More from The Week

That England should have a 3–0 lead in the present Test cricket series against West Indies is something that, only a few years ago, would have exceeded the most insane expectations of its supporters. In great measure the success is down to the discovery of excellent talent — Flintoff, Strauss and Key notably — and to the maturing of some older ones, such as Thorpe and Giles. But a significant part of England’s success has been the dismal and gutless way in which our once formidable opponents have now started to play the game of which they were — recently — not only the premier exponents, but also the leading entertainers.

On Monday, just as people settled down for the summer holidays, Michael Howard returned from his. He slipped back into Britain and at once set to work. He is already two thirds of the way through the probable term of his leadership. Just eight months remain until the general election, most likely to be called in May. So this may be Howard’s only summer as Tory leader, and he is determined not to waste a moment. There have been mutterings against Michael Howard in the past few weeks, but no one can challenge the dedication, commitment and passion that this battle-hardened 63-year-old brings to his job. This month, as Tony Blair and family make use of Silvio Berlusconi’s plutocratic villa, Michael Howard will be out there selling the Conservative message.

But why is Diana’s fountain being closed? Some people are decently embarrassed at the failure of this £3.6 million waterwork. Some people may be secretly amused. They look at the bone-dry channels of the Hyde Park memorial, and the metal security barriers that now surround it, and they feel that distinctive British joy in architectural disaster that went with the Dome. Some people seem to be blaming Kathryn Gustafson, the designer, who was responsible for another dud fountain somewhere else. Some are even blaming Rosa Monckton, the friend of the late princess who gave the commission to Gustafson on her casting vote.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the Moon, pop’s dopeheads were experimenting with ten-minute-long guitar solos, and a mop-haired Tony Blair was in the sixth form at Fettes where, in between canings for insolence, he was railing against fagging. Now, we are led to believe, the Prime Minister has decided that the decade of his youth was all a ghastly mistake. Launching his government’s latest five-year plan on crime, he declared the ‘end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order’. In other words, he was wrong and the likes of ‘Bugger’, as one especially cane-happy beak at Fettes was nicknamed, had it right.

You can tell when high summer comes to Westminster. Smartly dressed groups, lost and ill at ease — the women in hats and best frocks — wander through Westminster Hall in search of Buckingham Palace garden parties. The Catalpa trees in New Palace Yard burst into bloom, and their viscous, sickly scent spreads everywhere. These are always dangerous, fretful weeks. The whips hate them; they sense trouble, and yearn to close politics down and send their MPs away to the safety of family holidays. Last week MPs and ministers moved about in little groups. The Blairites clung to each other for protection against the supporters of Chancellor Gordon Brown, angry and dispossessed. Monday belonged to the Brown faction.

Just before the 1966 World Cup the England manager Sir Alf Ramsey remarked that his talented midfielder Martin Peters was ‘ten years ahead of his time’. Peters himself was displeased by the observation, but Ramsey was in reality being flattering. He meant that his player was not truly at ease among the clodhopping defenders and midfield ‘hard men’ who set the tone in the 1960s. Peters’s fluid, complex, visionary style anticipated an era that had not yet arrived. Very much the same can be said of Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor. To the more primitive type of Tory back-bencher, Letwin is the object of contempt.

As any investment banker will tell you, share prices in ailing companies rarely go down in a straight line. The process of decline is typically punctuated by periods of stagnation, known by technical experts as a ‘false bottom’. But these treacherous episodes are not nearly as perilous as the moment when a share price in long-term collapse starts to rally. The first two or three tentative bits of good news can be readily discounted. But gradually observers on the sidelines get drawn in, concluding that the stock really has turned the corner. Then the bears or short-sellers start to panic, hurriedly buying back stock to cover their positions, driving the price up yet further. At this stage smaller investors get caught up in the general excitement, completing the virtuous cycle.

Parliament was never designed for glorious weeks of high summer like this one. Its book-lined corridors; its snug bars; its beery, false jocularity; the stench of thwarted ambition; those great thick walls; the badly kept secrets; the formal dress code; those fat, florid, middle-aged men: all this makes Westminster a winter place. Summer weeks like this are about beauty, flirtation, gaiety and sport. Sensible MPs, like Nicholas Soames, Robin Cook and David Cameron (this week singled out by Michael Howard as a man with a great role to play in the future of the Tory party) contemplated escape to Royal Ascot. But the others lingered, made do with drinking cheap Pimm’s on the Commons terrace, and took stock. Liberal Democrats were sour.