The Spectator

Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, said that she had signed without asking any questions a form that her husband, Mr David Mills, used to gain a mortgage for a house, which he repaid a month later with an alleged bribe of £340,000 from Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. Mr Mills denies receiving such a payment; an Italian prosecutor is investigating the allegation. Mr Ken Livingstone was suspended for four weeks as Mayor of London by the Adjudication Panel for England when it found that he had brought his office into disrepute by saying to a reporter who had told him he was Jewish and worked for the London Evening Standard, ‘Actually you are just like a concentration camp guard. You are just doing it because you are paid to, aren’t you?

For a politician to invite the television cameras into his home is a risky business. An inexperienced Mrs Thatcher in 1975 merely had to open her larder to the nation to find herself accused of hoarding food. Tony Blair was criticised for the heavily draped curtains in his former Islington home, and John Major’s conservatory impressed nobody but the double-glazing industry. Some Conservatives will have been dismayed that David Cameron, too, has fallen for the temptation to be filmed in a domestic situation, even if his kitchen has proved to be a model of sensible, restrained taste. They will argue that it confirms their concerns that the new Conservative leader is a triumph of style over substance. We do not share this view of David Cameron.

A clause to criminalise the ‘glorification’ of terrorism, which had been removed from the Terrorism Bill by the Lords, was reinstated when the Bill was passed in the Commons by a majority of 38, with only 17 Labour MPs voting against the government. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the vote, ‘The type of demonstrations that we saw a couple of weeks ago, where I think there were placards and images that people in this country felt were totally offensive, the law will allow us to deal with those people and say, “Look, we have free speech in this country, but don't abuse it”.

A grim inevitability hangs over the country as we go to press. Some time over the next week or two the first dead swan of spring will be pulled from the rushes in the south of England, taken to a laboratory and declared to have perished from the H5N1 virus. From that moment on, the news virtually writes itself. Exclusion zones will be formed, schools and businesses closed, bridleways sealed off. Poultry farmers will be imprisoned in their homes, children’s budgies seized and put to death before their wailing owners. Country fairs will be called off, hunting and shooting will cease, and there will be demands for the Grand National and the Cup Final to be cancelled.

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, began speaking about all sorts of things outside his ministerial responsibility: security, identity cards, patriotism, a proposed Veterans’ Day each 27 June. The phrase ‘dual premiership’ came up in a question put by the Observer to Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary; in answer to which he said, ‘That’s what Tony would always want, what Gordon should do.

Mustafa Kemal Mustafa, known as Abu Hamza, the hook-handed Muslim cleric, aged 47, was sentenced to seven years in jail on six charges of soliciting to murder, two charges of ‘using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred’, a charge of possessing video and audio recordings intended for distribution to stir up racial hatred, and a charge under the Terrorism Act 2000 of possessing a document, the Encyclopaedia of the Afghani Jihad, containing information ‘of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. He was acquitted on three other charges of soliciting to murder and one of stirring up racial hatred.

We are not publishing the cartoons which caused such offence after they appeared in Denmark, and we believe other British newspapers are right not to have published them. There is a history of irreverence at The Spectator, but there is a difference between irreverence and causing gratuitous offence. Why humiliate members of another faith by ridiculing what they hold most sacred? Some have said the cartoons had to be published, or republished, to uphold the right of freedom of speech. But this is not an issue of free speech; neither our government nor any other European government has sought to ban the publication of the cartoons. This magazine opposed the Religious Hatred Bill, and reaffirms that position.

The government was twice defeated in the Commons in votes on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, making its provisions less broad. The government produced a form with a box to tick for people who wanted to prevent life-saving treatment being given them in future; this was according to the Mental Capacity Act, 2004, which comes into effect in 2007. A White Paper on health proposed treating more people outside large hospitals; but a question of funding remained. Mr David Blunkett, the disgraced former Cabinet minister, said his ‘sense is that there is a new understanding’ between Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Mr Gordon Brown about the latter replacing the former; ‘So good on them,’ Mr Blunkett said.

The success of Hamas in the elections for the Palestinian Authority has provided a joyous opportunity for that small but sizeable body of opinion in the West which considers the Arab world unfit for democracy. The sight of the terrorist leaders celebrating their election win tempts some otherwise sober people to sympathise with those malcontents on Oxbridge high tables who mutter longingly about the days when the world was ruled by kings and princes; by friendly, if not always benign, dictatorships. It is beyond question that the events of the past week have proved a huge embarrassment for the neoconservative project, and for President Bush in particular.