Between the ex-cabinet minister and the journalist, which one turns out to be a government apologist? No surprises: step forward, Mr Blunkett, a man who still cannot quite relinquish a hope he might make it back to another cabinet post, albeit under Gordon Brown. What he actually said was: "I was too keen to come back before - it did provoke a reaction from the London media. I don't want to light a spark in that direction again. But politics is in my blood through and through."

While Blunkett repeated his belief that the media were out to drive him from office after he resigned one cabinet post only to take up another a short time later (chair Iain Macwhirter asked: "Was there no impropriety at all?" to which Blunkett replied: "None of it was true"), journalist Hutton asserted his claim that Blair's latter-day foreign policies have been "a calamity". In discussion about his new book China: The Writing on the Wall, he claimed that Britain "should have been showing that the EU was the only way to go, but we've validated, by being the junior partner to Bush, the construction of a unilateralist system".

Hutton was passionate, full of facts and figures, knew his history and wasn't frightened of making predictions (if there's a Third World War, it'll be between China and the US over Taiwan). He endeared himself to a Glasgow audience by basing his hopes on a world whose values were shaped by the Enlightenment, and expressed hope that a certain future Scottish Prime Minister recognises those values too.