Either it meant Tony Blair would be standing down as Prime Minister before the next election, which we know, or it meant he would be out in days or weeks as a consequence of the vote, which he won’t be.

More from John Rentoul. Never mind the little green Martian who traditionally pays a visit to this planet for rhetorical purposes on these occasions, the average French or German visitor to the websites of British newspapers must be puzzled by such an extreme reaction to two votes in Parliament. In the size of type suitable for reporting a turning point in the Second World War the press declared that it was “the beginning of the end” – an observation that was either banal or wrong. The House of Commons voted to double from 14 to 28 days the length of time that the police may hold suspected terrorists under a judge’s supervision. Meanwhile a state of emergency was declared in France as the suburbs of Paris burned, and in Germany the exhausted parties finally agreed a coalition two months after an inconclusive election. Ambassadors’ witticisms about the tightness of prime ministers’ trousers or the looseness of deputy prime ministers’ vocabulary are usually consigned to the confidential files of the Foreign Office.

Occasionally, as with John Phillips’s famous despatch about the Muscat national anthem, they are so entertaining that they get leaked Rarely, as in this case, they are flaunted. The most famous example is Sir Henry Wotton’s joke, “An Ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”.. Nothing much happened in British politics last week. The publication of Sir Christopher Meyer’s memoir “DC Confidential” has been condemned by Jack Straw as a breach of trust, and others have warned that it will damage the Foreign Office But the issues raised are much wider. “Only selected lines are left.” I confess I’d had Thursday the 10th in my diary for four weeks.

I had failed to snare even a pair of blue jeans.Churlishly I glanced across at the lemon baby doll tops (£34.99); you’d have to pay me to wear it, I thought. As for the remaining sequinned cardies (£119.99, yes really), let’s just say I could see Camilla Parker-Bowles in one.Listen up, Stella: if you want to keep us peasants onside, pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap And make sure there’s enough to go round. Otherwise we’ll think you’re manipulating us.It’s certainly what sassily dressed Alex Atty, 16, who is studying for her A-levels, thinks. “I am not liking this ‘I’ll be a celebrity and do a clothes range thing.’ It’s poncey. She obviously thought: ‘I’m getting a bit old, I want to be in the public eye, so I’ll do a clothes range.’”. She is the Kate Moss of designers: girls love her, want her, want to be her.Which is presumably why hundreds of them pitched up at 6am to queue outside the Oxford Circus branch of H & M.

Women want a part of her, which is presumably why, in the frenzy and excitement of last week’s shopping spree, they forgot to feel patronised when she offered up a few golden crumbs to the hungry hoards That’s why she has sold out. She is playing to the gallery.Can punters not see that Stella is merely using them, the common hoards, to reinforce her brand? Make them mad for it, make them want it, make them weep when they fail to bag a trademark silk camisole or black tuxedo jacket that, for once, is affordable.It’s like cocaine: give a first-time user one line, just one line, and they’re hooked, chasing that first euphoric hit for ever and a day. They won’t succeed, of course, since Stella won’t be selling any more of her poor people’s diffusion line.Santa’s sack is empty: Patrick Barnston of H & M’s merchandising department informed me yesterday morning the collection was a one-off.”It’s been a huge success,” he told me as we surveyed the dregs of Thursday’s sale in the High Street Kensington branch. Sure, she wasn’t launching herself as a singer (that would have been embarrassing) or a gourmet purveyor of soya sausages, but she was undoubtedly hoping to trade on daddy’s surname. Branding, she knew even then, is everything.It was only when I won one of her frocks at a charity auction in the late 1990s that I realised she had edge That dress turns heads to this day Her clothes are sexy, sophisticated, elegant. However young and groovy you think you might look and act, the eyes of the teenager who beholds you can only see a crusty old saddo, anyway. I think in future I shall model myself on that nice Mrs Gillick..

Go Stella! The celebrity fashion designer must have raised a glass or six this weekend following the launch on Thursday of the Stella McCartney collection for high-street chain H & M. OK, it wasn’t all roses and laurels: she didn’t get the Designer of the Year gong, after all. That fashion “Oscar” went to Christopher “chav” Bailey, the man who took Burberry into the high street and beyond. But she did, single-handedly, orchestrate a degree of hysteria among the nation’s women not seen since well, the nation’s young women screamed at her dad Paul.
Exaggeration? Maybe But hype has, regrettably, become Stella’s middle name. It’s not just Patricia Hewitt and her “healthcare professionals” who are putting the boot in. The other week, a gang of academics gathered in Scotland to denounce the “helicopter mothers”, for hovering over their children, not letting them make mistakes, failing to give them necessary freedoms and so on Much of what they say is, of course, true. It is not possible for your child to learn by your mistakes; it has to make its own.