Hugo Rifkind

The worry is not that the new head of MI6 is on Facebook. It’s that he looked such a berk It’s the Speedos photograph, isn’t it? That’s the real killer on the Facebook page of the wife of Sir John Sawers, ‘C’, the new head of MI6. The one of her and her daughter doing a burlesque act isn’t great, and the one of her brother with the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving raises its own very special questions, but it’s the Speedos that really make you wince. Because they’re not just any old Speedos, are they? No, they’re the same Speedos, almost down to the piping, that Daniel Craig is wearing when he comes swaggering out of the sea in Casino Royale. They’re James Bond’s Speedos. You know the full body cringe?

Clearly they should just have a different Speaker every time. Like on Have I Got News For You? since they sacked Angus Deayton. Do you remember the one with Sir Trevor Mcdonald? Brilliant. Because we never saw it coming, did we? We all thought, well, they just need to find the right man, somebody with a suitable terse wit, and who isn’t going to appear on the front of the News of The World in the sort of grainy photographs that one now vaguely expects to show a young George Osborne. But no. Turned out you didn’t need a full-time frontman after all. Give them the jokes and a child could do it. Even Neil Kinnock. So why not do the same with the great topical news quiz of SW1? A different celebrity every day. For some reason, the first one that springs to mind is Johnny Vegas.

All that has really changed is that we’re all angry now. It isn’t just students who are cross I’m worried that we are running out of people to hate. It’s all moving too fast. In the space of just a few months, we’ve had bankers and the BBC and the police and now MPs. What’s left for the summer? It’s barely 18 months since we did the House of Lords; we can’t possibly do them again already. Nurses? Trains? Traffic wardens? Something more left-field? A summer of hate against the RSPCA? Mind you, maybe I’m being too hasty. Because, and humour me here, just close your eyes and try to imagine a copy of the Daily Telegraph. Look at the headline. It’s about MPs’ expenses, isn’t it?

As time moves on, and we forget about their slurs and their malice and their rather telling fantasies about seeing George Osborne dressed up as Marlene Dietrich, perhaps what we should remember about Gordon Brown’s inner circle is their control freakery. They don’t trust hospitals to heal, they don’t trust schools to teach, and they don’t even trust scurrilous anonymous blogs to make up their own unsubstantiated gossip. They look out across this land and they see only sheep. Whereas, in fact, we are goats. No, seriously. It’s a good analogy. At least, I think it is. Let’s see. It comes from the great Terry Pratchett. ‘For sheep,’ he wrote, about something entirely different, ‘are stupid, and have to be driven.

It’s the little slights that really hurt. The ones where they just don’t seem to have thought about it. Certainly, we’re all thrilled that the great President Obama has deigned to make a visit to this little island vassal state. But why did he have to bring his own car? We have cars. Loads of them. And the thing is, Barack, ours even drive on the correct side of the road. Granted, they aren’t all so proficient at, say, withstanding a direct hit from an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) as your multi-ton behemoth (dubbed ‘The Beast’), but you’d be amazed at the number of RPGs we don’t have floating around in the UK. Or assault weapons of any sort, really.

I’m a convert to shoe-throwing, and its power. But I bet they ban shoes in public pretty soon Where do we stand, then, on shoe-throwing? Me, I’m in two minds. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, I dunno, I think he carried it off. At least he threw both, and at least he was in the Middle East. Whatever happened next, is my point, at least he didn’t have to hop. At least he didn’t have a clammy sock. I do not yet know the name of the 27-year-old man who lobbed a shoe at Wen Jiabao on Monday, but I do know, from the pictures, that he only threw the one. And, more pertinently, he was in Cambridge. It can’t have been nice in Cambridge on Monday. It wasn’t nice anywhere on Monday. Did he bring a spare shoe? Was he expecting the Chinese Premier to throw his shoe back?

What are we to make of the disquieting information that Ehud Barak’s favoured pastime, when not waging war, politicking or dressing as a woman, is the dismantling and reassembling of clocks? ‘That’s really creepy,’ I said to the wife, when somebody on Newsnight mentioned it while we were watching it in bed. ‘It makes him sound like Sylar.’ Sylar, of course, is the super-powered serial killer from the hit US series Heroes. Prior to discovering his powers, he was a watch repairman. These days, he can fling you across a room with a twitch of his hand, shoot flames from his palms, and use a finger to open your skull like a can of soup. ‘Not so,’ said the wife, who was reading a book, but had heard enough. ‘Sylar is a professional.

I dread to think why a Liberal Democrat would want to impersonate a traffic warden. It wouldn’t just be to get free parking. Not with them. It would have to be a sex thing. Some kind of NCP-themed bondage dungeon; an underground den kitted out to look like an underground car park. ‘You’ve been a very naughty motorist.’ Yes, traffic mistress. ‘You’ve been feeding your meter, haven’t you?’ Yes, traffic mistress. ‘So what is to be your punishment? The double-yellow, or a clamp on your red route?’ Both, traffic mistress... Gaaaargh. Gaaargh and aaaaargh. But hold. Because you probably don’t actually know what I’m talking about, do you? At least, not if you live in Britain. Elsewhere in the world, you might.

If there really is a secret Zionist brotherhood running the world, why aren’t I a member? I know that the Iranian regime is famously confused about quite a lot of things, but if they are right about David Miliband being a member of a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, I’ll be absolutely livid. That bloody man has all the luck, doesn’t he? I’ve been waiting to be invited into the secret brotherhood of Jews who rule the world for years now. Nothing. Not a kosher sausage. Not a big-nosed sniff. Although I did once have a very weird conversation with Vanessa Feltz. It was at the party after a premiere of some sort at the London Film Festival a few years ago, and I found myself next to her in the coat queue.

I’m not saying these are bad people. Just that they are fat They say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both Eskimos and snow, on holiday down in the sun-drenched dogleg of Florida. I’m wondering, these Americans, can they really only have a handful of words for ‘fat’? Forgive the predictable observation, but there are just so many different types. I can see many from the window of my hotel room, down there on the shore watching the startlingly noisy, don’t-book-a-room-next-door, annual Key West World Championship Power Boat race. Arse fat, neck fat, hip fat, thigh fat.

The grimmest assessment of the world economic meltdown that I have seen came not from a banker or a politician or a pundit, but from Kristian, a 53-year-old Icelandic fisherman quoted in the Times. ‘The priorities went askew,’ he sighed. ‘We thought we could have jam on our bread every day of the week.’ God. Think about that. Couldn’t the pathos of it just make you weep? Not even toast, you’ll notice. Bread. Toast is a stuff of which the Icelandic fisherman has yet to dream. Had the glacial streams run sluggish with diamonds, had the cod grown golden teeth and scales of silver, ah yes, that would have been a time for toast. In a mere unprecedented economic boom, bread was luxury enough. Bread with jam.

‘Would you be interested,’ said the startlingly eager girl at the Birmingham conference centre, ‘in recording a message in the Conservative Video Box?’ God, I was pleased about that. There I was, neither a blond female, nor a read- ily identifiable member of an ethnic minority, and still the flunky reckoned I was the kind of person they wanted on film. It must have been the new suit. It’s grey, and sharp as daggers. You know. The kind of suit you might wear if you are an aspiring young Tory, and Central Office puts you up for a photoshoot in Tatler, which they will then sneeringly disown. That kind of suit. Plus, I shaved off my beard the other week, before I went to the Labour party conference.

OK. I’ll be honest. It’s been a bad fortnight, and I simply don’t understand any of the things you might expect me to be writing about. I don’t understand the fuss about teaching creationism in schools, because I can’t see that it would take very long. (‘God did it. Don’t go to the Galapagos. Class dismissed.’) In fact, I don’t understand anything about creationists at all. I don’t understand why there are suddenly so many of them if nobody even goes to church, and I don’t understand whether Sarah Palin is a creationist, or isn’t one, or how it can be possible for this to be in any way vague. I also don’t understand why the Church of England is apologising to Darwin, even though he is dead.