Boris Johnson

I’m not sure about this old ship business,’ said Marina. ‘Where’s the love-interest? Why can’t we go and see the Hugh Grant thing?’ ‘No no,’ I said, ‘I know it’s all about ships, but it’s gonna be great. Trust me.’ And I was right. They must be wizards, the people who filmed that Master and Commander. If we were to believe our senses, they had constructed two fully working ships of the line and sailed them into the mountainous seas off Cape Horn. As for the battle scenes, you haven’t seen such hyperkinetic violence since Saving Private Ryan.

As I was staggering round Highbury Fields in a pair of shorts, I saw one I knew and hailed him crying, 'Tom!', because it was Tom Baldwin, the political reporter of the Times and arch-friend of Alastair Campbell. To my surprise, there was not a flicker on those Shelleyesque features. He continued his stride. 'Tom!' I shouted again. Had he somehow failed to recognise me, at a distance of a few feet? Could it be, even at 8 a.m., that he was under the influence of some stimulant? It was only when I started jumping up and down in front of him, sticking both thumbs up, way up, and shouting 'Hey!' that I suddenly understood. He was cutting me. I was being cut dead. Thus has the war of Gilligan's scoop set hack against hack, brother against brother.

That Lord Woolf, he has a bit of a cheek, doesn't he? I don't know if you caught his intervention in the Criminal Justice Bill debate the other night, but it was the usual stuff. He excoriated the politicians (David Blunkett) for trying to fetter the discretion of the judges. He was appalled, said the Lord Chief Justice, by the attempts of these vote-grubbing politicos to erode a vital judicial freedom. 'The present proposal will have the effect of increasing political interference,' he said. Well, much as we may admire his liberal instincts, it strikes me that his lordship's words admit of a paradox. Where was he situated when he made those remarks? On the red benches of the Upper House, as Parliament debated a piece of government legislation.

Baghdad We could tell something was up as soon as we approached the petrol station. There was an American tank parked amid a big crowd of jerrycan-toting Iraqis. Unusually, the soldiers were down and walking around, guns at the ready. Then I heard shouting and saw the Americans using their carbines like staves to push back some of the customers, who were evidently trying their luck. Just then a black sergeant near me started shouting at an Iraqi. 'You, I've told you to get away from there,' he said, swinging his gun round. The Iraqi appeared to be a phone technician, with pliers and a handset.

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.

Chris Patten is used to rudeness. When he was the last governor of Hong Kong, the Chinese used to call him a 'jade-faced prostitute' and a 'tango-dancer for a thousand years', and other baffling insults. In these very pages he is called EU Marshal Chris PZtain, a byword for general sell-outery. To the neo-conservatives of Washington, he is the consummate Euro-weenie, ever warning us of the dangers of American 'unilateralism' and the risks of duffing up Iraq. To a certain kind of British Conservative polemicist, he shows an excessive willingness to listen to the claims of Palestinian terrorists and Irish republican murderers.

The Saudi ambassador tells Boris Johnson that America is hated and war on Iraq is mad 'No, no,' says the Saudi ambassador, 'this is how you do it. You cannot lift your arm above the shoulder, and you must do it sideways.' He moves alongside, a big man with a faint resemblance to Leon Brittan, and makes a thwacking motion. Meet Ghazi Algosaibi, 62, a poet and author, the Arab world's leading envoy to London, who has recently earned not just a personal rebuke from Jack Straw, but the demands of the Jewish Board of Deputies that he be expelled from the country. Mr Algosaibi recently wrote an ode to a suicide bomber (which prompted the rebuke). In the last two hours, in the lacquered mudZjar comfort of his Curzon Street embassy, he has been fluently denouncing the West.