truncated as part of the sweeping reforms he brought in when Leader of the House. The Spectator had just published an article by me expressing my misgivings at the prospect of a war on Iraq, and Robin told me he agreed with many of the points I had made. It therefore came as no surprise to me that his own doubts should have surfaced steadily to the point where he resigned from the government.

A non-stop drive for housing: when my father, then Frank Pakenham, fought as Labour candidate for Oxford in 1945, he hired a pony and cart and, stuffing his numerous children in the back, set forth along the streets with this striking placard. Unfortunately, the pony came to an abrupt halt quite soon and would not be budged. The stop as opposed to the non-stop was commemorated in a photograph in the Oxford Mail. Such is the emotive power of photography that I remember it well, as Maurice Chevalier would say, including the discomfort of the crowded cart, the tiresome behaviour of my scowling siblings, my mother in the cheerful red Socialist mac she wore for electioneering (as opposed to the politically incorrect grey squirrel which was her usual wear). Ah yes, I remember it well.

'You once said something I remind myself of at least twice a day,' Alan Rusbridger said to my excitement, over our lunch at Fl.

I have written a novel about Middle England's love affair with female newsreaders. I was struck by a survey which showed that viewers of these grave messengers of world events could remember only the first 30 seconds of what was said. The women newsreaders really are talking heads. My implicit thesis is that press journalists are superior to broadcasters: they are all form and no content; we are all content and no form. But the truth is that our invisibility is a matter of public courtesy. When the BBC began its highbrow fourth channel it recruited presenters from the press, who subsequently wrote of the channel with high regard. Viewing figures plunged. Within the BBC the channel was colloquially referred to as the ugly channel.

Good old Boris! What a guy! I write to ask him to sponsor my charity run in the London Marathon, and back comes the offer of 44Hp a word for a Spectator diary. So here it is (those last few words work out at more than 20p a letter - brilliant). And Boris being so personally loaded with his multimedia earnings, like columns, books, quiz shows, supermarket openings and appearances in Parliament, there's no doubt a big personal cheque to follow. Top man. Boris is not the only press magnate to respond to my appeal. Mark Seddon, editor of cash-strapped Tribune, has offered a great item for auction - George Orwell's stapler. Given Tribune's continuing financial problems, that really is an act of generosity. Bids for the said item, ladies and gentlemen, are now open.

If diaries are all about name-dropping and indiscretion, and they usually are, perhaps I should say that I had lunch on Tuesday with the Prime Minister at No. 10. This is the sort of thing that no diarist could bear to suppress. On the other hand, the unwritten rules of journalism dictate that I can't say anything about it. So does my editor at the Sunday Times. What a miserable dilemma. And in the very week when The Spectator asked me to write this diary. I suppose I can at least reveal that we had lamb stew followed by fruit salad; both were simple but good. Presumably the purpose of such meetings, among other things, is to subject us journalists to the Prime Minister's formidable charm.

George Bush is a reformed alcoholic, and takes staying on the wagon seriously. I have recently discovered that you can't get a drink at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, since it's located in the dry gulch of prohibitionist counties. As we wait for the Bush-Blair show to begin, I find you can't get a drink in the White House itself. 'Ladies and gentlemen, the programme will commence in two minutes,' bark the loudspeakers in the White House hallway. Up close, W. is small and dapper, with a far from friendly glint in the eyes. You can tell he's a martinet, even before he turns meanly on an American reporter: 'You violated the two-question rule as usual. You have a bad habit of this.' I ask if there is a direct link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 bombers.

I was brought up to pay little attention to vegetables, apart from beetroot, which was served every day, and carrots, of which we had two each on a Sunday, on the grounds that they enabled Spitfire pilots to see in the dark. And then last week I arranged to meet a friend in the bar of the Waldorf Hotel, and while waiting ordered a vodka-and-lime, no ice. After some time had passed, a small vase arrived with an enormous stalk of celery stuck in the middle and a radish floating alongside. Up until this moment, I had been feeling fairly gloomy - whether we are content or in a disturbed frame of mind depends, ultimately, upon the kind of thoughts that pervade our consciousness - but after half an hour spent sucking on the celery stem my mood altered, and I found myself humming.

I spent Tuesday evening watching Ashley, a 15-year-old blonde girl from Oklahoma, flirt with a British boy called PJ. 'Wanna see some photos of me?' asked Ashley. PJ grinned. 'I think you'll like them, they're hot,' said Ashley, and winked. A boy called Ghetto, whom neither of them had met before, interrupted the conversation. 'Hello, sir,' he began. 'Does anybody want to buy a dildo?' Kitty69 responded immediately: 'Check out the action on my live teen webcam!' The Yahoo chat room for teenagers is one of the oddest places I've ever been. Boys pick up girls within seconds of meeting, and retire to 'private rooms' to talk dirty. PJ and Ashley soon disappeared to check out her webcam, a small video camera that transmits live footage of its owner, usually naked, over the Internet.

When the Crimean war began in 1854, the prime minister was Lord Aberdeen, who carried a deep burden of guilt. Years later he was asked to pay for the rebuilding of a church on his estate, and pleaded King David's unworthiness: 'But the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Thou hast shed blood abundantly and has made great war: thou shalt not build an house unto my name.' When the Boer war began in 1899, the prime minister was Lord Salisbury, who felt intense misgivings: 'We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us by Milner and his Jingo supporters ...and all for people whom we despise and for territory that will bring no profit and no power to England.' And when the Iraq war begins in 2003?

Sydney When I first came to Australia in the 1980s the national sense of humour was less developed than now. Scarcely had I settled in my taxi at Perth airport than my driver offered, unsolicited, the following joke: 'Mate, what's the difference between a roo lying dead at the side of the road and an abo lying dead at the side of the road?' 'Er, I don't know,' I replied. 'There are skid marks in front of the roo.

Delhi If you are invited to one of these grand Indian weddings, you should jolly well make an effort. I inquired about the dress code, and was told that it would be all right for me to wear something called Kurta Pyjama. So I got the full bollocks. No mucking around. I went to the Delhi equivalent of Harrods, where the Suits-you-Sahib boys kitted me out, at some cost, in a green silk smock, an off-white silk waistcoat, and those funny drainpiped white pyjamas called churidars, not to speak of the agonising Jesus sandals called chaptals. And then there was the turban. Until you have had a turban wrapped around your skull, you do not appreciate what a socking great spinnaker of cloth it is. There's enough to make a bedspread, and when complete it significantly impairs your hearing.

This is the first Christmas in recent years that I haven't spent in traction or immobilised by glandular fever. You may imagine that I spend my days drawing and whistling in a carefree manner, but there are tears behind the laughter. Two Christmases ago I was invited to the Erotic Review party in a club in London's Soho. I had worked for the magazine doing dodgy drawings at fifty quid a pop, so they owed me a drink. Besides, I was eager to meet the Erotic staff who, I felt sure, writhed around all day on their laptops sans knickers and headaches. I found the club, walked in and was unable to see anything except a bar, far off in the distance, full of decadent, half-naked women and helpless men being used as sex objects.

Two or three times a week, some radio or television programme telephones, usually in search of a soundbite. That I should be so lucky, you may say. How flattering. Yes, but nobody ever mentions money. The ability to turn a phrase is the only marketable skill a journalist possesses. No newspaper would ask a professional writer to produce even a couple of hundred words without mentioning a fee, however modest. Yet broadcast producers do this to hundreds of us every day. The assumption is that we will perform for the mere thrill of gaining access to the airwaves. Politicians, of course, are always up for it. Why should the rest of us be? Factual broadcasting is at a low ebb partly because it is pitifully underfunded.

The 13th Earl of Haddington (cr. 1619) was minded to revise his theory about crop circles to incorporate pixies, he told me the other day while we were enjoying a pre-dinner cigarette at the chimney piece of a grand dining-room in Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. Lord H. - a whiskery, engaging gent in tartan trousers - has done a good deal of research into the subject, and has come to some interesting conclusions. He has now established to his satisfaction that crop circles are not made by aliens but - if I understand him rightly - by dead people. His working theory is that the patterns are an effort to communicate using alchemical formulae associated with the god Hermes. Hermes being a prankish character, these can be a little opaque.

Within an hour of returning to the Commons after a sabbatical tour of ex-British South Asia I find myself plunged into the firefighters' strike. The Blairites have long been envious of the glass-jawed opponents who queued up to be walloped by Mrs Thatcher. But during Monday's Downing Street press conference the Prime Minister modestly disavowed the Sun's belligerent claim that he wants to 'do a Maggie' on the FBU. There's no need really; he is as evidently a conciliator as she was a warrior. It suits the milder temper of the times, despite the media's frantic demands for victory by tea-time. Warrior Winston would not have lasted long enough to become the BBC's Top Briton if today's Daily Beast had been on his case in 1940-2.

They've scrubbed it off now, but until recently the outer wall of Hackney's HSBC bore a weird piece of graffiti. The ugly felt-tip scribble stood out harshly against the whitewashed stone. It consisted of a girl's name (illegible), then the equals sign, and then 'horing buckethole sellpussygal 10p a hour'. When I saw it, I stared at it for several minutes, aware of something intense and elemental being expressed with unusual power: a man's rage. I was enthralled by the muscularity of the words, their bitter and compressed viciousness, their lyricism. There's so much brutal anguish there, and a sort of blowpipe suddenness. And what about the improvisation? Whatever this girl had done, her offence was so vivid, foul and fresh in his mind that the old words had become useless, hopeless.

Whatever critics might say about Martin Amis's Kobra the Dread, his recent book on Stalin's atrocities, he was certainly right when he pointed out that people are generally indulgent, even flippant, about communist tyrants in a way they would never be about Nazis. This thought strikes me every morning as I walk through Canary Wharf on my way to work and catch sight of a large marble bust of Lenin, placed - by way of ornament - on a shelf above the counter of Mark Birley's excellent sandwich bar. Next to Lenin sits a slightly smaller head of George Bernard Shaw. He is there, one suspects, not so much to commemorate his dramas, as in the role of 'useful idiot', as Lenin famously dubbed Western fans of the Soviet regime. Clearly Mr Birley and his sandwich people haven't yet read Amis's book.