Commentariat

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I acknowledge the traditional keepers of this land on which we gather in our nation’s capital; their successors, and those who have come before me: their dignified service; their diligence and pledge; their important efforts in recognising, encouraging, and unifying Australians. I feel deeply the gravity of the role bestowed on me today as I stand before you in this Senate Chamber.

Three years ago, Londoners noticed that a sort of Victorian space shuttle seemed to have crashed into one of its most famous streets. They telephoned their friends, and their friends telephoned their friends. Shortly afterwards, a giant puppet of a small girl emerged, soon to be joined by a colossal puppet of an elephant.

Italy has an unnerving ability to switch in a flash from being a kind and obliging country to a nasty place capable of ruthless violence. The latest to find this out was a group of activists protesting about the plan to build a of a new American military base in the city of Vicenza.

I’ve become the first Leader of the Green Party at a time when progressive leadership has never been more urgent. We face the interconnected challenges of recession, soaring oil prices and climate change, but the leadership of the establishment parties has been so timid as to actually deepen the crisis.

At the beginning of this year, a shrewd friend of mine said that I was in a good position to understand Gordon Brown’s difficulties because I had watched the same thing happening to John Major. I disagreed. The PM was in a hole, certainly, but the comparison with Sir John was too far-fetched. I was right. Gordon Brown’s position is not as bad as John Major’s was. It is far worse.

I have a confession to make. I love not one despised style of music, but two: heavy metal, and country& western. As they scroll down my iPod, my friends weep – and retch. And it gets worse: I believe these eruptions of noise offer a political parable. Really: set aside your prejudices and your earplugs and stock up on metal and country. You will slowly see we have misunderstood two of the most politically charged, politically reviled places on earth: the Muslim world, and the Deep South. Don’t turn the page over; stay with me.

There is already famine in Africa but it is not the fault of the Soil Association or British organic food markets. Up to 14 million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk of starvation and this has little to do with Western-imposed attitudes to organic farming. Millions more are suffering in Zimbabwe, and food riots have flared from Egypt to Mozambique. The root of the problem in almost every case is political, not scientific.

“Too big to fail” is an expression that well suits Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned yesterday that these two institutions "are so large and interwoven in our financial system that a failure of either of them would create great turmoil in financial markets here and around the globe”. He was right. He might even have been understating things. For if Freddie and Fannie had been allowed to go under, what we have seen of the credit crunch thus far would have been a mere prelude to a much more profound slump - one comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the last time the banks simply stopped lending. Global financial turmoil would have been the beginning of it.

Few British MPs have ever been expelled from Parliament and sent to prison. Among the handful were a couple of Jacobites and John Wilkes, the radical hero who fled to America to avoid trial for libel in the reign of George III. Will the Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik be the next to join them?

Nicolas Sarkozy faces a hard task when he travels to Moscow today in an attempt to bridge East-West differences over the Georgia crisis that have, if anything, widened in recent weeks. A month after the Georgian government launched its ill-fated assault on the breakaway region of South Ossetia, the French President, who holds the EU presidency, has to persuade Russia to abide by the six-point peace plan he brokered. This would involve Russia withdrawing forces from Georgia proper, agreeing to the free movement of monitors in a buffer zone between South Ossetia and Georgia and initiating a framework for security talks between Tblisi and Moscow.

The annual conference of the Trades Union Congress opens in Brighton today with a varied agenda but one that is bound to be overshadowed by continuing speculation about Gordon Brown’s leadership. Although unions clearly do not wield anything like the same power within the Labour Party that they did 30 years ago, when they all but terrorised the governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, they remain a significant force, not least because of their financial donations. Their voice is important when doubts arise about the party leadership.

“I don’t mind a good fight,” John McCain told the Republican faithful last week, “and for reasons known only to God I’ve had quite a few tough ones in my life.” But even for this former prisoner of war in North Vietnam turned battle-seasoned Senator often at odds with his own party, no fight will be as tough as the one he faces over the next eight weeks, if he is to defy every law of politics and win the White House.

Every now and then the power of the human spirit to contradict expectations makes a lasting impression on a whole society. Ten days ago, Jimmy Mizen was just another teenager who had been murdered in London. The 13th this year. The details barely registered. Nice guy. Not in a gang. Tried to avoid a piece of low-level thuggery in a baker’s shop, which resulted in a broken window. Stabbed with a piece of glass. Ghastly business. Something must be done. What did Boris say he would do about feral, violent youths? Didn’t Jacqui Smith say something about harassing them? Next story.

A couple of weeks ago, on a station platform in the north of England, I counted at least four morbidly obese adults. One of them was a mother with a toddler, who was already showing the same tendency. So I wasn’t surprised to discover last week that British children are near the top of a new table showing the extent of childhood obesity in 27 European countries. Scottish boys and girls are at number two, with a third weighing more than they should, while their English counterparts are not far behind; almost 30 per cent of English girls are overweight, putting them at number four in the table, while English boys are in sixth place.

There are “some people so famous, so much the focus of media attention and public conversation, that they cease to be viewed by many as human beings. Britney has joined them.” Alastair Campbell’s point applies to anyone who is recognisable to the general public by their first name.

In May of 1977 two friends who were well on their way to becoming the most successful film makers in the world were sitting together on a beach in Hawaii.

During his time as Brussels correspondent for ‘The Daily Telegraph’, Boris Johnson impressed his editor by filing story after exclusive story, all apparently unnoticed by other papers. There were mutterings that these scoops were perhaps not as firmly wedded to the truth as might have been desirable. Most memorable among them was a story in 1991 following an announcement by the European Commission that it was leaving its Berlaymont headquarters because of the health and safety risks from leaking asbestos. Johnson’s explosive take on this was that the much-despised building was subsequently to be blown up. Seventeen years later, although it is now free of asbestos, the EC has yet to pack the walls with dynamite.

My mother swears like a trooper. Actually, that’s not fair - I grew up near soldiers’ barracks and I never heard any of them explete like she does. Now it turns out that Keira Knightley and Madonna curse more than squaddies too, and they’ve both been told to bloody well stop it.

Three High Court judges debating the sexual allure of man boobs is the stuff of music hall. The Court of Appeal has just overturned the conviction of a homosexual care worker who filmed another man at a swimming pool. He could not have been found guilty of voyeurism under the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, because the male chest is not accorded the same privacy as female breasts.

It is 15 days since Cyclone Nargis hit Burma’s Irrawaddy delta. Officially, 78,000 people have died (with another 55,000 missing), but NGOs estimate the figures will go a good deal higher yet. The UN admits it hasn’t a clue how bad things are. Offers of help for the 2.5 million people affected have come from all over the world, and aid organisations have done their valiant best to bring assistance. The situation is dire. There is nothing more certain than that corpses lying around in stagnant water will give rise to disease, yet that is precisely what the few images we have been allowed to see have shown us.

A mere 10 months have gone by since last summer’s by-elections. These contests marked the high point of Mr Gordon Brown’s premiership. Since then, the precious fluid has been draining away, so that now there is hardly anything left in the tank. I was one of only two practitioners of this strange trade to pick up the signs. The other was, I think, Lord Rees-Mogg in The Times. There may have been others. If so, I apologise.

Do you digg? Or twitter? Are you busy poking your friends on Facebook? Or feeding your aggregators? Most readers of the ‘IoS’ are pretty techno-savvy, and I expect you’ll know what I’m on about. Even Gordon Brown is twittering these days (and I don’t mean just at the dispatch box). But the rise of the digitally literate reader is causing a shudder of anxiety among the ombudsmen of the world’s newspapers, who are getting together for their annual conference in Sweden at the end of this month. (What do you call a gathering of readers’ editors? A “niggle”, perhaps?)

Another week, another Government target missed - that’s the downside of setting optimistic objectives in the hope of seducing voters. So far this year the number of new houses being built in England is running at the lowest level since Labour came to power - just over 32,000 homes are under construction. The pledge to build 240,000 new homes a year by 2016 stands about as much chance of being achieved as that other New Labour dream - the eradication of child poverty.

The Tony award nominations for the best work in New York were announced on Wednesday, and it was a good moment for London theatre. Eight Brits were nominated for major acting prizes, and the Chocolate Factory’s show, Sunday in the Park with George, picked up nine nominations of its own. To think that it started in our small theatre in Southwark makes me very proud.

So 43 is doing his bit too. To show solidarity with the troops fighting and dying in his endless war in Iraq, and with their families, George W Bush has given up… golf. When I read that remark, in an interview with the online publication Politico last week, it seemed at first to sum up everything that was wrong with him, and with the Republican party, blindly following him into the miserable dead-end that is Bush’s presidency in its final months.