Next time Gordon Brown is addressing the unlovely subject of Britishness he should think "mini-roundabouts". Is there any truer symbol of 21st-century Britain?

Mini-roundabouts are suburban, bossy little objects. They are imposed on us from on high, ostensibly for our own good (but just as possibly because they create work for consultants). Their introduction involves great cost and prolonged upheaval at the end of which you are left with a [...]

By the time you read this the Yuletide television adverts may be starting to grate. Which blameless carols have the likes of Woolworths and Dixons chosen for their hard-sell commercials this year? Will it be "O Come, All Ye Faithful", complete with tinselled reindeer? Or will it be some ding-dong handbell version of "Hark the Herald" that gets broadcast hundreds of times, to the point where you want to throw [...]

Now I know what it's like to be a mink attacked by a parent swan. At the Almeida theatre, as I sat in a puddle of innocence awaiting curtain-up, I came under a prolonged pecking assault from a fellow drama critic.

Georgina Brown of the Mail on Sunday is a county fortysomething who will one day make an excellent Lady Bracknell. She stomped up like Mother Grudge on a pogo [...]

Unkind souls said that one remark sure never to be heard was: "Sir Geoffrey's in sparkling form again tonight." Then Sir Geoffrey Howe made the resignation speech that torpedoed Margaret Thatcher. Now another ancient certainty has perished: Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has given a sizzler of a speech. Do not adjust monocles. Retrieve those marmalade spoons from the floor. That sentence was printed as intended.

Yes, Old [...]

At No 10 on Wednesday mornings, when Tony Blair summons his team to prepare for Prime Minister's Questions, I wonder if he says: "Right, lads, any massacres we can mention?" I ask this because in recent months Blair has repeatedly begun the half-hour session by invoking some disaster that has befallen the world in the previous seven days. He announces his sorrow at this calamity and says he is sure [...]

''American troops are to be armed with a stun gun that uses a baby's high-pitched scream," reports the Daily Mail. Even if people plug their ears, "it will produce the equivalent of an instant migraine", according to Woody Norris, chairman of American Technology Corporation, which has produced the weapon.

A baby screaming? Is that really the worst din we can devise? Here are 30 suggestions for really unacceptably discordant noises [...]

Often politicians are described as "bare-faced" (as in "bare-faced liar"). It's true. There are pitifully few moustaches in the Commons today. I can think of just 15; none is in the cabinet.

Peter Mandelson had a Village People moustache back in the 1980s. The Hartlepool MP fired up his Philips Ladyshave, mowed the thing off - and his ministerial career duly failed. Ditto Stephen Byers.

Hitler and the emperor Hirohito [...]

One of the many reasons to love the Conservative Party is its commitment to politics as a public entertainment. Those new Labour ghastlies with their Darth Vader grimness are so self-targeting and dour. As the past few days have shown, it is left to the Tory hierarchy to make us suck in a gulp of helium from their party balloon and run out into the street to squeak our joy [...]

One of the better wheezes at party conference time used to be strol-ling the corridors of the conference hotel mid-afternoon, flipping round the "Do not disturb" signs so that they instead read: "Please clean this room." In the great years of Tory bonking, countless trysts could be wrecked this way.

Ministers would be down to their sock suspenders, muttering, "By God, you look fabulous in that camisole, Venetia/ Pammy/Clive", when [...]

Clare Short's bold stance on the Iraq question may be many things, but on a local level it is good politics. The International Development Secretary's constituency (Birmingham Ladywood) has Britain's fourth biggest concentration of Muslim voters.

Short, with a parliamentary majority of 18,143, has a potential Muslim vote of 15,184 in Ladywood. According to 1999 figures supplied by the Muslim Council of Great Britain, the country's biggest Islamic seat is [...]