Commentariat

Independent

Recent readers of my husband Cooper’s column will undoubtedly know that he was having some problems with the immigration authorities here in the United Kingdom. They took him away for questioning 10 days ago and he was held for three days against his will and then released – but his passport was retained. Three days ago they came for him again – they knocked on our door at 5am, forced an entry and took Cooper away. They told me that he was being extradited back to the United States that morning. That is the last I have heard of him, apart from a mysterious telephone call from someone who said that he was a “fan” of Cooper’s column – he warned me that he was being taken to Guantanamo Bay.

Stand by for fireworks between Jack Straw’s Ministry of Justice and members of Britain’s “exotic” artistic community.

There’s something Oedipal, even Shakespearean, about Marcus Wareing’s eclipsing of his former mentor and boss, Gordon Ramsay, in the hierarchy of top London restaurants. It’s part of a syndrome in which a former protégé rises to match, then overtake, his beloved master. It happened with Gordon Ramsay who, after enduring years of training, abuse and belittling by Marco Pierre White, left him to go it alone, and comprehensively outclassed him in stars and media recognition.

Is there anything so relentlessly pursued and yet so badly defined as happiness? The Halifax bank carried out a survey two years ago to find Britain’s happiest locality. Using criteria such as employment levels, house prices and salaries, it identified Elmbridge in Surrey as the most blissful enclave in the land.

Anyone who has lived through previous ups and downs in the housing market will find nothing surprising about the pain that housebuilders such as Taylor Wimpey are feeling at the moment. Until this year, it was an unsustainable bubble. Construction firms were always going to be in the blast zone when it inevitably burst.

Russia’s action in recognising the unilaterally declared independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was hasty, intemperate and ill-advised. It was also utterly predictable. These two regions have tried to separate themselves from Georgia ever since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and they have twice declared independence, without convincing Russia to give them formal backing. Georgia’s ill-fated attempt three weeks ago to change the facts on the ground by military means, gave them another chance. It is a chance that they, and Russia’s new President Dmitry Medvedev, had no hesitation in seizing.

After eight years of George Bush, people are hurting at home and our standing has eroded around the world. We have a lot of work ahead of us: jobs lost; houses gone; falling wages; rising prices; the Supreme Court in a right-wing headlock; and our government in partisan gridlock; the biggest deficit in our nation’s history; money borrowed from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudis; Putin and Georgia; Iran and Iraq.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, wants to give the impression that she has increased the number of police on our streets – but has she? Last week, she announced 6,000 more special constables, although recruitment of the more controversial community support officers seems to have slowed. Special constables receive only expenses. Some would say they represent policing on the cheap. Police community support officers (PCSOs) have more limited powers. Although they work in a cosmetic fashion by offering someone in a uniform walking the streets, you have only to spend five minutes talking to one to realise they are completely ineffectual, having no powers of arrest.

It’s early days, but I wouldn’t mind betting that someone’s already working on a Hollywood script about Clark Rockefeller, the 40-something socialite who last month prompted a nationwide manhunt by kidnapping his seven-year-old daughter. Police eventually discovered that Rockefeller was not who he seemed: their fugitive’s real identity was Christian Gerhartsreiter, a German student who’d visited the US in 1977 and remained illegally ever since – living, social-climbing, and even marrying under a variety of aliases.

Two presumptions seem to have taken hold of all discussion of the burgeoning crisis over Russia’s actions in Georgia. One is that Moscow, by sending in the tanks, has changed the rules of geopolitics and destroyed the post Cold War era of calm and co-operation, as the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, argued in his sabre-rattling speech yesterday in Kiev. The other is that what we’re witnessing is a return to the politics of the 19th-century, when empires ruled and great countries thought in terms of spheres of influence.

There has been a great deal of harrumphing and anxiety amongst education traditionalists that the name of Winston Churchill is missing from the revamped national curriculum on history due to be introduced in secondary schools to be taught from next week.

It feels like it has all fizzled out. All the end-of-term excitement at Westminster about Gordon Brown’s uncertain hold on No 10 seems to have subsided. Was it all just the silliness induced by the imminence of the holidays? Just as, at school, the older pupils play practical jokes and teachers break the routine with a bit of fun. You can tell what sort of school I went to: for our maths teacher this consisted of doing a whole lesson in base six; most teachers nowadays just put on a video.

Finally, the warm ups are over – Ted Kennedy and his farewell call to arms, the Clintons and the latest episode of America’s favourite political psychodrama. Even the uncertainty about whether the engaging but irredeemably prolix Joe Biden can keep control of the word count will have been resolved when this article appears. Here in Denver, we’ve at last got around to the one thing that matters. Barack Obama.

Does the shadow cabinet need its own nanny? In a speech to the Reform think tank, Andrew Lansley echoes David Cameron’s edict that there is "no excuse" for being overweight and that people should get off their sofas.

Perhaps it was just me, but the sight of Chelsea Clinton introducing her mother at the Democratic convention in Denver last night seemed to say: "Fear not! Defeat in the primaries was just a blip, the dynasty continues".

I have just returned from a couple of weeks in the blazing south of Italy, and yes, it was lovely, thank you for asking. But without wishing to sound ungrateful (and now that I’ve seen the miserable weather back here, I know I will), I have to confess that I’m not really a beach-holiday kind of a girl. Lying around aimlessly gives me far too much anxiety time. Behind my sunglasses, I can indulge all my darkest fears without my husband suspecting a thing. And there are all those beach-related worries to add into the mix: have the children got enough suncream on; should they be out that far in the sea; are there jellyfish, paedophiles, abandoned syringes, broken bottles, dog faeces?

Chickens fighting, sheep always falling over, pigs had measles, dog’s got fleas. Tractor, quad bike and digger, in pieces half the year. Roofs blowing off, hedges sprouting out of control like magic beanstalks, mulberries ailing. Beams failing. Badgers, rats, rooks, rabbits all gatecrashing the party. There is always some small emergency or other unfolding in this tiny soap opera, something that demands my full attention and since I became a farmer I’ve noticed that the existential angst, the malaise that afflicts all those with no tussles, has evaporated completely. I pity anyone who knows what they are doing. The utter boredom afforded by the riches of Croesus

When an exciting new project involving Michael Jackson and his family is announced, the form book usually requires us to take it with a large pinch of sodium chloride.

At first sight, the notion of having to persuade the British to winter in Spain looks absurd. We already do, in the shape of several million package holidays to the Canaries (try finding a space over Christmas or New Year in Tenerife or Lanzarote), and long-stay trips to resorts such as Benidorm. But Hispanophiles know that the Iberian peninsula is best visited in the off season, when the air is as clear as the beaches, and the cities are unencumbered by backpack-wielding inter-railers.

The truth about a “windfall tax” on the energy companies is that it would raise a lot of money and wouldn’t raise much protest. After all, who is going to march on Parliament for the sake of E.On’s profits? Who would be ready to dress up as Batman and stand on the roof of Buckingham Palace and defy armed police to demand “Justice 4 Centrica”? Who would riot for a raised dividend at Shell or BP?

In television, what happens, happens, and no matter what people say and do to make it happen differently, it doesn’t. That’s it. No one has the ability to draw a line under anything, no matter how much money and effort they put into trying.

It would be lovely, of course, if the sight of a reality TV star bursting out of a bus was to inspire the children of today to drop their Mars bars, and their fries, and their burgers, and their Xboxes, and beg their parents to let them get up early and do 300 laps before a nice bowl of buckwheat muesli. Fingers crossed and all that, but really. I wanted to be Olga Korbut, and then Bjorn Borg, but without getting off the sofa, obviously, and I come from a family whose male members actually did some sport as well as watching it, but the last time I did any with any enthusiasm (”music and movement” if I remember rightly) was at about the same time they put a man on the moon.

I once arrived in Finland on May Day. As I walked into my Helsinki hotel, a big Finnish bloke attacked me. Luckily, it was with a balloon. However, the fear flashed through my panicking brain that even though he was not a gunman or a knifeman, merely a balloonman, he still meant to do me harm, and it was with some difficulty that I extricated myself – only to find that everyone in the whole damn city was in the same damn state. They were all pie-eyed. I’d never seen anything like it.

I first drank in a pub aged 15 or 16, at which point I must have looked 14 at most. We thought we had ‘em fooled, but of course we didn’t – hence the humouring smiles from bartenders pretending to examine our home-made ID cards. Though the legal drinking age was 18, many young people were already in pubs two years before. And many landlords turned a blind eye and kept their doors partly ajar.

It resembled the final, triumphal, scene in every American high-school film you ever saw. You know the one, where the least fancied girl becomes “prom queen”, and swirls off into the distance with the hunkiest, handsomest member of the football team. Well, it happened to Michelle Obama on Monday night, except that her audience was the American viewing and voting public, and the stakes were the highest they could possibly be.