Now we know why Tony Blair looks so comfortable on the chat-show sofa: it's home from home. As the Hutton and Butler inquiries have revealed, the Prime Minister prefers intimate, informal chats on the sofa to the discipline of minuted cabinet meetings.

His chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, told Lord Hutton that, out of a possible 17 meetings on an average day in the run- up to the Iraq war, [...]

Two bulls are standing in a field, eyeing up some cows on the hillside. The younger of the two bulls says excitedly: "Let's run up the hill right now and shag one of them!" The older, wiser bull replies: "No, let's walk up the hill - and shag the lot of them."

The gag was a favourite of Tony Blair's immediate predecessor, the late John Smith. One of the wisest [...]

The English are so nice, D H Lawrence wrote, with his tongue firmly planted in his hairy cheek. What would he have made of contemporary politics, where niceness is all? George W Bush beat (or very nearly beat) Al Gore to the US presidency because, we are told, he seemed "a pretty regular kind of guy". Big, clever Al just wasn't as nice, as folksy, as George Dubbya.

Tony Blair [...]

Fifty-five years after the last Olympic Games held in London, when the heroic Czech runner Emil Zatopek and the Dutch "mother of two" (as she was inevitably called) Fanny Blankers-Koen wowed the capital's crowds, the city is bidding to host the world's greatest sporting event again, this time in 2012. And once more, a spunky mother of two holds the fate of the games in her hands. This mother is [...]

Who says there's only bad news around at the moment? Investment bankers, even if they still have jobs, won't be getting their multi-million-pound bonuses this year. McDonald's is closing down branches in prestigious central London sites. And now the PR industry is facing its comeuppance. The days of booze-fuelled lunches, outrageous press releases and even more outrageous fees are gone.

Recessions administer a kind of colonic irrigation to the economic [...]

Hands up all those in favour of standing in the way of progress. Nobody? OK, now put your hand up if you think that being modern, generally speaking, is a good idea. I see. So that's 93 per cent support for modernisation. Now all we have to do is agree what it means.

When new Labour is dead, and a future Gunther von Hagens (of "Body Worlds" fame) performs an [...]

It's a pretty remarkable story that provokes a "no comment" response from the head of policy at the Institute of Directors. But the usually fluent and voluble Ruth Lea did not feel able to add to the official statement, put out by the IoD this week, concerning the non-appearance of a joint IoD/Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report into corporate social responsibility or CSR.

The project had begun with [...]

The most leaked memo-writer in the history of British politics received another breakfast-time shock on Monday morning, thanks to a Daily Telegraph splash on "Blair's euro battle plan". The research for GGC/NOP, the research firm led by Philip Gould and Stanley Greenberg, was available to all for just 50 pence - rather less than the firm's usual fee.

Although the pollsters' overall message was that a euro referendum was winnable, [...]

You cannot buck the market. This was the painful lesson Margaret Thatcher tried to impress upon an ungrateful nation for much of her time in office. The first of her major privatisations - British Telecom in 1984 - was a radical act, an exercise in economic shock therapy. Market forces were thrust upon the telecoms side of the gentle and friendly world of the old General Post Office. The numbers [...]

I used to go out with a girl who worked for Marks & Spencer, but she wouldn't let me try anything on. Ancient jokes like that one, for which I apologise, confirm the special place that M&S holds in the public's imagination. Substitute "Matalan" or "Gap" in that sentence and the humour, such as it was, is gone.

We have all shopped at Marks & Spencer. Schoolchildren have been fed [...]