On the BBC, a cuddly Gordon spoke of being nice to your neighbours. A bit rich, surely?

The BBC is trying to define the British Identity, and Gordon Brown graced Auntie with an audience. His television appearances are rare these days: David Dimbleby has complained about Brown's absence, since 1997, from Question Time. But then Dimbleby would never offer the Chancellor the reverence that Dermot Murnaghan did on the Breakfast news - nor, for that matter, would a live audience.

This was the cuddly, softly spoken, sofa Gordon; he mused on the importance of tolerance, fair play and the necessity of getting on with one's neighbours. Which is a bit rich, because he famously doesn't get along with his own, as revealed painfully in Derek Scott's new book, Off Whitehall. The former Blair economics adviser said the Chancellor would make Blair beg for crumbs of information about the Budget.

Fair play? I think not, Chancellor.

And talking of naked ambition, I'm sure the headline was the key to it all. On the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine: "Over exposure", next to a picture of the naked A A Gill. But was it ironic or iconic? Inside, he was contemplating the death of the nude, its destruction through the lens of a camera, and the difference between a nude and just being plain naked - the former embodying beauty and art, the latter usually neither.

Whatever Gill was contemplating, we were contemplating that body. How many men of his age (50), or of any age, could survive such scrutiny? The Blonde is a fortunate woman indeed. But, for the record, Mr Gill, that cover was a nude, even though it was a photograph.

David Blunkett is so cosseted these days that even on a night at the Proms - in a box next to mine and with a woman who was not his Kimberly - he was reluctant to chat. Indeed, the looks we were given for even poking our heads round the partition would have been enough to wither the most hardened hack.

Blameless Blunkett has out-Tefloned Tony - he's not to blame for rising violent crime, he's not to blame for a protester getting close enough to blow up Buck House, he's not to blame for shagging a married mother. And now he's even too grand to talk to.

Where Richard and Judy lead, others follow. Such is the success of their popularisation of the novel, that now even Waterstone's has R&J sections. To mark our new thirst for reading, Woman's Hour has launched Women's Watershed Fiction, searching for the ten novels that have changed women's lives. I'd submit the Atkins South Beach Diet Book.

In the Tory camp, Michael Howard's reshuffle had some good news: he brought back John Redwood, a man of considerable intelligence and substance, and not alien to those of us who know and like him. The bad news is the appointment of Nicholas Soames - a one-man branding disaster - and the exit of a moderniser, Damian Green.

Labels in politics often serve only to trivialise. Green is the kind of politician the Tories desperately need in their front line - honest, likeable, compassionate. To replace his face with Soames's is a PR disaster beyond contemplation.

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