On Any Questions, the studio audience booed and jeered when Peter Hain defended the war

I finished the week with Radio 4's Any Questions. Recorded just hours after the news of Kenneth Bigley's murder, it was a sombre affair, except for the question about our first kiss (remember, that was the Tory snog initiative). I distinctly heard one well-dressed lady in the front row say "Pass the sick bag, Mildred" when Peter Hain said he remembered only his last kiss, the one he had given his wife that day. Mildred's friend was being unkind, as Hain also speaks very lovingly of his wife in private. I think he meant it.

What he could not have meant is that he believed "overwhelming" evidence had been put to members of the British cabinet before we went to war that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The audience started booing and jeering. Which is what had happened the previous night to Patricia Hewitt on BBC1's Question Time, where she proved that she belonged to the Can't Say Sorry, Won't Say Sorry party - she falls excruciatingly into the first category and Tony Blair arrogantly into the second.

When you look into these ministers' eyes, even the Blair loyalists, you can see they know they're defending the indefensible.

If ever Tony Blair needed proof that Alastair Campbell is an electoral liability it came on Breakfast With Frost. The camera loves him, but the problem starts the moment he opens his mouth.

Campbell's tribal hatred may go down well inside the strategic planning unit, but on a Sunday morning, he just came across as rabid. His claim that Blair had been cleared of wrongdoing over Iraq by four inquiries (holding up his fingers and prodding them at us, like an almighty

four fingers to the viewers) was laughable, given that the Iraq Survey Group had revealed only days earlier that there were no WMDs and no nuclear threat, nor was there any 45-minute capacity - the reasons we went to war, as I remember.

The wide-eyed, finger-stabbing, nose-picking propagandist reminded us only of the utter contempt this government has for both us and the truth.

Bad timing for the lovely Jon Snow, who revealed in the Mail on Sunday his plan to leave Channel 4 and join the UN. At 57, and after 15 years, he wants to hang up his whacky ties and "change the world".

"I'd like to see the UN become the greatest institution in the world," he said. Alas, it went to print before news broke that UN officials had colluded with Saddam and helped syphon off billions of pounds from the oil-for-food programme in Iraq. Snow's got an uphill job making the UN credible again, let alone great.

No week is now complete without a David Beckham scandal and this time we had two: first, the pulverising of Ben Thatcher to use up his one-game suspension. "Some people fought I ain't got de brains to fink up somefink like dat meself," said David proudly. He was, however, curiously silent about another little fouling - allegations in the Sunday Mirror of an affair with a spray-on suntan expert. This created a new tabloid term of abuse hot on the tail of Rod Liddle's "slapper": the "brazen beautician". But I know it's all lies just from the headline: "Becks beds pal of Posh". Posh has no pals.

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