David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

A green light for red-light areas

If you're male and well endowed, then the next time you're in Stockholm Mimmi would like you to call. “I'm an elegant sexy Swedish woman,” she tells visitors to her website, “that [sic] is turned on by seducing men...” The rate for each seduction is €560 per hour, so the large bulge needs to be in the region of the wallet.

I know what you're thinking. Didn't you read somewhere that Sweden had made the purchase of sex illegal, and that so successful had this policy been that the British Government was contemplating similar legislation in this country? Mimmi, therefore, shouldn't exist, let alone boast a blog in which you can see her completing the Gothenburg half-marathon dressed in lacy underwear. Mimmi, however, understands the law. “I am not selling sexual services,” she reassures would-be, er, friends, “but offer company and intercourse. Since it is very difficult to prove what two people are doing when they are alone in a room, meeting with me is relatively safe...”

In January 1999 the Swedes made it illegal to pay for sex (but not to sell it). The punishment for the crime of obtaining casual sex for compensation could be as high as six months in Scando-clink, though a fine would be more usual. The sex can be any kind of sexual act involving contact and encompasses homosexual as well as heterosexual encounters. To prosecute the (usually) male clients successfully, the Swedish police must produce evidence of a prior agreement for compensation - which need not be financial. The word “casual” here leaves open the intriguing possibility that men or women who pay their spouses for sex are deliberately exempted.

Mimmi's invitation indicates one kind of problem with the law. But the Swedish authorities are, nevertheless, evangelical about their unique policy; their representatives claim massive reductions in street prostitution since 1999. One often-used statistic - repeated in this country - is that by 2004 Sweden had only 500 street prostitutes, while Denmark, which is half the size, had between 6,000 and 8,000. And it could be, with the opening yesterday of the Suffolk murders trial and the current concern over human-trafficking, that the British people might support measures that would lead to such a reduction.

The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Kingsley Amis's son has always had plenty of people to hate him. His imagined patrimony, his early success, his implausible virtuosity and his fearlessness have ensured that many who weren't actually offended by him were envious.

It was probably inevitable that Martin Amis would attract the bitter dislike of the more ideologically policed section of the liberal-left intelligentsia. In the past couple of years there has been a slow excommunication from the broad church - with good reviews turned into bad in the London Review of Books - and then last year, the full auto-da-f� - conducted principally in The Guardian, with members of the round-robinocracy, led by Terry Eagleton, waiting their turn to add a faggot to the flames.

Amis's apostasy was not, as it was with others, over the Iraq War. This collection of writings mostly from newspapers on events since September 11, 2001, reminds readers that he always opposed the invasion. In March 2003, he gave warning that the “intellectually null” George Bush, “a tax-cutting dry drunk from West Texas” was leading his country into a disastrous trap, ineluctably provoking, inter alia, “an additional generation of terror from militant Islam”. If Amis is open to any criticism over Iraq, it is that he explores Saddam Hussein's science-fiction bloodiness - as he does in the short story In the Palace of the End - without the slightest realistic notion of how it might be brought to a conclusion.

The proximate cause of Amis's being run out of Lib-town was an interview that he had given to Ginny Dougary of this newspaper. In it he examined his own emotional and political reaction to the London bombings and confessed to a punitive urge - “don't you feel it?” - to somehow force the Muslim community to get its house in order. These were the sentiments described by Eagleton as being appropriate to a “British National Party thug”.

White woman v black man. One's got problems

By late tonight (Iranian gunboats permitting) Barack Obama could be the surf-away leader for the Democratic presidential nomination - carried there not so much on a wave, as in a gush. How odd it is that we in the West seem to have only two ways of thinking about politics - either supreme cynicism or supreme credulousness.

Mr Obama, wrote the usually super-sour Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, offers Americans “a cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent West Wing sort of president”, and the struggle between him and Hillary Clinton is a battle between Love and Hate with Mrs C representing the other thing.

Andrew Sullivan, a well-known US-based liberal-right blogger, opined post-Iowa that “sometimes, elections really do come down to a simple choice: change or more of the same?”. In his view Mr Obama “has what Reagan had in 1980 and Clinton had in 1992: the wind at his back”. “A man who pardons the original sin of the slave and who holds up a mirror to America in which she is beautiful, multiracial and pragmatic,” commented a French newspaper.

Other writers projected into the Iowa caucus victory nothing less than an end to the “culture wars” and now tedious conflict between the opposing strands of the baby-boomer generation: the Haight-Ashbury hippies and the Rush Limbaugh rednecks. One usually sober Britisher seemed to suggest that the responsibility for the hatreds that have divided Americans socially rested almost entirely with two families: the Bushes and the Clintons. Now, with the help of galvanised youth, Mr Obama could transcend all this.

The Year in Ideas: It’s all about Iran

Towards the end of 2007, in the Iranian city of Kermanshah, the authorities put to death a young man of 21 for the crime of sodomy. The importance of this act of judicial murder was not primarily that the man had been a boy of 13 when the “crime” had been committed, nor that had Makvan Mouloodzadeh been born a citizen of most other countries in the world he would still be alive. It was that a nullification of the sentence as unIslamic by the Iranian Chief Justice was then overturned by a group of judges convened as the Special Supervision Bureau of the Iranian Justice Department.

In 2008, this divided administration, with its wildly competing understandings of what is and isn’t Islamic, will be continuing a programme of enriching the uranium necessary for the creation of a nuclear weapon while continuing to refuse access to the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In the same year, the international community will have to decide whether it wants to intensify its attempts to prevent this, or to give up and allow the gradual development of an Islamist bomb – 2008 will be the year of Iran.

In defence of hymn-singing atheists

At my daughter's Christmas concert on Monday night, none of the Tamil parents knew the words to the carols, so the Jews had to sing twice as loud. The next morning I read Libby Purves's elegant reproach to the great atheist Richard Dawkins on his admission that he too enjoys belting out Away in a Manger. “How honest is it to sing?” she demanded of Professor Dawkins. “How insulting to those who mean every word of it?”

This made me uneasy about the carolling Jews. True, they absolutely don't rubbish God, but Jews explicitly deny the possibility of Jesus being the Messiah, and therefore presumably ought to worry about causing offence to true believers when singing this, as they did: “Late in time behold Him come/ Offspring of a Virgin's womb/ Veiled in flesh the Godhead see/Hail the incarnate Deity.” You'll recognise there Charles Wesley's own interesting preoccupation with carnality, as well as one of the most famous not quite rhyming couplets in schoolboy history.

Fortunately both Jews and Hindu Tamils were — for reasons of time, I imagine — spared the verse from Once in Royal David's City, where the young Jesus's imagined relationship with his Virgin mother is extolled, continuing: “Christian children all must be/Mild, obedient, good as he.”

The author of the carol was a Victorian Ulsterwoman, C.F. Alexander, the wife of the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, and Mrs Alexander was not averse to supplementing the scriptures when she felt the Spirit demanded it. In the version of Once in Royal David's City that we did sing on Monday, the final verse ended thus: “When like stars His children crowned/All in white shall wait around.” Now, it's been years since I took biblical instruction, but I am not aware of any authority for the exact colour of the clothes to be worn in Heaven by those eternally “waiting around”. Like any songwriter Mrs Alexander had just made it up.

It seems a bit harsh, therefore, to make belief any kind of test for joining in the song. Worse, I would say that anyone who “means every word of it”, given the provenance of many words, has problems much bigger than whether a Professor R. Dawkins denies God.

And it also raises a question over Libby's suggestion that Prof D might be more honest if he stuck to “a verse or two of Frosty the Snowman”. This an interesting parallel, since this, too, is a tale of resurrection, in which Frosty finally, “Had to hurry on his way/But he waved goodbye saying/‘Don't you cry, I'll be back again some day'.” And songwriters Jack Nelson and Steve Rollins had no less supernatural backing for their words than did Mrs Alexander, so one perhaps ought to add that Professor Dawkins may only sing their song if confident that he isn't in the company of those who believe that Frosty the Snowman is real.

Be liberal, but not with the facts

Yesterday, the day on which the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer of Thoroton effectively killed the Government's 42-day detention plan, was also the 43rd day that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito spent in custody in Italy in connection with the Meredith Kercher case.

I mention Knox and Sollecito, neither of whom have been charged, because their situation casts some light on the way the debate on detention has been conducted in Britain. Readers may remember that Liberty recently released a report “carried out by lawyers and academics in 15 countries” claiming that Britain had, in effect, the most draconian detention laws in the Western world. Using the hyperbole routinely deployed on these occasions, Liberty claimed that its report “exploded self-serving assertions about extended detention in inquisitorial Europe”, and made “embarrassing reading for all of us in the land that gave Magna Carta to the world”.

Although Liberty's intervention received the usual respectful attention from the liberal press, it was still pointed out in some places that countries with different judicial systems - as in the case of Italy - seemed to permit detention before charge for much longer periods than even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was minded to call for. Ah, said Liberty, you don't understand, such objections had “confused pre-charge detention with detention pending trial”. A helpful graphic in one paper repeated the Liberty figure for Italy for pre-charge detention as “four days”.

You may notice here what would seem - to the person on the Clapham omnibus - to be a semantic sleight of hand. In Italy you can be held for month after month without formal charge as long as you are understood to be “pre-trial”, during which time sufficient evidence may be found to convict you or, if not, you may be released. And Italy is lauded as being more liberal than Britain for systematically holding suspects for far longer than our Government is seeking to do on an exceptional basis.

Shadowy donors — or generous? (Jewish Chronicle)

One of the curiosities of the Abrahams affair was the suggestion that it all had to do, somehow, with Jewish power, through (naturally) the less obviously Protocol-ish medium of support for Israel. There was the Telegraph front page showing Mr Abrahams in intriguing proximity to the Israeli ambassador while the story wondered where his money had come from. And there was my old colleague from my Independent days, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, constructing a shadowy edifice from the convergence of Abrahams, Labour Friends of Israel and Gordon Brown’s chief fundraiser, Jon Mendelsohn.

Ms A-B anticipated that her bravery in raising unpalatable truths would lead to her being traduced by the obvious people, and I would certainly not want to disappoint her. Especially since my mind turned not on the differences between Mr Abrahams and Yasmin, but their rather obvious similarities. Suppose that the idea of the Jewish/Zionist power play was in fact a cover — albeit unconscious — for an even more uncomfortable reality?

It seems to me to be rather obvious — though I don’t know the man — that Mr Abrahams is someone who uses his money and contacts as others might use platform shoes, as a means of elevation in the eyes of a dangerously indifferent world. And why not? Isn’t that also one reason why I write and robins sing?

How to be a mad dictator

Gordon Brown was right not to go to Lisbon at the weekend, but even so, there was something marvellous about seeing Robert Mugabe being Merkelled in the flesh by the German Chancellor. There, impassive, he was forced to sit while Frau Angela told him, in front of 70 African and European leaders, what a shower he was. Whether it improves anything or not, is another matter, but it felt good.

Four weeks earlier there had been a rather similar moment during the Ibero-American summit in Chile. Hugo Chavez, the populist President of Venezuela, had been laying about him with his characteristic lack of restraint. Jose Aznar, the former Prime Minister of Spain, was, according to President Ch�vez, a fascist, and, he added, “fascists are not human. A snake is more human”. When the current Spanish PM - an opponent of Mr Aznar's - objected to this abuse, Chavez continued to shout. It was at this point that the King of Spain, Juan Carlos, leant forward and told Chavez to shut his big, fat, sloppy gob. My Spanish is poor, but it was something like that. JC's admonition has become a popular ringtone around the world.

This symmetry appealed to me because, though Chavez's Venezuela is not yet anything like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, I cannot help thinking that Mugabe is Chavez's possible future, and that the 83-year-old former liberation fighter is the former general's Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Mugabe, like Chavez, took power after elections that were widely agreed to have been fairly conducted. Over time his governing philosophy came to consist of an economic nationalism underpinning a state socialist system, mobilised by exploiting resentment towards a privileged minority (the whites), treacherous elites (journalists) and interfering foreign powers (Britain).

The Zidane moment of madness

For Christmas I would like a special writer's present. This would be the uninhibited capacity to be able to write sentences about stench and stink and sleaze and about how politics is enmired in corruption, or else about how government is terminally incompetent and useless — and to get this stuff into boisterous print, before the treacherous and debilitating thought occurs to me (as it invariably does), that perhaps there is something more to it all than venal politicos and unemployable public servants. Scruple diminishes the effect of all too many a column.

Criticism — reproach, even — comes easily enough; satisfying condemnation, however, I tend to reserve for actions, statements or falsehoods I couldn't readily have made myself. I somehow just can't slaughter someone just for messing up, because I also mess up, and in circumstances far simpler than those faced by prime ministers or generals. Was Wendy Alexander, Labour's Scottish leader, attempting deliberately to subvert the law for the sake of £950 from a chap in the Channel Islands? I doubt it.

Sometimes, however, there is a kind of messing up that goes beyond my understanding. And you think: “How on God's green Earth can that have happened?” Two of the Government's recent debacles fit into this uncomprehended category: the case of the lost discs and the affair of the general secretary. Let us take them in reverse order.

No real sex please, we're ironic

Later today the luminary authorities who run the magazine The Literary Review will — for the 15th time — announce the winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The original object of this prize was to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. Clearly this is a long-term project because, as I write, those who are threatened with receiving the unwanted gong in front of a sniggering audience include the novelists Iain Banks, Norman Mailer, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson, as well as Ian McEwan for his detailed descriptions of various low-key sexual fumblings in On Chesil Beach.

Allow me now to draw a line of connection — one that is going to seem tenuous. Just last Friday the Health Protection Agency reported on an important aspect of non-fictional sex. This was that, in 2006, the number of sexually transmitted infections (or STIs) rose to 620,000, up by 2.4 per cent on the previous year. It estimated that 73,000 people in Britain live with HIV, one third of whom are unaware that they even have the virus. Nor is this, as some like to imagine, about African migrants; among gay men there were 2,700 new diagnoses of HIV in 2007. Naturally, young adults accounted for a high level of infections, including genital warts (the virus for which is linked to cervical cancer), gonorrhoea and chlamydia.

It's possible, of course, that the greater effort put into screening is partly responsible for the year-on-year rise. Even if this is the case, we are still left pondering a British paradox: how does it come about that there is so much sex in the culture and yet so little knowledge of how to prevent oneself getting or passing on this life-threatening virus or that unpleasant germ? Since this is my column, I will dispense peremptorily with the eternal lobby that links disease with “too much” sex education and argues that if we knew even less about sex, then we'd be less likely to do it so often. They would not apply such logic to any other realm of human existence.

Not all hypocrisies are equal (Jewish Chronicle)

Every week, when I open my JC, there to seems to be an article about how many frummers there are these days. Millions of ’em, cluttering up Jewish schools, congregating in Jerusalem to persecute gays, and breeding like Catholics. Soon, the subtext seems to be, they will have taken over Jewishness from its rightful owners, that great amorphous group whose main distinction is that it isn’t Orthodox. And then where will we be?

It may be that, as someone on the far edge of all this, I have got my anthropology wrong. And maybe not. There was a wonderful episode of the sophisticated American comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which the Jewish anti-hero needed to schmooze the director of a private hospital into bumping a friend up the queue for kidney transplants. This director is frum, so David puts on his kopel and peppers his speech with achs and schpls in order to suggest that he is also Orthodox. Unfortunately, his plan unravels when he is stuck on a ski-lift with the frummer’s daughter, who — unwilling to be alone with a man after sundown — jumps and breaks her leg.

As ever, David captures both the comedy of the subject, and the hypocrisy of its critic. When I first heard the word frummer, some 25 years ago, it was from a Hackney Jew, who used as a child to earn money on Shabbat from doing the things for the Orthodox that they weren’t allowed to do for themselves. As he recounted the list of switchings-on and off and lavatory flushings, it became clear to me that he didn’t respect his employers at all. There was, in his voice, a mixture of contempt for their superstitions and resentment that they didn’t seem to care what happened to his soul as a result of all his rewarded infractions.

Tony Blair: The war? I believed in it, I believed in it then, I believe in it now

Months ago, when I knew I would be interviewing Tony Blair for a series of programmes on BBC One, I would ask friends, politicians and other journalists what questions they most wanted put to the former Prime Minister. Reduced to its essentials, the answer would almost invariably be the same one, “Why, really, did you go to war in Iraq?” Today this, as far as I can tell, is what happened.

When Tony Blair became Leader of the Opposition in 1994, he — like Margaret Thatcher — knew little about foreign policy. What he did have was a series of instincts about how the Major Government and the international community had handled affairs in Bosnia, and he wasn’t impressed. Ever the anti-fatalist, once in office he was inclined to see such problems as requiring a solution. And passing across his desk in autumn 1997 were a series of intelligence reports concerning the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction. “We cannot let him get away with it,” he told Paddy Ashdown that November.

Although military force short of invasion was used several times against Iraq in the following years, the first killing ground was to be the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999. When a campaign of airstrikes against Milosevic’s Serbia seemed to be getting nowhere, Blair began to agitate for Nato to threaten the use of ground troops and eventually persuaded a very reluctant Bill Clinton to agree to such a line. Two days later Milosevic backed down. The lesson that Blair took from this, he told me, was that the credible and united threat to use force could succeed where all else failed. In fact he didn’t believe that Clinton would have carried out the threat.

As the Kosovo crisis developed, Blair had delivered a major foreign policy speech in Chicago that spring. This address outlined a doctrine of liberal interventionism, arguing that there were circumstances when, though its interests were not directly threatened, the international community might intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. The speech singled out two major villains: Milosevic and Saddam. One critic of Blair’s foreign policy activism was — I was reminded by a senior Blair aide — then an academic at Stamford, Condoleezza Rice.

Why ditch Blairite foreign policy?

There is much to admire about David Cameron: the hair, the skin, the sticking to the task when the going was hard, the job-creation schemes for John Redwood and Boris Johnson. I attend gatherings full of Labour nervousness or Tory optimism and note that, among the trendies at any rate, shares in Brown are at Northern Rock levels and Cameron, in bright Bermudas, surfs the political rollers.

Mr Cameron has done well. And insofar as we may discern a Cameroonian ideology, it could be said to be Blairism sans Blair. This is sensible, because the former Prime Minister, while outstaying the patience of the political classes, was always located by voters as the politician whose instincts were closest to their own. So Mr Cameron is big on academies, big on choice, big on tolerance, big on “leadership”. He has done well.

It has been interesting, then, to see the most obvious aspect of Tony Blair's leadership legacy — his foreign policy — subtly disowned by the Tory leader. Three weeks ago, visiting Germany, Mr Cameron gave a speech outlining his new principles of conservative action abroad. His first principle was that “to help protect international security, any state must put its own national security first”. “Every good military commander,” Mr Cameron opined, authoritatively, “understands that no campaign will succeed unless you secure your home base first.” The 7/7 bombers, he declared by way of evidence, were British citizens, not Iraqi agents.

Consequently we had to beef up the “four types” of domestic security — institutional, cultural, economic and physical. We had to have a clearer and more confident national identity like, er, India (his choice, not mine, though China would have been a more honest example), we had to promote national cohesion, bear down on those who threaten said cohesion and strengthen our border protection.

Love from Lisbon – an explosive package

Sometimes in politics (though rarely in journalism) your sins will find you out. One of the lessons that Tony Blair says he learnt from his time in office was how his choices were affected and constrained by what he had said in opposition. He thinks he spent a lot of time undoing the effect of claiming that it was “standards, not structures” in education, reintroducing a previously abused internal market into the NHS, and now believes that he ended up suffering from Labour's successful pre-'97 taunting of John Major's Government as having been “sleazy”.

Of course, it all seemed like a good idea at the time, as now does the Conservative party's demand — backed by this newspaper — for a referendum to endorse ratification of what will become known as the Lisbon treaty. It is, is it not, a simple problem for poor old Gordon, trying desperately to justify to the electorate the breach of a promise made back in 2005? And it is, is it not, something of an open goal into which the Conservatives can keep scoring, from now to the next election? An election that, according to some of my more tribally Tory colleagues, is as good as in the bag.

I am not going lean against my mental five-bar gate, remove a straw from my mouth and give readers the wise shake of the head and the “Gordon bain't be as stoopid as he be painted” bit of political folk-wisdom. But I will remind them that there is something important being missed here.

Who really killed de Menezes?

A couple of years ago I did my second stint of jury service at a Central London court. We ended up hearing a case in which a middle-class couple were terrorised one evening by a man who had decided, wrongly, that they were connected with an earlier argument he’d lost with someone else entirely. There was a lot of punching, threatening and door-smashing involved, and the woman was still so scared that she testified from behind a screen so that the accused wouldn’t see her face. “I don’t like her,” said one of my fellow jurors. “Stuck-up. Brought it on herself.”

I was reminded of this moment when reading Sean O’Neill’s comment in this paper last week, that while everyone in Britain now knew who Jean Charles de Menezes was, few of those most vociferously calling for action against the Metropolitan Police, were likely to recall more than one or two names — if that — of the victims of the July 7, 2005 bombings, which happened 15 days earlier. The police end up with a fine of £175,000, condemnation for having permitted “an unwarranted risk to the public” and a barrage of calls from newspapers and politicians for the head of Sir Ian Blair. Those who beguiled the bombers from inadequacy into mass murderousness remain unpunished and unpunishable.

We are in a strange condition not to have noticed that the two main criticisms of the Met in the de Menezes case are — more or less — incompatible. The one case is that, for whatever reason, the officers involved acted with appalling and undue violence, as a result of which an ordinary member of the public was left with seven dum-dum bullets inside him, and there but for the grace of God die we. The other is that the police, believing Mr de Menezes to be a 21/7 bomber returning to public transport to fulfil the jihadi duty that he’d flunked the day before, allowed him to board a bus and then a train, without intercepting him.

It's all a wicked plot by the Tories and the SNP

Some of Britain's more bruised politicians, surveying the broadcasting coverage of Alex Salmond's appearance before his party faithful at Aviemore, must have wondered what the Scottish First Minister had that they didn't, for no cloud was permitted by the BBC or anyone else to cross the saltire sky.

Part of it was novelty, of course; Salmond in power is new, even if the impulses he represents are as old as any Cairngorm cave. Some of it was the particular and material appeal that Salmondism possesses for the journalistic classes, gesturing left while acting right. Who benefits from dropping all prescription charges and all student fee contributions, given that the poor were already exempt? What could be nicer than congratulating yourself on your public virtue while pocketing the state's largesse?

So the man got the benefit of the doubt and not a word did I hear questioning the constant tone of national chauvinism running through the Aviemore speeches. Allow me to parse one of them for you. “People,” predicted Mr Salmond, “will look askance at the budget squeeze on Scotland when this morning's price of Brent crude is $86 a barrel... and the revenues from Scotland's North Sea resources flood into the Chancellor's coffers.” So, if the minority SNP administration finds it cannot afford to subsidise Scotland's middle classes to the extent it has promised, it will be the fault of the English who have stolen the oil revenues. Or, as John Swinney, the SNP finance minister, said, creating an image that politics could have done without: “Our black gold is filling the Chancellor's self-inflicted black hole.”

I worry about the SNP because I hate this scapegoating business. “The London way,” said Mr Swinney, “means taxes on small businesses go up and a squeeze on Scotland's public services takes an effect.” The London Way. Or, at other times in other places, the Irish Way, the Jewish Way, the Way of the Other.

A weapons expert, a rose grower and a fantasist

One of Ming Campbell’s more light-hearted legacies to his party was the elevation to the position of Shadow to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster of Norman Baker, the MP for Lewes. In fact Mr Baker’s job represented a repromotion, since he had previously been environment spokesman for the Lib Dems, but had decided to give the post up to pursue other matters. The nature of those other matters became clear at the weekend with the serialisation of his book, entitled, The Strange Death of David Kelly, or, as the headline put it, “Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death.”

This charge, from a senior MP in an influential newspaper, is sensational in the truest sense of that word. Surely, the reader may be entitled to imagine, such an accusation would not be made lightly and that Mr Baker will have done his homework. His accusations, therefore, deserve scrutiny.

Mr Baker’s initial objections to the verdict of suicide on Dr Kelly were both intuitive and practical. Mr Baker simply doesn’t believe that the senior arms inspector was suicidal, since he was a “strong character who had survived many difficult situations in the past”, including the self-destruction by overdose of his own mother when he was 20. And Mr Baker worries too about a series of what he believes are discrepancies about the finding of Dr Kelly’s body on Harrowdown Hill in July 2003. Was he wearing a coat when found? And had the body been moved?

The obesity debate: clarity begins at home

There is a writer we both know and love, you and I, who hates fat people. Every time there needs to be an example of personal unloveliness – from flatulence to bad manners – it is somehow bracketed with excessive girth. At first I just thought I was being oversensitive, but over time I realised that this expression of distaste, though possibly unconscious, was invariably there. I began to wonder whether, in adolescence, there hadn’t been some attempt on the author’s virtue by a very fat lady indeed.

This is just one small example of why it is a drag being big; few are hated simply for being slim.

So the wonder is why so many of us are fatter than we should be, or would like to be, and why so many of us will become that way. With cigarettes at least it was once considered cool to smoke; outside Tonga and Idaho it hasn’t been considered good to be plump for at least the past couple of centuries.

Yesterday the outward problem of obesity got it with both barrels at the conference of the gold-standard organisation in the field, the National Obesity Forum. The chairman of the forum argued that “levels of childhood obesity will lead to the first cut in life expectancy for 200 years. These children are likely to die before their parents.” Some have called for what I suppose would become known as a Lard Czar to coordinate the fight against flab.

I have to admit that, knowing what I know (and I know quite a lot about fat), I find this debate, as it is carried out in public, intensely irritating. The campaigners for change are always on the edge of exaggeration (“worse than climate change”), so fearful are they of inaction. This gives credence to the deniers who will invariably claim that the whole idea of obesity is a scare got up by the Government so as to deprive the public of its pleasures.

From scandal to panic: the agony at the BBC

For as long as it lasted, it was a fabulous image: the BBC’s slightly pompous arts supremo, Alan Yentob – never a man to wear his talents inside his clothes – having himself edited into encounters that he wasn’t actually there for. My imagination furnished me with Yentob interviewing Tchaikovsky, Yentob bobbing alongside Mao on the Yangtse, Yentob witnessing the Great Fire of London from Jeffrey Archer‘s penthouse flat.

You may recall that, in the wake of what has ludicrously come to be known as “Crowngate”, it was revealed that “noddies” of Mr Yentob had been inserted for interviews at which, according to the BBC website, “he had not been present”. This hilarious malpractice was widely believed to have taken place.

And it could have happened, I suppose. Having worked for most of my early journalistic life in television, I think I did once hear of someone doing it. Certainly the practice of recording the interviewer’s questions once the interviewee has departed is a long-standing practice where there is only one camera. Presenting Newsnight a decade or so ago, I had to record questions I had supposedly asked Lionel Jospin in English, only for him to reply in French.

A terrible fortnight full of shallow populism

What a long way, in politics, a few foreigners will get you. Last week in Bournemouth, the day after Gordon Brown’s big speech, I stopped off in a newsagent. The local paper carried a big front-page headline – something like MIGRANT DANGER – which topped a story about bad Eastern European drivers killing everybody. The young woman at the counter, with her high cheekbones and soft accent, was obviously a migrant from somewhere Slavic, but she somehow managed to sell me a magazine and a flapjack without either of us suffering.

It was a minor irony, of course. I am sure that she wouldn’t have felt targeted by the article, any more than she might have been by Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, seemingly blaming migrants for overburdening her force with demands for translation – or the rash of “Migrant Assaults Child” yelps that accompanied the tale from Chatham of the Slovakian mother who set about a junior Ku Klux Klan tormentor with the sort of peremptory dispatch that many regret the police no longer using.

That’s the mood that the parties are catching, and that’s why the word “foreigner” as a term suggesting both threat and blame, has become almost fashionable. Foreigners, said the PM, would get ID cards first, would be expelled if they had guns or sold drugs, would be asked to play by the rules and to learn English. “Wealthy foreigners”, we were told by the BBC news yesterday, would pay for the abolition of stamp duty for first-time housebuyers under plans announced at the Tory party conference.

There is a constituency in this country – one that often writes to me – that was well represented by Lord Tebbit when he was wrote in the latest edition of The Spectator. He wondered why – in this anarchic shambles of a country in which teachers are routinely assaulted in classrooms, illiteracy is rising, where “foreigners” have even taken our doctors’ jobs (gaining access to our quivering, vulnerable bodies) and all is debt, profligacy and woe – the Tories were trailing the treacherous new Labour architects of dystopia.