Imran Khan was talking to me about his platform for political change in Pakistan, in an interview at the guest house of his former mother-in-law, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, which he uses while in London. He was banging on about change so much that I interrupted to joke: "Where is Pakistan's Obama?"
The 55-year old politician met this with a disapproving glance, before
hastening to add: "I was there before Obama trying to do the same
thing." Ouch.
There's something that bothers me about the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (aka DSK), the French head of the International Monetary Fund, who is being investigated over whether a romantic affair may have led to him abusing his power. This raises the bigger issue of the possible conflict of interest involving the marriages of French politicians and journalists. DSK's wife, Anne Sinclair, is one of France's best-known journalists, and she has been writing a weekly column from Washington on life in the US.
Did she, however, mention her husband's affair in her article for the Journal du Dimanche, which ran three pages on the IMF scandal today? No, she did not. She did, however, mention it in her blog, in which she says that "this one night stand is now behind us." Should she not have been more up front about her relationship with DSK in the pages of the newspaper? Or should she be writing at all from Washington for risk of compromising her journalistic integrity while married to the head of the IMF? Surely there is a case to answer.
If there was any need, Gordon Brown's surprise appointment of Peter Mandelson as Business Secretary confirms his utter contempt for the European Union. Why else would he deprive the EU of its Trade Commissioner scarcely without notice at a time when Mr Mandelson would have been a key player in working for reforms dear to Mr Brown's heart, such as phasing out subsidies to European farmers, and above all, trying to protect the poorest of the poor in the world following the collapse of the global trade talks in July, for which Mr Mandelson had been the chief EU negotiator?
Journalists travelling to the US with the prime minister, who has undertaken a mission to garner international support for his global financial reform proposals, were given a cruel insight into just how marginal Britain's views are on the economic crisis as seen from Washington.
Waiting for Gordon Brown to emerge from talks in the White House, a group of us were at Andrews Air Base watching CNN which cut into its programming to show President Bush and Mr Brown sitting in the Oval Office. CNN broadcast a statement by the American president summarising their talks, with the financial crisis at the top of the agenda. But no sooner had he turned to his guest after saying "thank you for coming", and as the camera focused on Mr Brown who was preparing to say a few words, a producer must have called "Cut!" and the prime minister disappeared from view.
You might think there is no connection between Georgia and Iran. But I think that America's humiliation in Georgia makes military strikes on Iran more likely. The US was never going to challenge Russia, a nuclear power, militarily. For the same reason it never attacked North Korea. But it did attack Iraq before Saddam Hussein had the chance to produce a nuclear weapon from his clandestine weapons programme.
While the Bush administration is distracted by the Georgia crisis, Iran is continuing with the installation of centrifuges which produce nuclear fuel either for civilian reactors, or, if the level of uranium enrichment is sufficient, for a bomb.
Cartloads of mud have been thrown at the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, by his erstwhile fans this week. We read in the the newspapers that the increasingly wild-eyed and perspiring Mr Saakashvili, once the darling of the West, has over-reached himself by expecting Nato support in his "gamble" taking on the Russian bear.
We cannot know what whispers or taps on the shoulder from Nato might have preceded last week's Georgian offensive to bring South Ossetia under control of the central government. But a central plank of the Saakashvili government since it was first elected in the "Rose revolution" has been that of Georgian territorial integrity, to be restored by ending the "frozen conflicts" of the 1990s.
Finally the Red Cross has spoken out about the "deliberate misuse" of its emblem by the Colombian soldiers who rescued Ingrid Betancourt. The long silence of the International Committee of the Red Cross since CNN reported on 16 July that one of the rescuers was wearing an ICRC bib must be an indication of how conflicted the ICRC is about upholding its own rules in this case. For using the neutral logo of the Red Cross is a violation of the Geneva conventions and could constitute a war crime.
Yet the end result in this case was the freeing of the Franco-Colombian hostage who had been held for six years in unspeakable conditions in the Colombian jungle. But there is a point here about the dangers of setting a precedent.
There was an animated discussion on Newsnight about whether Britain has a Barack Obama, after David Miliband, the foreign secretary, weighed in with his article widely interpreted as his bid to become the next prime minister. Nobody in the BBC discussion thought that the foreign secretary could be compared to the black US Democratic presidential campaigner.
But hang on a minute - who snuck into Number 10 Downing Street last Saturday when Obama was huddling with Gordon Brown? Step forward David Lammy, the minister for skills. It turns out that the MP for Tottenham, like Obama, attended Harvard and the pair of them have met. He said afterwards it was "wonderful" to be there at "history in the making". So who is Britain's Obama then, with an agenda of "change we can believe in"?
Barack Obama didn't need a warm-up band for his love-fest in Berlin. But as a political rock star, he had one anyway. The leader singer of the band surveyed the 200,000 people crammed into the Tiergarten in central Berlin and said he thought it was the "biggest support concert" his group had ever done. Obama commands a sort of unconditional hero worship from his fans.
If you remember the Jonestown Kool Aid massacre in Guyana in 1977, then you will understand what I mean when I say it seemed as though the Obama fans had already have drunk the Kool Aid before Obama appeared.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former UN secretary-general, is one. Nessim, the husband of Justine, the fictional character in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet was one. I'm talking about Egypt's Coptic Christians, the community of up to 10 million souls - 10 per cent of the population - who are the target of persecution and discrimination.
The number of violent incidents against the Christian minority is on the rise. The discrimination starts with Egyptians identifying their religion on passports and ID cards, and continues through the education system, while converts from Islam to Christianity lose their inheritance rights.
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