The Spectator

‘Sleaze has been the dominant factor throughout,’ declared the opposition, ‘and sleaze has been the end issue. Nothing better encapsulates what people think of this government. Sleaze will be one of the things that brings this government down.’ The opposition in question was New Labour and the government was Conservative. A decade on, with poetic symmetry, the positions are reversed: it is the supposedly irreproachable Gordon Brown who presides over a party mired in allegations of evasion, lies and outright criminality. In his memoirs, John Major correctly identifies the lethal quality of the word ‘sleaze’: ‘it fed the public belief that the Conservative party as an institution had been in power too long, and had got into bad habits.

Nick Robinson has a great little story about when Gordon Brown’s photo shoot with  the fashion photographer David Bailey. My favourite story of the week comes from the studios of David Bailey where the daddy of all photographers was taking pictures of the PM for the magazine GQ. "Do you use ever use digital instead of film?" asked Brown's right hand woman Sue Nye. "Nah" drawled Bailey "digital's like socialism - it flattens everything out and makes everything the same". Bailey's laughter at his own joke was met, I'm told, by an explanation that that's not really what socialism was… Well at least the Labour left will be glad to see Team Brown defending socialism.

From 6:45 PM Spectator.co.uk will be broadcasting the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared debate on whether or not Britain needs its Trident nuclear weapons system. Speakers include Baroness Helena Kennedy, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the SNP spokesman Angus Robertson and Times columnist Oliver Kamm. The event will be chaired by Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian. Listen live from 6:45pm.

Lord of works Sir: Your profile of Lord Malloch-Brown was grossly unfair (‘Labour’s lord of the perks’, 10 November). I have known him since 1979 when, at the age of 26, he built and ran the Khao I Dang refugee camp in Thailand. Over 100,000 Cambodian refugees had reason to be very grateful for his superb work. Since then he has had a large number of significant international assignments, at the World Bank, the United Nations and elsewhere. He has enormous experience, particularly of the problems of poverty and international development. In recent years he has been very critical of US policies, including towards Iraq. I disagree with these views but they do not make him viscerally anti-American, as is now being claimed.