From the Horses' Mouths

The [not so] Silly Season is starting early.

President Bush jauntily labels himself “the world’s biggest polluter”. How true – and not merely because of the USA’s excessive carbon gas emissions. During his eight-year presidency, Dubya has emitted more verbal poison than a dozen herds of belching Texan steers.

Our very own broody PM Gordon Brown rashly confides that he sees himself as an “older, wiser” Heathcliff. As Emily Brontë’s Gothick anti-hero of Wuthering Heights is just about the most viciously destructive character in fiction, inflicting disaster upon everything and everyone around him including those whom he professes to love, GB’s Labour colleagues may well concur in his self-assessment.

And that stalwart champion of feminism, Harriet Harman, titters that she couldn’t possibly supplant “true grit” Gordon as PM, because if she did "there aren't enough airports in the country for all the men who would want to flee the country". She flatters herself. I know a good many women who would be jostling for places on those overcrowded planes in that unlikely event.