Matthew Dancona

Am I about to become the ‘Spectator One’? Having cleared the first airport-style security check at the US Embassy on Upper Grosvenor Street, I reach a second perimeter inside the building itself. This time the X-ray machine picks up a mysterious electronic device inside my briefcase which turns out to be a mobile phone I do not recognise. Uh-oh. Here I am, on my way to interview the American ambassador, and there is a stray mobile in my case — a potential trigger device, as everyone around me is thinking, but not saying. Not good. Hushed calls are made, a Marine frowns and a plainclothes officer straight out of 24 whisks me off to the so-called security ‘igloo’ so that every single item in my case can be checked meticulously.

Philip Bobbitt tells Matthew d’Ancona, we must start from scratch if we are to beat the terrorists Cometh the war, cometh the guru. South of Baghdad, insurgents shoot down a US helicopter, killing two US servicemen, days after five British military servicemen died when their Lynx was brought down in Basra. Iran’s President scornfully rejects the EU’s latest desperate bid to stop him building nuclear weapons. A parliamentary report on the 7 July bombings reveals terrible intelligence errors. The Afghan foreign minister complains that Osama bin Laden is still at large in Pakistan. A war on many fronts: but are we winning? Step forward Philip Bobbitt, a tall, immaculately dressed 57-year-old Texan scholar, who now spends most of his time in London.

Beverly HillsThere is a global village, but the bad news for the environmentalists is that it is bound together by hatred of rising fuel prices. My cabby in London says exactly the same as the driver who takes me from LAX to my hotel: £1 a litre, or $3 a gallon, the outrage respects no borders. We are the world, as the song says — and we demand cheap gas. To the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Elton John and David Furnish are throwing a party for Dylan Jones, editor of GQ. It is a beautiful balmy night and the guests spill out into the hotel’s famous gardens, where the scent of orange blossom and bougainvillea mingles with spicy Hollywood gossip.

When Alan Milburn returned to the Cabinet in September 2004, explicitly tasked to run Labour’s general election campaign, Gordon Brown’s advisers were amazed by the Chancellor’s composed response to such a bloody-minded act of provocation by the Prime Minister. ‘Gordon was very strategic about it,’ one aide recalls. ‘He said Milburn would fall out of favour with the parliamentary party and the activists, and that it would be a shambles.’ The Brownites are nothing if not thorough, however. So a superbly orchestrated campaign of assassination was mounted just to make sure that Mr Brown’s prophecy came true: a campaign that became known around Westminster as ‘Kill Mil’.

Matthew d’Ancona recalls a very odd meeting with the two men who have dared to take Dan Brown to court — and their spooky theory about the European Community Much the strangest journalistic encounter I have ever had took place more than a decade ago at the Westminster restaurant known in those days as L’Amico. It was the sort of bistro that old-fashioned Tory MPs found congenial, serving traditional Italian fare, with nooks and crannies in which to plot. The dinner in question took place in a private room, and the invitees were a motley right-of-centre bunch, gathered to give advice to two very unusual guests. And seeing the pair on the news every evening in the past few weeks has brought it all flooding back.