News that Piers Morgan is toying with the idea of taking the red out of the top of the Mirror comes as no surprise to those who have been closely watching either his newspaper or his luncheon companions - although Morgan's idea of toying with anything is akin to a lion playing with the carcass of a zebra.

Sales in the red-top market are in decline and have been for more than a decade, owing largely to an expanding middle class. They do, however, still turn in hefty profits. The only way the Sun or the Mirror can increase their circulation is to take market share from each other, or to change the original product and try to move into a new market. With change comes the very real risk of accelerated decline.

But this is clearly the gamble Morgan is weighing up. Can it be that he is planning to turn the Mirror from a red top into a grey top? Are we witnessing the tortured birth of a mid-market Guardian? And would anyone in their right mind attempt to take on the Daily Mail?

Morgan's recent signings read like the guest list of a leftie's stag night - Jonathan Freedland, Christopher Hitchens, John Pilger, Matthew Norman, Jim Shelley. I would venture to guess that none of these writers would have been a volunteer, but what Piers wants, Piers usually gets. He can be an irresistible force. He is also a clever editor with a good eye for talent - he spotted Tony Parsons before he became Tony Parsons - and the quality of the writing has improved out of sight under his editorship. But what evidence is there of hundreds of thousands of middle-class lefties wandering around the market place in search of a newspaper? Aren't they all reading the Guardian already?

I suspect, in the end, that when people buy a paper, they're buying a brand as much as anything else. As with their car and their postcode and the school they send their kids to, they want their newspaper to say something about them. Let's never underestimate the snobbery of the educated left. How many of them would want their neighbours to see a copy of the Mirror - red or grey topped - dropping on their Islington doorsteps?

When it comes down to it, it may just be that you can no more take the red top out of the Mirror than you can take the page three out of Melinda Messenger.

A word of advice for Euan Blair: however many times your mum tells you that there should be no penalty for fame, remember that sometimes there is a price. The best seats in the house for you and your girlfriend at a movie premiere, and the opportunity to rub shoulders and be photographed with, and stare down the cleavage of, the great and the good-looking of the British film industry, are privileges (yes, privileges, not rights) not afforded your average teenager. And a word of advice for James Naughtie, on the same subject on the Today programme. Since when did Kate Winslet, an Oscar-winning, internationally regarded, thirtysomething actress and mother become a "starlet"? I know it was early, Jim, but shame on you.

How do you get millions of apathetic Brits to celebrate a bunch of dysfunctional, obnoxious, talentless, greedy spongers? Yes, we are talking about the royal family and the desperate state, as exclusively revealed by the Times, of the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations.

The answer is at our fingertips, or at least at our remote controls. Given the success of the brutal new talent show Pop Idol - 11.8 million people watched it last weekend - and the equally merciless Big Brother before it, the Queen needs her own TV show. At last, Edward can be really useful.

Call it Big Mother (everyone loves the Queen Mum, and she wouldn't be required to do anything but sit on a throne drinking gin and tonics all day), take them all - even the dullards like Andrew, and the hangers-on like Princess Alexandra - confine them inside one of their smaller palaces, film them 24 hours a day, humiliate them, make them perform and compete with each other, and thereby display how utterly irrelevant they all are. And you, the viewer, get to vote them out.

Then, during the last show of the series, when there is only one royal left, the public get to vote on whether they want a monarchy or not. Well, I'd watch it.

There is much talk around of women making millions out of their books, and much talk from those women to help the millions roll in.

On the one hand, we have Joanna Trollope, draping herself rather seductively over all the newspapers and talking about the one thing you won't find in her books - sex. At 58, she is thrilled that she can take pleasure from uncomplicated sex, "just like a man", and reveals that the streets are a good place for picking up young talent. The lady protesteth too much? Then we discover that the hitherto magnificently private Sue MacGregor, 60, is to reveal all in her book about a secret affair she had with Leonard Rossiter (who played Reginald Perrin). I'm sure that one of the most successful and serious women in British journalism has enough great tales to tell without this one. Finally, there is Tina Brown. The publishers are fighting over her impending scribblings. I would bet a cool million that she manages, in her autobiography, to do exactly what she has done throughout her magazine career - make millions by being nice to all the right people and nasty about none.