Commentariat

The arrest of Damian Green last Thursday, his subsequent detention and
interrogation, together with the police search of his home and his office in
the Palace of Westminster, constitute the most serious breach of the
privilege of Parliament in modern times. At least eight senior figures in
the British Establishment were involved; they either initiated the action,
agreed to it, conducted it, or allowed it to continue. Not one of them seems
to have understood how serious a “high crime or misdemeanour” they were
conspiring to commit.

Yesterday a Pakistani security official said that if India now put more forces
on to the disputed Kashmir border, the Pakistani Army would do likewise. By
the way, that would mean that Pakistan put less effort into fighting the
Taleban on its western border, he added, in an unsubtle warning to the US
and Britain. Pakistan understands only too well that for the West its border
with Afghanistan represents the frontline in the war on terror.

A theme of the autumn was Huge Salaries. Like giant hissing cockroaches they fascinate and repel. It is easy to grasp the idea of fortunes made by starting and selling a business: the weirdness begins when that familiar object, a pay packet, is inflated to insanity. I am always reminded of that nasty phenomenon the neotenous tadpole: instead of developing frog legs the small wriggling comma keeps growing until it is just a huge bloated head and lashing tail as long as your hand. Proper frogs wisely avoid it.

The British have always been beastly about the Swiss. Oscar Wilde thought the Alpine republic was inhabited solely by theologians and waiters; Sydney Smith argued that it was an inferior version of Scotland. The consensus seems to be that the Swiss did not deserve their extravagantly beautiful landscape. Ethnocentric claptrap, of course. We just resent that you can prosper by avoiding wars; wimps win. Remember that old Orson Welles line: “They had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Eugenics is one of those knock-down words used to silence argument. It was
used several times last week, in radio discussions and articles about women
choosing to give birth to babies with Down’s syndrome.

Were we better off in the 1950s than we are now? The Labour MP Frank Field
thinks that we were, commending the fact that back then, instead of getting
drunk, stabbing one another and watching Strictly Come Dancing, the mass of
British people were cheerfully occupied with such fulfilling and organic
pastimes as “cooking, gardening, dressmaking, music-making, rickets, polio
and smallpox”.

I have always been a fan of British restraint. I revere it. I love the fact
that someone in the throes of peritonitis will murmur vaguely about having
“a slight tummy ache”. An elderly friend, recently out of hospital,
cancelled supper a few weeks ago. She was clearly not feeling well. Asked if
there was anything anyone could do, she said: “Oh no. I’ll just go to bed
with a glass of water.” This sort of thing makes me nearly explode with
admiration.

My first assignment as a journalist in Bombay was in 2003, when I visited the home of a man accused of planting a bomb that had killed several people a few days earlier at the Gateway of India, the city's most famous landmark. The suspected terrorist lived in a typical Bombay slum, congested, with packed houses that shared walls and windows, and I spent the day quizzing the neighbours, who said they had heard and seen nothing suspicious, even though the police were sure that the man had assembled the bomb at home.

On the whole, and in the main, and everything considered, you do not in a
democracy go around arresting the Opposition. For some time now, web
humorists have been spelling new Labour “Nu-Labour”. As reports of Damian
Green’s arrest swirled yesterday, the prefix ZA attached itself to the
bloggers’ joke: ZANU-Labour. If by lunch I had heard the comparison with
Zimbabwe once, I had heard it a dozen times.

In this time of national adversity the country needs leadership by example. Instead of fan-mailing X Factor finalists, Gordon Brown should be down in the Westfield shopping mecca rewarding Sarah for swinging that Scottish by-election with a Christmas splurge in Jimmy Choo. Why are Tessa Jowell and Jacqui Smith not tripping into Cabinet, ministerial wrists buckling under Accessorize bags? We need to see Lord Mandelson test-driving sporty runabouts, Alistair Darling running amok in PC World.

The death of Woolworths has dealt a serious blow to those of us who had been quietly celebrating the onset of recession as a counterbalance to the recent years of greed and slickness, and had hoped that it would herald the arrival of a new austerity.

W e now know that 2009 is going to be very, very tough, particularly the first
half of it. A number of our clients are battening down the hatches and there
is considerable gloom about.

Images of that great Bombay monument, the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, engulfed in flames and thick billowing smoke cannot help but recall the collapsing twin towers of 9/11. The attack seems to bear all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation.

Forget VAT. Forget the Pre-Budget Report and the gaping hole in the public finances. Why has no one noticed that the financial system is clinically dead? Without bank loans, credit lines and overdrafts, good businesses will go bust and repossessions soar. The PBR was miserably irrelevant.

The festive season has come early this year - well for the robbers it has. For the rest of us there isn't a great deal to celebrate.

The woes of Woolies have inspired a wave of nostalgia for a Pick'n'Mix of cosy experiences that range from filching confectionery or broken biscuits, searching for 7in singles by Technotronic and Yazoo to buying Miners mascara and scratchy school uniforms. However, as the retailer's administrators assess possible offers for Woolworths' 800 stores, maybe we should all be concentrating not so much on the past of this business, but on what its passing means for the future of high streets, including yours.

The leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales has called for the National
Gallery to surrender a Renaissance masterpiece – because it is a “work of
faith” rather than art.

The keen wind of recession whistled down Hope Street last week. In Liverpool, the question on everybody's lips was simple: would it blow away the city's dreams of turning its year as Europe's Capital of Culture into a decade of regeneration? What price those millions sunk into great theatre, street carnival, cutting-edge art and Simon Rattle concerts? Were they simply to be swept out by economic forces that no one had predicted?

The number of flights at Heathrow will increase far sooner than the Government
has previously admitted under plans to squeeze in more take-offs and
landings on the existing runways.

We live in an age when technological ease has become so much a part of the
accustomed way of life that it seems “natural” to some, even their right.
But what does our dependence upon such technology do to our connection with
Nature? Does our increasing dependence upon technology make us believe that
we, too, and the world about us, are merely part of some enormous mechanical
process?

Look, we know our place, we semi-numerate arts graduate girlies. We don’t
normally intervene in abstruse economic debates, sticking modestly to
matters of ethics, aesthetics, priorities and psychologies. But since it has
recently transpired that the world’s ruling economists, bankers, treasuries
and strategy wonks are not after all infallible, it is perhaps permissible
for a lay thinker to stick an oar in.

The appalling rapist who made his two daughters pregnant 19 times in 28 years did not need to build an underground cell, like Josef Fritzl, in which to commit his crimes: he could rely, instead, on the thick walls of British reticence to hide the horror.

Shock. Horror. VAT could go up after the next election. Or it could go down -
or stay the same. The same can be said of income tax and council tax and
road tax. It can also be said about public spending, government deficits,
the FTSE index, the oil price and the price of fish. So what?