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For a politician to invite the television cameras into his home is a risky business. An inexperienced Mrs Thatcher in 1975 merely had to open her larder to the nation to find herself accused of hoarding food. Tony Blair was criticised for the heavily draped curtains in his former Islington home, and John Major’s conservatory impressed nobody but the double-glazing industry. Some Conservatives will have been dismayed that David Cameron, too, has fallen for the temptation to be filmed in a domestic situation, even if his kitchen has proved to be a model of sensible, restrained taste. They will argue that it confirms their concerns that the new Conservative leader is a triumph of style over substance. We do not share this view of David Cameron.

Prince Charles was low in the water during the early 1990s. The collapse of any marriage is painful. In the case of the Prince the agony was magnified beyond endurance by a merciless public scrutiny with which the royal publicity machine, whose armoury of lethal weapons included the raised eyebrow and the old boy network, was ill equipped to deal. Looking back, the Prince must have drawn on enormous reserves of moral courage in order to cope at all. Relief came only with the arrival in 1996 of Mark Bolland, smart, gay, and educated at a comprehensive school. Five years later Bolland was rightly named PR professional of the year. The job he did for the Prince was awesome.

The Prime Minister has long felt an unshakeable conviction that he brings to bear a unique insight into human affairs. There are great schemes to transform society and make a better world which he would undoubtedly accomplish if only circumstances allowed. Sadly they do not. A number of factors — dim-witted ministerial colleagues, unco-operative Labour MPs, an incompetent Civil Service, the mulishness of Gordon Brown and a cynical press and broadcasting media are probably the five which loom largest in the Prime Minister’s mind — have prevented him from carrying them out. Hence the look of virtuous though irritable bafflement that has gradually become Tony Blair’s most characteristic public expression.

One of the most successful smear campaigns in the modern era concerns Margaret Thatcher. It was alleged that she stood for a narrow, selfish individualism without reference to wider duties and responsibilities. This claim was based in part on a single remark made by the then prime minister to the magazine Woman’s Own in 1987: ‘There is no such thing as Society.’ Her words were ripped out of context and then distorted. Read in their full form, it was clear that Mrs Thatcher was making a profoundly moral point, fully coherent with both the Christian tradition in which she had been reared and the most generous ideals of the Conservative party which she represented. She was saying that our most pressing problems can never be solved by an abstraction such as the state.

A myth is beginning to be constructed around the events of the last week at Westminster. It needs to be challenged at once before it gains ground and becomes acknowledged fact. It goes as follows: Charles Kennedy was sacked as leader of the Liberal Democrats because he was a heavy drinker. This is open to challenge — both the claim that Kennedy was a heavy drinker, and the associated proposition that he was driven from office on account of his drinking. Kennedy’s consumption of alcohol was at most moderate — and negligible compared with an earlier generation of politicians: Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Harold Wilson, Ken Clarke. All of them were the better for it.

JANUARY In Iraq Sunni insurgents targeted the politically dominant Shiites; Iranians were accused of supporting Shiite militants. Austria, taking up the EU presidency, accused Britain of being the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Labour floundered over its Education Bill. FEBRUARY Dr Rowan Williams announced his retirement to a monastery in Anatolia after the greater part of the Anglican Communion, led by Nigeria, broke away from Canterbury over the consecration of a lesbian bishop in Canada. Sir David Frost was prosecuted under anti-terrorist legislation for his involvement with the new al-Jazeera international television channel.