The government's handling of the credit crunch is now rapidly descending from denial to panic and now farce. The crisis is real enough but the attempt to show Prime Ministerial firmness against the banks in the breakfast summit at Number Ten is really nothing more than a ridiculous piece of posturing.
The fact is that the banks are in a stand off with the British authorities. The financial institutions say they can't ease their lending until the government bails them out with increased liquidity and by lending against some of their dodgier assets. The government - particularly the Bank of England - say they won't do this because it will only reward the banks for their irresponsible past lending.
Fine as a moral argument. No-one need to have any sympathy for the banks, a bunch of self-rewarding greedheads if ever there were. But what the government is demanding is just totally contradictory.
You have to hand it to the Royal Family and the Establishment. It's not fast on its feet and it's certainly not attuned to the modern world, but when it comes under direct attack - as it has from Mohamed Fayed - it sure knows how to gather its strength to squash the offending beetle.
I'm no believer in conspiracies on Diana's death. Nor have I ever been much interested in her private life. But the way that the coroner's inquest was set up to damn for ever the Egyptian owner of Harrods and - they hoped - to lay finally Diana's ghost to rest was almost frightening in its ruthlessness and purpose.
Can you believe our Prime Minister agreeing to have the Olympic torch come to Downing Street and then, when the protests mount, very carefully avoiding actually touching it so that he can't be pictured carrying it? But then this is the same man who reluctantly agreed to meet the Dalai Lama when he comes to London next month but only at Lambeth Palace not Downing Street, to make the occasion a religious rather than political gesture.
It won't work. For, whatever they may achieve in terms of changing Chinese policy, the demonstrations over the Olympic games have brought the Tibet cause fairly and squarely onto centre stage and western politicians cannot any longer get away with trying to have it both ways - mouthing human rights whilst cosying up to the Chinese government.
When it comes to the Middle East it is now impossible to discuss in a rational way any act of violence without getting dragged in to the most irrational and fruitless discussion of moral equivalence and relative justification. And maybe there is no way of sanely commenting on an act of such insane violence as the Jerusalem shooting yesterday.
But if it is impossible for ordinary observers to discuss, what the dickens is the UN doing, getting involved in trying to pass resolutions of condemnation and then getting all tied up in knots over Arab objections?
For an idle moment I thought Lord Foster was being ironic, or even playful, when he said that his new terminal at Beijing airport had been started and finished in less time than the planning enquiry took in to his fifth terminal at Heathrow before sod was even turned. But no, I fear not. For Foster, and the band of global super-architects he has come to dominate, the views of local residents, the considerations of the environment, the mixture of build and space around is just an irritant.
It's just as well that the Georgian billionaire, Badri Patarkatishvilli, has proved to have died from natural causes in his UK home this week. If he had died from poison or other unnatural causes, the citizens of Britain might well have called for a halt to the whole gruesome business of giving refuge to the mega-rich detruitus of the former Soviet Union.
Summitry may have got a rather bad name of late after the overblown rhetoric and let-down of President Bush's efforts to bring the Middle East parties together at Annapolis and Gordon Brown's ill-chosen gesture in arriving late for the recent EU summit at Lisbon. But for the real vanity and misjudgement of political leaders at the top you should read David Reynolds' recent book on "Summits" (Penguin £25) and the accompanying series on BBC4.
To no-one's suprise - except perhaps the Arts Council England - the big names of theatre have managed to save a dozen and a half companies from the Council's new round of cuts. The media may call them 'luvvies', but when names such as Dame Judi Dench and Sir Tom Stoppard combine forces to lobby, it would be a brave official or minister indeed who would stand in their way. Indeed there is a strong suspicion that the Arts Council deliberately manipulated, or at any rate acceded in, the reaction to its cuts, knowing that it could then be seen to relent on the high-profile cases and get away with the other 185 organisations that won't have their funds renewed and the 27 which will have their subsidies drastically reduced.
Are the Tory MP, Derek Conway's financial sins more grievous than those of Labour former minister, Peter Hain, in the rat-tat-tat of accusation and counter accusation rattling between the parties at the moment? What Conway is accused of is far worse than Hain, goes the argument, because Conway's alleged breaches concerned financial emolument for his own family whilst what Hain was doing concerned a political process not a personal gain.
Is he hero or villain? Yes, yes, of course in sober terms what Jerome Kerviel did to the third largest bank in France, the Societe General, was a terrible act that helped panic the markets, served to lessen faith (in so far as they have any left) in financial institutions and could bring his own bank down with consequent loss of jobs.
If the current financial crisis could have one productive side effect, it should be to put a stop to pretentious talk shops such as Davos. Indeed it could do a lot of good by concentrating minds at the woolly-minded and hot-air fests that meetings of the G8 have become.
Far be it from me to argue against expenses-paid trips by journalists and bankers to the ski slopes of Davos, but the trouble with meetings such as these is that they are predicated on a self-congratulatory myth - that there is some common wisdom and high-minded consensus to be reached between the top men of business, regulators and government.
If anyone wants to understand just how out of touch Gordon Brown is with the real world, you only have to look at his latest trip to China and India. While he waffled on about great new trading opportunities for British businessman, the markets in Asia and at home were scaring themselves into the biggest crash since 9/11. And the biggest falls were in the two countries he was visiting.
The McMaster report into arts funding is not doubt worthy and right. Money should go on excellence. There has been too much targeting and box ticking. Arts people should be more involved in the decision. And so say all of us. But it neatly avoids the central question, which is: should we now abolish the Arts Council altogether? It's proved itself cumbersome, bureaucratic, secretive and uninspired - all the things that are the exact opposite of a mecahnism for encouraging creativity and development in the arts. Looking at its latest decisions to cut funding to some 130 organisations, it is never going to change.
We went into Iraq on lies and now we're retreating from it with even more. To pretend that we're turning tail because the iraqis are ready to take over is simply mendacious. We're going because the whole venture has lost the support of the public at home, Gordon Brown wants it off his Number Ten plate, while over there the army had finally recognised that we'd become part of the problem rather than its solution. As long as we patrolled we aroused violence from the competing militia eager to show their mettle by taking on the 'foreign invader.' Training the Iraqi security forces is just a fig leaf and they, and we, know it.
It's not David Miliband's fault that his voice hasn't broken yet. But even so innocence cannot be an excuse for the circumlocutions that the Foreign Office is forcing him into over Kosovo. Take his comments on Tuesday's Today Programme on BBC Radio 4.
"This is Europe's backyard. If we ignore the problem, we are not going to solve it. If we pretend there is only a military solution, we won't solve it. If we deal with political, economic, social and security issues, we can make a difference there, recognising the legitimate aspirations of Kosovars."
Does that mean, asked the interviewer, that Britain was pepared to recognise Kosovo if it unilaterally declared independence?
"The short answer to that is yes," said Britain's new Foreign seceretary, before adding "in the Balkans, it is important to avoid short answers and recognise it is a very complicated situation."
If only Peter Sellers were alive today, what fun he'd have with this convoluted response (although Rory Bremner could still make a fair stab at it).
Of course it is good that Gillian Gibbons has been sprung out of her Sudanese jail early. And of course it is ridiculous that this primary school teacher should have been sentenced to a prison sentence for naming the class teddy bear after the prophet Muhammed. But the whole theatre of her early release is really a sham.
The entire exercise, to put it bluntly, has been an excuse for the worst kind of political and diplomatic theatrics.
The last thing I would wish to do is to denigrate the opening of the new Eurostar station at St Pancras. It's all to the good that at last Britain seems to be applauding engineering achievement, past and present. But rearely can an occasion have produced quite such overflown and misleading praise. Cutting off 20 minutes from the train time to Paris doesn't suddenly bring the Continent a huge step closer and challenge for the first time air travel. That has been true ever since the tunnel started in 1994.
The mystery of the continuing future over Sir Ian Blair's surivival is not so much whether he should survive. Of that there is no doubt. Report after report has revealed him not as personally responsible for the de Menezes shooting but guilty of the opposite - of being totally divorced from the proceedings.
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