Another whitewash

Did I believe there was no connection between Alastair Campbell's desire to "fuck Gilligan", the leaking by government officials of Dr David Kelly's name to that end, and the weapons inspector's subsequent suicide? No, I didn't, despite what Lord Hutton told us.

And like Guido, neither do I believe there has never been a connection between donations to the Labour Party and the award of peerages, even if nothing was ever written down on paper about it in a way that would have enabled the Crown Prosecution Service to prove that a specific crime had been committed.

I have one simple question on all this: If no-one at No 10 had anything to hide, why did they seek to obstruct the inquiry at every turn, turning what could have been a routine investigation into one that eventually lasted 16 months and cost £800,000 of taxpayers' money?

I don't think the public will be any more convinced by this than I am. Maybe, as with the case of Lord Archer, we will just have to wait a decade or more for the truth to out.

Gordon scores

The Tories are predictably fuming about the fact that Gordon Brown has succeeded in re-focusing attention on the issue of politicians' drug-taking pasts, first by pledging to look again at the reclassification of cannabis and then by persuading Home Secretary Jackie Smith to fess up to having a toke at university.

Why do they protest so much? Isn't it a perfectly legitimate tactic for a party leader to seek to put his opposite number on ths spot over an issue - particularly when they have brought the problem on themselves by being less than open about it in the past?

But whatever the low politics of the situation, it's the right move by Gordon. Cannabis is evil shit and I have witnessed at first hand the kind of psychosis it can induce in regular users, in my case in a former landlord. An old newspaper colleague of mine, Huw Lewis, had an experience that was, sadly, even closer to home.

And in case anyone's wondering....yes, I did, once or twice, and all it ever gave me was a bloody headache.

British Beatyourselfupaboutit Corporation

Okay, so it's a serious story, and having grown up in local newspapers where awarding competition prizes to your friends can be a sackable offence, I find it frankly beyond belief that such things have been going on at the BBC.

But however justified, there is something in me that hates to see the corporation beating itself up like this. It's still the greatest broadcasting organisation in the world, and British culture would be immeasurably poorer without it. Let's hear it for the Beeb!