It would be an absolute effing disaster if Gordon Brown was PM, and I'll do anything in my power to effing stop him.

Mair: You said it. Didn't you?  

Hutton: I did say it. Yes, I did. Yeah. Let's just get that over with.  

Mair: And what do you think of him now?  

Hutton: My opinion has changed of Gordon. I think he has - and certainly, in all of his dealings with me, showed nothing but, sort of, a great deal of support and help during my time as a minister. So I personally have no criticisms of Gordon's performance as prime minister at all. I think he has been a tremendously hard-working man, who has really put, as I said, his heart and soul into it.

How can you take seriously a polling organisation which shows such huge monthly fluctuations? The last three months have shown the Tory lead go from 17% down to 6% and back up to 17%. Ridiculous.

“MBA students come out with, ‘The customer’s always right,’” he says, adopting a whiny voice. “Horseshit! The customer’s usually wrong! And, ‘My staff is my most important asset.’ Bullshit! Staff is usually your biggest cost!”

The bonus tax is popular in the short term (on the "tax anybody but me" principle), but I think it will have a negative effect on perceptions of Labour over the long term because it makes the party look as if it doesn’t like success.

The downside is that it risks making Labour look like a party that doesn’t like success or aspiration, an image that Tony Blair managed to shed.

The modern media now has a collective oppositional self-interest not just to particular parties or class interests, as in the past, but to the very idea of government and politics itself.

The Tories ... want to cut the deficit faster. That leaves them with a revenue gap of billions of pounds each year, which can only be filled by across the board cuts to public services, a massive rise in VAT or most likely a combination of the two.  

Of course, raising VAT is an option Ministers have been advised to consider in the past. In 2001 when we needed to raise billions of pounds to transform the National Health Service, there were some who favoured putting up VAT rather than national insurance.  

But in 2001, Gordon and I rejected that advice. We said if you put up VAT, it's going to hit people's bills for clothes, petrol, household goods, and other essentials. It's going to affect millions of pensioners and people who are out of work, and because VAT is the only tax which everyone pays the poorest people in society will end up paying the most as a proportion of their income.  

We said the fair thing to do is to increase National Insurance, so that only people who are in work will pay, and the people who can afford the most will pay the most. That’s the same choice the government made last week.   The truth is it's the Tories who are the party of VAT. They doubled it to 15 per cent in 1979, raised it again when they abolished the Poll Tax in 1991, then tried to charge the full rate of VAT on domestic fuel and power in 1993.

Seriously, though, does anyone (apart from Blairsupporter) even read this constant rubbish any longer?

Three years ago, then prime minister Tony Blair promised his Israeli counterparts that the legislation allowing private citizens in Britain to obtain arrest warrants for foreigners suspected of carrying out war crimes would be amended. And he meant it. No one had to point out to Mr. Blair that with the wars taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan, he, his colleagues and the officers of the British Army and their American allies could also find themselves in the dock. Blair's successor Gordon Brown has also made similar promises.

So why was this amendment never put into effect? Not because the Labour government could not find the necessary majority in parliament. And the leaders of the Conservative Party have also privately assured the Israeli embassy in London that it would support such a motion. No, the British government hesitated and prevaricated because they knew full well just how downright unpopular such a move would be. They would have been eviscerated by the local press, by every single human-rights movement, by the Archbishops, the professors and by the great majority of their own grassroots memberships. For a weak and deeply unpopular government, this was too much to contemplate.

In other words, while Israel may be able to comfort itself with a degree of sympathy from Britain's political leadership, it has lost the understanding of the rest of the country's opinion makers. Some of you may be asking, So what? Britian's days as a superpower are long over. True, but in the arena of international media and public opinion, Britain still punches way above its natural weight. The maiden speech given by Catherine Ashton - who is from Britain and the European Union's new high representative for foreign affairs and security policy - in which she roundly criticized Israeli policies is just the latest striking example. The response from Israeli politicians, a proposal to boycott British products, already signed by a third of the Knesset, is risible.

Just as the connection Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman made between global anti-Semitism and the arrest warrants in his speech on Wednesday is pointless, neither is another round of moaning about Israel's "hasbara failure" going to get us anywhere. The point at which a change in PR tactics might have remedied Israel's international situation has long passed.

Life imprisonment for those convicted of a homosexual act;
The death sentence where the offender has HIV, is a "serial offender" or the other person is under 18;
Imprisonment for seven years for "attempted homosexuality".

‘I am riveted by the current Iraq inquiry, though angry already because I feel it will end with a report and nobody’s actually going to be arraigned for what happened.’ Would she like to see Bush or Blair in court? ‘I’d like the buck to stop somewhere and know where that buck stops.’

What Blair has said is remarkably reminiscent of an entry in Alastair Campbell’s published diaries, 2 April 2002. The entry covers a meeting at Chequers to plan the war:

“”We discussed whether the central aim was WMD or regime change. Piggott’s view was that it was WMD. TB felt it was regime change in part because of WMD but more broadly because of the threat to the region and the world.”