If you’re interested I’ll speak to him and give you a bell this evening

If you’re interested, I’ll speak to him and give you a bell this evening…” What a charmer, what a spiel.I didn’t end up as a duchess, but I did briefly go out with a car salesman. I’d just come to London, and all my friends were going out with lawyers and doctors and people who wrote television jingles for butter substitutes. “But what on earth do you talk about to someone who sells cars all day?” they cried, their eyes wide. “I mean, does he like the theatre or go to art galleries?”No he didn’t, thank God, but every time he took me out he arrived in a different car, faster, sleeker and more expensive than the one before. There is much to be said for an evening listening to Mahler in the Festival Hall beside a serious young solicitor, but bowling down to Brighton in an E-type Jag with a Brad Pitt lookalike is more fun. Even more fun, probably, than marrying a chinless wonder and nearly becoming Queen..

What a pleasure to hear someone actually opting for the plain truth. One morning last week I heard a New York Times correspondent being asked on the radio if he believed war could be averted with Saddam Hussein in power No, he said. The substance of the journalist’s position was that George Bush would not go into the next election with Saddam shouting abuse from Baghdad One can just visualise the Democrats’ TV ads. They flash up a picture of Osama bin Laden and the commentary says: “George Bush promised to bring him in dead or alive.” And then a picture of Saddam: “He promised to bring him in.” And then a picture of George W: “Where are they George?”

What a pleasure to hear someone actually opting for the plain truth.

Mr Bush knows he will have little good news on the economic front to woo the electorate. There is muttering aplenty in the heartland about how he is the rich son of a rich father who cares too much for rich folks. If the President can’t tell Americans that he’s made their world (as distinct from “the world”) a safer place, he has nothing at all to offer.The op-ed pages of US newspapers have been full of sceptical pieces about Bush and the looming war. Here’s Frank Rich writing in The New York Times on Pearl Harbor Day, last 7 December: “History will eventually tell us whether Pearl Harbor Day 2002 is the gateway to a war as necessary as the Second World War, or to a tragedy of unintended consequences redolent of the First World War. A savage dictator is delivering a ‘full’ accounting of his weapons arsenal that only a fool would take for fact, and a President of the US is pretending (not very hard) to indulge this UN rigmarole while he calls up more reserves for the confrontation he seeks.”Yet many in media and political Britain have failed to grasp this reality.