Prevailing wisdom insists Gordon Brown is already more or less finished as Prime Minister. Washed up, almost before he has settled into the prize he always craved, by blunders such as the 10p tax-band fiasco and the election that never was.
Two things strike me as remarkable about the Queen's current visit to Turkey. The first is the adamant firmness of her public support for Turkey joining the EU as a full member. For someone who is normally and understandably cautious in all matters of diplomacy, she was almost outspoken. The second is the sheer resilience and dedication to duty of our two senior royals, particularly as the Duke of Edinburgh is clearly at present not in the best of health.
If fine words could save lives, the survivors of Cyclone Nargis would have nothing to fear. Germany's Angela Merkel found the Burmese junta's indifference to people's plight "inexplicable", only to be trumped by French President Nicolas Sarkozy's "utterly reprehensible". For once, US President George Bush seemed to have come up with a few bons mots with his description of the Burmese regime as "either isolated or callous" but the award for soundbite of the week surely goes to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband's "malign neglect" and "a humanitarian catastrophe of genuinely epic proportions". Well done, David.
Style icons? Probably. If shoes teetering on six-inch heels setting you back roughly the same as this month's mortgage are the kind of must-haves that feature in your fantasies. But poster girls for western women's brave new twentieth-century world?
In my forthcoming autobiography, Things I Should Probably Have Said At the Time, But Somehow Forgot to Mention, there are startling revelations. One astounding expose involves the conspiracy against common sense by those who claim to have bought, far less read, "books" by people named John Prescott or Lord Levy.
Have you ever met a woman who wished she'd lost her virginity at 13? Do your women friends hang over their coffee cups saying: "I waited until I was 19 years old. How I regret it. When I think of all those spotty youths I refused to let have their way with me behind the youth club, I could weep."
An adviser to John Major, when the Tory premier was facing meltdown, recalls an American visitor to Downing Street bringing Republican expertise. He was given a tour of senior people and, after hearing of impending doom, was asked what he thought.
There are times when political events read like a modern history exam question: Discuss the circumstances that led to the rise of Scottish independence, with particular reference to the SNP's narrow victory in the 2007 election; the collapse of Gordon Brown's authority after the aborted UK General Election; and the collapse of Wendy Alexander's call for a referendum on independence. The failed Wendyrendum is clearly a defining moment in Labour's
disintegration in Scotland.
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