Commentariat

Times David Aaronovitch

In the 1906 general election - a landslide defeat for the Conservatives - the constituency of Henley, then South Oxfordshire, was won by a Liberal named Philip Morrell. I wouldn't have known this about Boris Johnson's predecessor had I not been trawling the Times Archive for his wife, the arts patroness and salonière Lady Ottoline Morrell.

If it is a matter of faith with you that Gordon Brown is mad, terminally dithering, responsible for all the ills you suffer while entirely innocent of all the benefits you enjoy, sub-Stalinesque, constitutionally unable to empathise with your plight (whatever that consists of) and utterly incompetent, it may be better if you move straight on to the column below. Because my argument is almost premised on the idea that this weird consensus is no better grounded than was the perception, current last July - do you remember last July? - that he walked on water.

Are CNN anchors the grandest beings on the planet? On the other side of the Atlantic last week, as Pope Benedict visited the New Rome, I saw CNN's Wolf Blitzer introducing an item about the pontiff's progress&#59; and, as the visual backdrop for the piece he had a gigantic picture of himself, a gigantic picture of the Pope, and a gigantic picture of the two of them shaking hands. “Hey,” Americans were asking each other, “who's that grey-haired guy talking to Wolf Blitzer?”

I would define a moment of double respect as being when, say, the Pope addresses both Houses of Congress, or - as happened again last week - when that great institution the BBC quotes an expert from that even greater institution, the United Nations. The “official” in question was also the Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Richard Falk, and his chosen subject was Israel, so I bowed slightly, turned the tap off and put down my razor to hear what he had been saying.