Her delivery is very secondary to her stage presence, as she pauses twice in the show to have extra eye-liner and lipstick applied to her still-youthful face by a handmaid.The audience wolf-whistled and called out encouraging things, none of which she could hear clearly (“I’m deaf as well as brain-dead”). Things shut down completely for a few minutes as a panel of electricians trooped on-stage to mend a fault. Faced with a hiatus to plug, Marianne tried some jokes and screwed them up (“What’s green and hairy and goes up and down? A raspberry in a l.. no a gooseberry in a lift”). Still with time to kill, she decided to introduce the band, and screwed that up (“…and this is Rik on bass No, sorry, Tony is it? Tony on bass And this is Rik on drums”). When the band got back into its stride, someone shouted “It was worth the wait!” Marianne knitted her brows “What d’you mean, I came to work late?” she asked. “Though, of course, you’re right, I did.”She did everything wrong. It seemed that, as long as she kept lighting fags and jamming them into her pearly holder, and prowling the stage doing little dances like a skittish contessa, and asking the audience if they were all right, the way you might ask awkward dinner-party guests; as long as that voice, that Dalek cackle kept scraping along through country-and-western numbers and her own bursts of loathing from Broken English, everyone would continue to love her.

At the end of “Sliding Through Life on Charm” she realised it should’ve been her last number, told us to imagine she’d gone off-stage and was now returning Then she did an encore. Our last sight of her was a held-aloft packet of Marlboros disappearing behind the curtains. There is nobody, literally nobody, in the universe who could get away with this stuff except Marianne Faithfull.It’s a dog’s life, as a well-known Labour politician will tell youFor the past six months, a certain doggie word has been hijacked by commentators anxious to be rude to Mr Blair. In his dealings with President Bush, they say, he is Dubya’s poodle – and they have said it again and again, so that we are now stuck with the indelible image of the breed as a lapdog of the boudoir, a craven canine companion on a lead, a dumb beast that obeys orders such as “Fetch!” and “Heel!” and “Play dead!” Is that how we now think of poodles?Well, bang on time, this weird apparition turned up at the weekend, flounced into Cruft’s Dog Show in Birmingham, swanned about wiggling its white tush at the thunderstruck judges, tossing its unfeasibly overgrown pompadour and widening its spectacular crocodile jaws at its handler, Michael Nilson, and generally reminding us all what a spectacular creature a poodle can be.

It picked up the Best in Show award and, by one of those rules of dog-fancying that stipulates you have to give your pet a ridiculously long and convoluted name, it answers to “Nord Champion Topscore Contradiction”.Actually, it doesn’t answer to this hefty cognomen at all, since it’s impossible to imagine anyone (even a Norwegian) shouting, “Oi, Topscore Contradiction, stop chasing those pigeons,” and its owners mostly call it “King”. But what an extraordinary creature it is, this animal to which Mr Blair has been explicitly compared 42,670 times since last September. Look at it – ridiculously primped and puffed-up, shrill, vain, done up to the nines in fashionable frou-frous, big-headed, skinny-arsed, yappy and convinced it’s a monarch… How can anyone ever again think that it has anything in common with our beloved Prime Minister?
More from John Walsh. I see William Hill are offering odds against how many of the horses I own with Robbie Fowler will win this week.

They’re going 1,000-1 that all four of them will win, but I’d better those odds. It should be 10 million to one because Auetaler has got no chance in the County Hurdle on Thursday. We’re very pleased with Bernardon, who runs in the opening race today, but although AP [McCoy] has been agonising over which one of Martin Pipe’s to ride, he’s gone for Westender instead of ours. We’ve got Richard Guest, the Grand National-winning jockey on board, though, so that’s fine.It’s the same story tomorrow when we run Samon in the Royal & SunAlliance Hurdle AP was in a quandary but has chosen Classified ahead of him.