By Andy McSmith

There was a time, a generation ago, when part of my job as a party press officer to keep politicians like Gordon Brown informed about what was being written or said about them. I pity the poor sod who has had to brief Brown about this weekend's collection of character assassinating observations, coming not from political enemies, but from people who are supposed to be on his side.

To deal with them in order of seriousness, having Lord Levy saying that it is "inconceivable" that Brown did not know about the secret loans that the Labour Party raised to fund their last general election campaign is bad, but containable. Levy is not an unsullied source.

John Prescott's description of Gordon Brown as "frustrating, annoying, bewildering and prickly" and the revelation that he suggested that if Brown was so angry, perhaps he should resign, is worse - but taken as a whole, Prescott's memoirs arguably hurt Blair more than Brown.

By Andy McSmith

There is one phrase in the self-serving, manipulative statement by the ghastly Josef Fritz published in The Independent and other papers today that sticks in the mind. "I grew up in Nazi times and that meant respect for authority and the need to control. I suppose I took on some of these old values."

Since the discovery of Fritzl's secret, an argument has raged about whether there is a connection between his crimes and Austria's Nazi past. The historian Peter Millar says that there is. The Independent's Dominic Lawson says not. Some of those who say there is a connection have indulged in pretty wild generalisations about Austrian society, that make you wonder whether they have ever been there, or met an Austrian.  Every society throws up psychopaths who exhibit extreme cruelty, including ours.

By Andy McSmith

Somehow I knew we had not heard the last of Lee Jasper. It emerges today that he is contemplating a return to politics as Labour MP for Vauxhall, in place of the troublesome Kate Hoey. It is some years since I have lived in this constituency, but from what I know, I don't think this notion is complete fantasy. Given Hoey's record, there must be people in the Vauxhall Labour Party who are of a mind to deselect her. It is the sort of seat where, sooner or later, the Labour party will want to run a black or Asian candidate, and it would be almost impossible for any Labour to lose it in a general election.

All of which fills me with foreboding. As Ken Livingstone's advisers were licking their wounds over the weekend, one point on which they agreed was the ex-Mayor should have sacked Lee Jasper sooner.

By Andy McSmith

Imagine if your job was to go into Downing Street this morning and give Gordon Brown five reasons to be cheerful. It would be a challenge, but here is an attempt...

1. Only 35 per cent of the electorate outside London voted yesterday. A tight general election could bring out twice that number. A high proportion of those who did not vote this week but might vote when it comes to choosing a government are disgruntled Labour voters.

2. As the prospect of a Conservative government looms larger, it will concentrate minds on what they would do in office. That might motivate the lost labour voters to come back.

3. In 1995, a very substantial part of the Conservative Party truly despised John Major; they could not forgive him for not being Margaret Thatcher, and in their hearts they wanted to see him lose. Most of the Labour Party doesn't want Brown to lose, doesn't wish he was Tony Blair, and doesn't deeply despise him, though it has come close to despairing of him.

4. It won't be long before Mayor Johnson, if he is Mayor, does something crass that will deeply embarrass David Cameron. And imagine if Ken Livingstone had won while Labour was being trashed everywhere else - how insufferable he would be. On the other hand, of course, if he has won, wow, what a poke in the eye for Boris and Dave.

5. Er, events. The public mood is changing. People are more interested in rising prices in the shops and the collapse of the housing market than in the Westminster Punch and Judy show. Every crisis is also an opportunity.

By Andy McSmith

Kate Hoey, Labour MP for Vauxhall, has been skating on thin ice this week, coming dangerously close to encouraging Londoners to vote for Boris Johnson, which would have resulted in automatic expulsion from the Labour Party. Her beef with Ken Livingstone goes back a quarter of a century. She must have thought her careeer was made when, in 1980, she was selected for a safe London seat of Dulwich, but she lost it by less than 2,000 votes in the 1983 debacle, stuck around, and lost again by 180 votes in 1987, then won nearby Vauxhall in a by-election in 1989. She blames Ken Livingstone's activites as GLC leader for those six lost years.

By Andy McSmith

This sombre fellow with receding hairline, no tie, looking grimly into the distance somewhere off to his left - who can he be? The name is familiar, but the face escapes me...

By Andy McSmith

The 10p tax rate rebellion always had that feel about it of a rebellion that was not going to happen. There was no principle at stake on the government's side. Gordon Brown prides himself on having been the Chancellor who has done more than any other for a generation to reduce poverty. He was never going to eyeball his own MPs on an issue such as this. It was just a matter of finding the right formula to placate the hard-to-please Frank Field. So he opened himself to David Cameron's taunts about being "a loser not a leader", but he did the right thing eventually. The enduring mystery is why he put himself in this mess in the first place, and why the inevitable reaction was delayed for so long

By Andy McSmith

Of all the daft comments made about Richmond Council's excellent plan to charge parents who drive their children to school in Chelsea tractors, the daftest of all comes from the spokeswoman from the Parents Teachers Association that "they (ie schools) should try offering some parking provisions." No they shouldn't. One of the scandals of our time is the way the precious ground available to schools is disappearing under concrete when it should be grassed-over open space for children to play.

And one of the banes of urban life is idle parents who drive their children to school when they should be walking. Around 9.00am every week day during school term, every bit of road around primary schools in towns are cluttered up with cars parked on yellow lines, parked with two wheels on the pavement, or just double parked.

By Andy McSmith

Some, such as Nick Robinson and our own John Rentoul, think that it is all over for Gordon Brown. Others disagree. Brown's position at the moment is bad, very bad. After his poor performance at a private meeting for Labour MPs and peers two weeks ago, Labour MPs have been talking with unusual openness about the possibility of a leadership challenge, against a man who was told to his face by Labour MPs that "people don't know who you are".

The time to launch it will be after the 1 May council elections. If the results are as bad for Labour as predicted, MPs are going to see Labour councillors in their constituencies falling like pins in a bowling alley, and will return to Parliament the following Monday with their heads full of foreboding about their own chances of survival. But I don't think a challenge will happen.

By Andy McSmith

Cannabis is one of those issues on which you think one thing when you have parents and quite another when you are one. From wanting to smuggle the stuff into the house you switch to being determined to keep it out. And yet, when you find out that someone in your care has broken this particular law - unlike any other law I can think of - about the last thing you want to do is involve the authorities.

By Andy McSmith

Last September, when Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England knew what the rest of us found a couple of days later, that Northern Rock was in serious trouble, he wrote to the Commons Treasury Select Committee explaining why the government should think twice before intervening to rescue ailing banks. It is a matter of 'moral hazard', said King. The market must punish those who act recklessly, or there will be no reward for anyone who behaved sensibly and "sat out the dance". This mindset caused a six month delay before the Northern Rock crisis was sorted. By contrast, it took four days, including a weekend, for the Fed to move in and deal with the collapse of Bear Stearns.

By Andy McSmith

Over on the New Statesman website, Martin Bright laments that left wing critics of his campaign against Ken Livingstone attack his motives instead of putting up a proper argument. Yes, I go along with the general point. Personally it exasperates me how opponents of the Iraq war obsess about Tony Blair's motive for sending our troops into Basra, when what really matters is not why he did it, but what the long term effect has been.

On the matter of Ken Livingstone, around London there are hundreds of bus stops. At those stops, if you look, you will notice Londoners waiting.

By Andy McSmith

You still sometimes a little old man called Joel Barnett, or Lord Barnett, shuffling about the House of Lords. He is 84, good natured, quietly spoken and intelligent, and has not held a government post for 29 years, but his name was raised in anger - yet again - at Prime Minister's Questions today, by an MP from Manchester. All across the north of England they are seriously hacked off with Joel Barnett. North of the border he is more likely to hailed as a national hero up there with Robbie Burns.

By Andy McSmith

Why has the argument over Iraq got snagged on the narrow point about whether Tony Blair lied about whether there were WMDs in Iraq? On this morning's Today programme, Margaret Beckett's principle defence of the war was that other secret services, besides the UK's, believed that they were there. Ergo, the war was justified in the circumstances of the time, sorry about the subsquent mix up, the argument runs. One can't blame Mrs Beckett for putting this line, since so many of the war's opponents seem to think the whole argument reduces to the simple proposition that the war was wrong because Blair lied. I don't think he did; but I still think the war was wrong.

By Andy McSmith

The Conservative MP Michael Fallon, a member of the Commons Treasury committee, is accumulating a devoted fan club on the Tory right as one of the most articulate advocates of tax cuts - and, by implication, a critic of David Cameron's and George Osborne tax and spend strategy. The Daily Mail wonders why he is not in the Tory Shadow Cabinet.

Michael Fallon is certainly clever. He has made a great deal of money outside Parliament, and he has been around a long time. Over 10 years ago, when the newly elected Labour government was first introducing a national minimum wage in the UK, they encountered vigorous opposition in the Commons from the Conservative industry spokesman, Michael Fallon, who warned that it would be "damaging for jobs and for the economy and will not help the lowest-paid in our society." He suggested that if a minimum wage had to be introduced at all, it should be between £3 and £3.20 an hour, not the £4 an hour favoured by Margaret Beckett, who was then  Industry Secretary.

By Andy McSmith

I am intrigued to read that Boris Johnson claims that his great great grandmother was a "Circassian" slave. This is the definitive answer to anyone who suggests that Boris is knob. He may have been to Eton, but there is slave blood coursing through his veins, so 'put that in your pipe and smoke it.' Perhaps, now, Boris can tell us who the Circassians actually were.

I have travelled a bit in south Russia and on the southern side of the Caucasus mountains, and you meet a lot of people there from small nations of whose existence the world is largely unaware. You meet people who call themselves Adzharians, Balkars, Lezgins, Ossetes and many more. Daghestan alone is home to more than 40 nationalities. But, so far as I know, no one has ever come across anyone who says: "I am a Circassian." Nor, indeed, is there a place called Circassia.

By Andy McSmith

The success of Orlando Figes's latest book "The Whisperers" about every day life in Stalin's time makes me thankful that I still own a more remarkable book on the same subject, published in English translation almost 40 years ago. After Stalin's death, a new breed of tough women emerged from the twilight, the Gulag widows, who had lost their menfolk to Stalin's firing squads or forced labour system. Nadezhda Mandelstam was the queen of the widows. Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, wrote a famous epigram about the great leader, for which he met an early death in a labour camp.

By Andy McSmith

In one of his many onslaughts on Ken Livingstone, the Standard's Andrew Gilligan berated what he called "the amazing mediocrity of the defence put up by Mr Livingstone and his supporters". He goes on to list some of those 'mediocre' arguments - "Then there's the argument that it's all because of the election. It's not..." he asserted.

Gilligan himself is like so many of the best investigative journalists - obsessive, tenacious, uncowed, and lacking all sense of proportion. He may think that his relentless exposure of the murkier corners of London city hall administration are not 'all  because of the election', but look at the front page headlines on the Standard in this week alone.

By Andy McSmith

Tomorrow is the awful day when you see ten and eleven years olds in tears in the playground, while grim faced mothers stand in knots planning their next move. It is the terrible day when the kids in their final yera at primary school are told which comprehensive has allocated them a place. In rural areas this is not such a trauma. For most people, there is no choice; there is only one school within a reasonable distance, all the children go there, and the result is a genuine comprehensive with a good social mix. In the cities, there are too many schools within travelling distance, and, supposedly, the parents choose. Would you like the child you nurtured from birth to go to a place where he or she is assured of a proper education, or would you prefer a tumble down building where discipline has broken down, bullying is rife, the teachers have given up, and from whence no child has progressed to a decent university in living memory?

By Andy McSmith

The current issue of the magazine Compass has a letter in support of Ken Livingstone's campaign to be re-elected Mayor, signed by the great and the good. As others have pointed out, not all the signatories are members of the Labour Party. I would just draw attention to one signatory who indisputably is, namely the MP for Coventry North West, Geoffrey Robinson. Mr Robinson is also the proprietor of the New Statesman, and is hunting for a new Editor, following the resignation of John Kampfner. The New Statesman's Political Editor, Martin Bright, is one of Livingstone's chief tormentors, believing that he is not fit to be re-elected. No wonder Bright has ruled himself out as a potential occupant of the editor's chair.

By Andy McSmith

As the waters close in around the unremarkable career of the Speaker, Michael Martin, his defenders claim that he is the victim of 'snobbery', under attack for his working class roots and Glaswegian accent rather than his handling of his office. You would think to hear them that every previous Speaker has been a top-hatted toff, which is simply not true. Martin's immediate predecessor, Betty Boothroyd was the state educated daughter of textile workers from Dewsbury, with the accent to prove it. Her predecessor, Bernard Weatherill, was a former tailor, who remembered overhearing a comment in the lavatory just after his arrival in the Commons - "I don't know what this place is coming to, Tom, they've got my tailor in here now." His predecessor, George Thomas, was a miner's son. All three were attractive public figures, trusted by backbench MPs, who enhanced the reputation of the Commons.

By Andy McSmith

A file drops in my email inviting me to participate in a poll to list Labour 's top 50 achievements since being elected in 1997. They offer their own suggested list, available on the Labour Party website. Looking down it, I see inflation, relative lack of, at No 1, with free fruit for four year olds just slipping in at No 50. But the further down I scroll, the more I am struck by the absence of any issues of life and death - unless you happen to be a fox: banning fox hunting gets in at No. 35. Does my memory deceive me, or was there was once a civil conflict ripping Northern Ireland apart, and was it not one of Tony Blair's greatest achievements to bring the opposing factions to the negotiating table and keep them there? I search for this on the list, and at No. 26 find a dreary reference to "bringing devolved power to Northern Ireland."

Then, where is the mention of Iraq?

By Andy McSmith

A word on the exchange between John Humphrys and Alistair Darling on this morning's Today programme, in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer was accused of having either said or agreed that nationalisation would be 'lingering death' for Northern Rock. It seemed odd that Darling would ever say anything so interesting, having built his career on never expressing a controversial opinion. The record shows that, much as we all admire the great Humphrys, on this occasion he was being unfair.

By Andy McSmith

The most ominous sentence in the account in today's Independent of the hounding of Ahmed Ghous Zalmai, an Afghan broadcaster jailed for distributing translated copies of the Koran, is this speculation on the Attorney General's motive for ordering his arrest - "some say he (the AG) is proving his credentials because he is waiting for the Taliban's return to power."

By Andy McSmith

I have an error to confess. In yesterday's Independent I wrote about David Garrett, the world class violinist who slipped and smashed his instrument, which I described as a "priceless Stradivarius". Actually, it was not made by Antonio Stradivari, but by one of his pupils Giovanni Guadagnini. Guadagnini was one of the greatest instrument makers of all time, but not the greatest, a Mike Tyson of violin makers rather than the Muhammed Ali of his craft. This would make the smashed instrument worth around £1 million, when it was in one piece. Apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this mistake.

Garrett will be playing a genuine Stradivarius when he performs Bruch's Violin Concerto at the Barbican tonight.

By Andy McSmith

The announcement by Lord Justice Scott Baker that the Diana inquest has cost the taxpayer more than £2.2 million in the last eight months, bringing the taxpayer's total bill for investigating her death to more than £6 million, prompts only one thought - they should send the bill to Mohamed Fayed.

By Andy McSmith

We get to do some interesting things in our line of work, such as going to the National Theatre for the first night of "The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other" - a 90 minute drama without dialogue. I would not have paid to go, but having been, I can think of worse ways to spend an evening. The acting, or miming, is good, and there is enough visual variety to keep you interested. I think the whole concept is pointless, but there you go.

By Andy McSmith

As Derek Conway's career implodes, accusing fingers have been pointed at other MPs, such as Sir Menzies Campbell, and Margaret Beckett, who pay their wives or husbands to work for them. Despite what we have learnt this week, I think the practice of employing spouses is to defensible. Unlike Derek Conway's sons, they are not being paid to do nothing. They work for their wages. Politics is notorious as a profession that destroys marriages. The further politicians climb up the greasy pole, the more time they spend away from home in circumstances where winding up in the wrong bed is all too easy. But I suspect that a fair few have been delivered from temptation by the knowledge that the spouse will be in the office next morning.

By Andy McSmith

There was a time, believe it or not, when politicians generally kept discreetly silent when members of the opposing party were hit  by scandals that involved money or sex. During all the sleaze scandals that mired John Major's government, newspapers making all the running, Tony Blair and the Labour Party kept out of it, on the whole. This was either high-mindedness, because they did not want to bring politics as a profession into disrepute, or a sensible precaution, because if you live in a straw hut it is best not to set fire to your neighbour's roof.

Those days are gone.

By Andy McSmith

So now George Galloway, instead of being full of respect, is 'Old Labour' - which is presumably meant to imply that he stands for the Labour Party as mother used to bake it, before Tony Blair ruined the recipe. So here is a little known story about old George and Old Labour.

By Andy McSmith

Here we go again. The Evening Standard has another three full pages today dedicated to its campaign to remove Ken Livingstone from office. Martin Bright, presenter of Monday's hour long Dispatches programme, who also wants Livingstone out of office, has defended the broadcast by saying, among other comments, that:

"The Channel 4 documentary was an entirely legitimate investigation into the office of Mayor of London. The only incumbent of that office is Ken Livingstone. We found serious structural weaknesses in the mechanisms designed to hold the mayor to account.."

The Mayor's office is indeed very powerful, and the checks and balances are weak, too weak. This possibility was foreseen ten years ago when Tony Blair - for it was he, more than anyone else - set about creating this office. One vociferous opponent was a Labour MP named Ken Livingstone.

By Andy McSmith

Jacqui Smith is taken furiously to task today by the Daily Mail and other newspapers today for the gaffe she made when she said she wouldn't feel safe walking the streets of London. It was a daft thing to say, though not quite as daft as her attempt to make it better by mentioning her visit to a kebab shop. But as the onslaught picks up speed, you notice that she is attacked on two separate grounds. On the one hand, the Tories call it a shameful admission that London's streets are unsafe; on the other, Diane Abbott, accuses the Home Secretary of "feeding a climate of fear", by saying that the streets are unsafe when they are not.

By Andy McSmith

Another day, another two pages of the Evening Standard are dedicated to dumping on the Mayor of London. We know why The Standard is doing this: they want Ken Livingstone to lose the election in May. This aim is of course not shared by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme, who in the spirit of impartial journalistic inquiry have devoted months to preparing a programme that will do as much damage to Livingstone as possible, as close to the election as is decent.

By Andy McSmith

In case you didn't know it there was, in fact a Democratic primary in Michigan. It does not mean much, because the party nationally does not recognise it, and Obama and Edwards did not take part, but voters were offered a choice between backing Hillary Clinton or being uncommitted. Uncommitted did better than you might think, especially among black voters and the under-30s

By Andy McSmith

Progressive Policies Forum, the think tank that has not done any known thinking, puts me in mind of Saint Simeon the Stylite the Elder, the fourth century ascetic who never went to church, read the Bible, healed the sick, performed an act of kindess, or did any other Christian act except stand on top of a very high column of stones. His contemporaries assumed that remoteness made him holy. Should we not learn to be as trusting as those Syrians? Instead of assuming that PPF is just a front organisation to siphon cash into Peter Hain's deputy leadership campaign, should we not take it on trust that PPF is a think tank whose thoughts that are just too deep for sharing?

By Andy McSmith

Mark Ravenhill writes a fulsome tribute in today's Independent to the brilliant, difficult, half-forgotten playwright, Edward Bond. He points out that the late Sarah Kane shared his enthusiasm. They are not alone. Laurence Olivier, Mary McCarthy and Bernard Levin, to name but three, acknowledged Bond as one of the greatest writers of his time. Yet his work is rarely produced, and people wonder why.

By Andy McSmith

The new Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg can expect to wake up in the morning to a reasonably good press. He stepped into the bear pit of Prime Minister's Question Time for the first time, and did not get mauled. That is an improvement on Ming Campbell's first foray when he was laughed at, but, oh, it was so forgettable. Is there anyone, anywhere, who watched PMQs and can remember, unprompted, a word of what Clegg said?

By Andy McSmith

The first government minister to put his head above the parapet in 2008 is Lord Adonis, the schools minister who has been the brains behind Labour's education policies for most of the past decade. He now wants to include in schools league tables information about how many gifted pupils there are in each secondary schools. The measure is controversial, because it is likely to benefit those schools that already attract clever children, widening the difference between the best and worst state schools. Virtually everything Adonis does causes trouble.

By Andy McSmith

I see that Jeffrey Archer has become exercised about poor Princess Anne, whose life has been spent slipping down the queue for the throne. Once she was second in line. One more royal baby boy, and she won't even be in the top 10. I suppose Lord Jeffrey is right; they should alter the rules and put princesses on an equal footing with princes. They should also do away with the rule that prevents the heir from marrying a catholic.

But I don't think this is where the real problems of the British monarchy lie. At present, the institution is preserved by the popularity of The Queen, who came to the throne at the age of 26. If we assume she lives to the same age as her mother, she will be followed by a man of 80. If Charles then lives a good long life, William will be 60 by the time he is King. Eventually, as one arthritic old monarch follows another, the public is going to tire of the whole show.

By Andy McSmith

Our colleague Terence Blacker in today's Independent repeats an often heard accusation that Polly Toynbee, the grand dame of left wing journalism is "humourless". I disagree. She is, of course, deeeply serious, but that is not the same thing. The appreciation of humour requires unspoken shared assumption between listerner and hearer, or writer and reader. If you write: "There are two things I don't like about Peter Mandelson - his face", that is a joke that can only be shared with people who know something of Peter Mandelson, and who share an unstated belief that one-faced people are nicer than two-faced people.

Here is Polly Toynbee reacting to an email she received from an ageing member of the Socialist Worker Party: "By the way, if anyone knows someone called Ian Birchall, do please tell me about him. He just sent me this email: 'You are a loathsome overpaid hypocrite. Nobody would miss you for 5 seconds if you were dead like your despicable shitball (ex-)husband. I should like to see you in a cancer ward screaming with pain and vomiting blood.' His email is ian@ibirchall.wanadoo.co.uk. No, I didn't reply to that one."

That is humour, though not, I grant you, of the Bernard Manning kind.

By Andy McSmith

Note how David Cameron allowed Prime Minister's Questions to pass by today without mentioning the dispute between the government and the Police Federation. Strangely shy of him. It may have something to do with the evidence set out in February by Sir Clive Booth which shows that over 12 years, police pay has risen by twice the rate of inflation and by more than the average pay increases in either the public or private sectors. Usually, when a group of employees are awarded better pay, they are also required to become more productive. If the police "produce" more than they did 12 years ago, the evidence is hard to find.

Gordon Brown will therefore have to tough this one out, although he needs a dispute with the police right now like a hole in the head. And if it came to a strike, the consequences would be incalculable.

Talk of a police strike has been heard before. If you click here you can eavesdrop an online discussion between officers three years ago about what would happen if they stopped work. As one points out, there may be a law that forbids police officers to strike, but who would enforce it?

By Andy McSmith

On the only occasion that I ever met Conrad Black he was chairing an event which I was covering for the Daily Telegraph at which a mad senator from Texas was arguing the case for Britain to leave the EC and join the North American free trade association. On discovering that I didn't agree with this insane proposition, Black accused me of being a liberal and said that if I ever introduced my attitudes into his newspaper, he would ring the editor at 3 a.m. "I do that, you know," he added.

He didn't, in fact. I am pleased to say that the piece I wrote for the Telegraph did enrage him, because it quoted Kenneth Clarke at length on what a lunatic Black's Texas friend was, but instead of abusing his position as proprietor, Black wrote a riposte which was published in The Spectator.

It is a curious fact that for all his bombast, greed, and dishonesty, Black was a good newspaper proprietor. Nearly everyone who worked for the Telegraph under his ownership wishes they had him back. The same was true, believe it or not, of that other criminal, Robert Maxwell - who beats Black as the biggest bully I have ever had the misfortune to know. When the Daily Mirror acquired a new proprietor in David Montgomery, everyone - even that inveterate revolutionary Paul Foot - had to acknowledge that as a proprietor (though not as a pension fund manager), Maxwell was better.

By Andy McSmith

I don't know why anyone thinks there is a mystery around this ex-prison officer who claims to have had amnesia for five years. The answer is obvious. The guy comes from the North East. He's been donating money to the Labour Party all this time and can't remember what names he has been using, that's all.

By Andy McSmith

Jasper Gerard, in today's Observer, suggests that the 15-day sentence passed by a Sudanese court on the British teacher Gillian Gibbons, and the street protests by what he calls the 'Rent-a-Mullahs', is "a case so absurd it may be a tipping point" - more "absurd", he implies, than the sentence of 200 lashes passed on a Saudi woman after she was raped by seven men.

Absurd, perhaps, but nowhere near so cruel. Though Gibbons has put through a dreadful ordeal, it will end soon and she will return to a familiar community where almost everyone is on her side, including numerous Muslims who have commented on the case. Even the Sudanese government's representative in London plainly did not want this to happen to her.

But who will look after the 19-year-old, assuming that she doesn't die under the appalling sentence inflicted on her?

By Andy McSmith

George Bush is deeply concerned that Gary Kasparov and other opponents of President Putin have been arrested. Quite right. It concerns us all. But what a contrast between these remarks and the President's silence, and the weird response from the State Department, to the news that a Saudi teenager who was raped by seven men has been sentenced to 200 lashes because she was in a car with a man who was not her husband or a relative.

By Andy McSmith

Whoever was behind the decision to invite the objectionable Nick Griffin and David Irving to address Oxford students can congratulate themselves on one count. They wanted publicity. They got it. The story has been reported around the world. And it was, first of all, a publicity stunt. There is a serious argument to be had about whether, for instance, there ought to be a law against Holocaust denial, but the best people to make it are not Holocaust deniers. It was not necessary to invite Griffin and Irving to a prestigious setting like to ensure that they are not denied to right to free speech. Addressing the Oxford Union is not a "right"; it is a privilege that should not have been misused in this way.

By Andy McSmith

Kim Howells, the Foreign Minister, claimed not long ago that the UK and Saudi Arabia have "shared values". Something else we have in common, it now emerges, is an armed presence in Iraq. The New York Times reports that a treasure trove of documents captured during a raid by American troops has yielded the first accurate picture of the make up of foreign insurgents operating in Iraq. They discovered that 41 per cent of a sample of more than 700 were Saudis, while another 20 per cent came from Libya. There were no Iranians, but that is not surprising because it appears to be a list of Sunni insurgents who have infiltrated Iraq to oppose Shi'ite rule. The US have caught Iranians inside Iraq in the past - they make up a grand total of 11 prisoners out of 25,000 now being held in detention centres.

By Andy McSmith

An anniversary is about to slip by almost unnoticed. A year ago today, the newspapers were full of grim pcitures of Alexander Litvinenko, wasting away from toxic poisoning. He died on 23 November 2006. The story which so fascinated people at the time has now run into the sand. We know that the man accused of Litvinenko's murder will never be tried, because the Russians will never extradite him. Books written about the affair have not sold well, as public interest fades. The conflict between the Russians and the Chechens, in which Litvinenko became embroiled, is something about which most people know little and have no strong opinions.

By Andy McSmith

It is a truism of politics that once a government is perceived to be on the downward slide, everything that happens is a potential disaster. In the early autumn, when Gordon Brown was riding high, there was the first run on a British bank in living memory - and no one blamed the government. The impact on the polls was nil. Today it emerges that some careless junior official has posted a couple of CDs of which he or she shoudl have taken more care. It's a terrible blunder, but it is patently not the fault of Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling or anyone else in government. Yet don't be too surprised if the voters think otherwise, and that the next opinion poll shows another drop in Labour's support. It's irrational, but that is how it goes.

Meanwhile, having children of school age, I shall have to watch my bank statements - like about seven million other parents.

By Andy McSmith

How appropriate that the sad self-publicist who has applied to bring a private summons against the McCanns for child neglect should also be a former parliametnary candidate for UKIP. But the story that fills the front page of today's Daily Express, does not do justice to "retired solicitor Anthony Bennett" who far more bonkers than it implies. Six years ago, he was in court charged with stealing 29 metric road signs, though his criminal conviction was overturned on appeal.

By Andy McSmith

When the law finally caught up with the killer of 11 year old Lesley Molseed, after 32 years, it brought back another ghost from the past. Lord Waddington was the barrister who represented Stefan Kiszko, who spent 16 years in prison for the murder. Most people have perhaps forgotten the full awfulness of David Waddington, the last Home Secretary to advocate hanging, who looked and talked like the Minister for the Interior of some tinpot republic.

By Andy McSmith

The ConservativeHome website takes the press to task for describing the former Cabinet minister and convict, Jonathan Aitken, as a "disgraced". The site even refers to the right of a politicians to have a private life. But there was nothing remotely private about Aitken's fall from grace.