Tile Questing Vole
young Sama bin Laden, niece of the international terrorist (and a member of a family branch, it should be stressed, with not the faintest interest in jihad), was staying in London with her granny not long ago. When the time came to fly back to her home in Cairo, she had to catch a connecting flight in Zurich. To her dismay, after waiting an hour or so in the airport, she learnt she had missed the flight, and called her mother to warn her she wasn't going to be on the plane. In some irritation, Sama's mama called the airline to ask why on earth they hadn't paged her daughter. 'Come, madam,' said the airline operative. 'Announce: "Would Sama bin Laden please go to Gate 25"? You must be joking.'
uor audiences of metropolitan yuppies,
the PM is prone to nominate pasta with sun-dried tomatoes as his favourite food; canvassed in more working-class areas, he claims to love an honest British newspaperful of fish and chips. Only the ignorant, envious and self-vauntingly consistent have had the cheek to call him a rotten old fraud. But Robin Cook's diaries — published as The Point of Departure — show Mr Blair's rumbling tummy, as it were, unplugged. It emerges that Ronnie Campbell, Labour MP for Blyth, is the fixer who feeds the PM's insatiable appetite for the traditional Tyneside flatbread, the 'stony cake'. At one reception for north-east members, Mr Cook reports, 'Ronnie turned up with a stony cake to give to Tony. Of course, the cockney policeman had never seen a stotty cake, and was very suspicious. Ronnie had to put it through the metal detector, just in case it was going to explode in the middle of the reception.' This column will be monitoring 'Stony' Campbell over the weeks and months to come for signs of excessive Prime Ministerial patronage and, if it discerns anything irregular, will come down on him like an unstable pallet of barmcakes.
As the Leader of the Free World, so .described. presses the flesh on these shores accompanied by a modest phalanx of armed guards, I'm offered a cautionary tale by a colleague who commutes regularly to King's Cross from Huntingdon. He found himself sitting beside a young woman of — arguably — Arabic looks, who he noticed was reading with great interest a manual containing
advice, lavishly diagrammed, on the 'Quantity of Explosives Required To Produce A Bomb'. He and his conscience did what men and their consciences have done since first prose writer ran out of inspiration: they wrestled. And, on arriving at his terminus, he raced to Platform 8 and the offices of the Transport Police, where he reported to the lady manning the front desk what he had observed. She greeted the information with grave alarm, announced she would have to fetch her superior officer, and scurried behind doors. Shortly. the superior officer emerged — and who was she? Why, the lady on the train.
Jet's hear it for those unsung heroes in d the world of accountancy. This week, a tenacious team of auditors refused to certify the accounts of the European Union, saying they were 'riddled' with 'errors', 'abuse' and money simply 'disappearing'. This magazine and its sister publications have long campaigned against the venality, corruption and naked lining of pockets that infest the European Union and organisations like it. Isn't it time some collars were felt?
My telephone rings — and who is it but a self-promoting creep by the name of Sam Leith, the author of a notably pinched and mean-spirited review of lain Duncan Smith's new thriller The Devils Tune in the Daily Telegraph. He is very overexcited about a glancing retaliatory reference made to him by IDS on Radio 5. 'You know who wrote that review?' IDS is said to have asked on air. 'The chap who writes their gossip column. We've had runins in the past.' Mr Leith points out that he hasn't sullied himself with gossip for more than two years, and most recently edited the Telegraph's Comment pages. 'No
wonder he lost his job if he didn't even know who edited the Comment pages of the main Tory newspaper,' sneers Leith, omitting to mention that he was fired from this role a month or two ago. 'Who could give a monkey's?' I ask. 'Get off the line and don't call me again.'
Mr Duncan Smith's thriller, incidentally, was the outrider for a trio of former Tory leaders making their way into print. William Hague has recently delivered the manuscript of his biography of Pitt the Younger. John Major, too, is writing another book. He has, apparently, decided against dignifying Edwina Currie's account of their affair with a reply, and is instead writing a book, I'm told, about cricket.
ffortlessly showing us who's boss, George W. Bush sweeps in and scoops the Mixed Metaphor of the Week prize. In an interview with senior British journalists, he announces of the occupation of Iraq: 'This is a transforming mission. It is a milestone ... in the history of liberty.' A transforming milestone in the history of a sempiternal abstract? If you say so, pal. But will it yet turn out to be the explosive pivot that seals your fate?
Age shall not wither Joan Collins, if she has her way. But she must be vigilant. At a charity event the other day, Miss Collins was forced to cancel a scheduled Q & A session on the grounds that the earpiece she would have had to wear would have come into conflict with her wig.
Spotted: Charles Moore, retired 'pub bore' and biographer of Lady Thatcher, in a pub. His companion in the Coach and Horses, my spy reports, looked rapt.
Idon't for a second suggest that John Allen Muhammad — the Gulf war veteran found guilty of the ten 'Washington Sniper' killings — does not deserve his fate. But, phew, the prosecution didn't half go for him. His trial was moved to Virginia on the grounds that he'd be more likely to get the death penalty there. He was convicted under new anti-terrorism laws on the grounds that the random killings he conducted from his specially adapted van were 'intended to spread fear'. And the icing on the cake: according to the Guardian's front-page report this week, 'the judge instructed the jury on the last day of the trial that it could consider the car itself to be a murder victim'.
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