Piers Morgan

If you have started to fear that Tesco, that rampaging retail beast, is running the country, then you may be right. Let me explain. When Time magazine made everyone who uses the internet their ‘Person of the Year’ last month, it got us all thinking about the nature of ‘power’ in the modern technological age. In pre-internet days, power was fairly easily definable. Politicians and newspaper proprietors essentially ran the country, because they decided how we led our lives, how we got our news, and how we thought. But the emergence of the world wide web has changed everything.

If I meet one more smug, smirking pro-war protagonist who greets me with that 'Hey, peacenik – you must feel a right prat' look, I fear I shall arm myself with a few of those elusive WMDs and take out whole swaths of Wapping, Kensington and Downing Street. If there's one thing worse than the world's most powerful military force waging an unlawful, unethical war against a clapped-out old tyrant's ragbag excuse for an army, then it's surely the quite absurd rash of gloating and triumphalism that has engulfed large parts of our country. I am all for saluting the efficiency and bravery of the armed forces in doing their job, but did anybody really ever doubt that we'd win the military conflict?

And so to Blackpool. But how? Train: disgracefully expensive, probably delayed, full of broadsheet journalists (apart from the Independent), possibility of being jumped in the buffet carriage by a beaming Richard Branson dispensing pork pies. Car: long, boring, held up by roadworks and impoverished Independent journalists in jalopies. Plane: ten minutes from Canary Wharf to City airport, no queues, prompt 40-minute flight. And, most crucially, via Manchester. Now, I won't labour the football in a rugger bugger's bible, but the last time I went to Manchester was in May to see Arsenal win the double in Sir Alex Ferguson's backyard. Better than sex?