The BBC was forced on the defensive last night after senior Conservatives attacked it for broadcasting “disgusting” remarks about Baroness Thatcher by Jonathan Ross. Her conversation with David Cameron at the Beckhams’ pre-World Cup party certainly neutralised her hiring of David Blunkett as a Sun columnist after his departure from the Cabinet. So plenty of Cabinet ministers were at Murdoch’s summer party in London last week. And Blair will be going to his annual gathering of senior executives and editors next month.Wade eschews the spotlight but has celebrity status and networks on the political and celebrity circuits. Blair has been to a Bristol housing estate to talk to victims of crime. The Sun, on the side of “terrorised residents “, called for zero tolerance of the “nightmare of anti-social behaviour” by “feral children”.The silent majority have their voice back, and government ministers remember the influence of The Sun in bringing Margaret Thatcher to power. Reid has sought the review of a case in which the judge said that a life sentence for a sexual assault on a three-year-old girl could be considered for parole after five years.Reid is also reorganising the Home Office after revelations about the early release of prisoners and failure to deport foreign nationals convicted of serious crimes.

The red-top tabloids are going through one of their ever rarer periods of agenda setting. He writes film scripts and novels.James WaltonIn the job since 1998, Walton writes the witty Daily Telegraph reviews with a light touch and occasional flourishes of erudition. Reid is dispatching a junior minister to the US on a fact-finding mission.The Sun is campaigning against judges who, it claims, are soft on “killers, child-sex beasts and rapists”. But when Tony Blair and John Reid are reacting, the tabloids have the satisfaction of feeling that they are influencing events.That is good news for Rebekah Wade (right), the editor of The Sun, and Andy Coulson, the editor of the News of the World, the biggest-selling daily and Sunday newspapers It is good news too for Rupert Murdoch, who owns them. Does it give these three real power?There is some evidence that it does. Coulson’s News of the World has reactivated the campaign, started by Wade when she edited that paper, to import “Megan’s law” from America, to make public the whereabouts of convicted paedophiles. They are in the news not, for once, for their exposure of the sexual activities of politicians and footballers but for their confident and populist treatment of law and order.

That scares politicians: these are the “real” issues that sway votes. It takes two to create such a situation, and we would not be where we are if the Government were popular and appeared to be in control. It is neither, and the succession of Home Office cock-ups over crime and punishment, asylum and immigration, have created an environment in which the tabloids can claim that they know what their readers really care about.
Politicians do not have to react. Some people, it seems, just never learn.’Coup!’, BBC2 Friday 30 June, 9pm ‘The Wonga Coup’ by Adam Roberts, Profile Books, £9.99. His worst fear is that he might be traded to Equatorial Guinea for the oil supplies Mr Mugabe needs so desperately.”You tried to play chess in Africa and ignore the black pieces,” Mann is told by a fictional interrogator in Coup! But even some of his released co-conspirators are quoted in The Wonga Coup as saying they would follow him in another adventure, just for the thrills.

He could face charges under anti-mercenary laws in South Africa, where he also has citizenship, but would hope to be allowed to return to Britain. He can expect no sympathy from Du Toit, whose best hope is to be allowed to complete his sentence in South Africa: Equatorial Guinea has given amnesties to several jailed with him.Mann, whose fellow convicts have all been released on completing their sentences in Zimbabwe, is due to be freed in 2008. He finally cracked in January 2004, admitting that when he financed the lease of a helicopter, he had reason to suspect it might be used in a coup. He was given a suspended sentence, a fine of $500,000 and his passport back, and left South Africa the same day.And today? As a convicted felon, Sir Mark is barred from the US and earlier this year was asked to leave Monaco. He cut a slightly forlorn figure: his passport had been impounded, his American wife, Diane, had gone home to Texas with the children (they are now divorced), and people far more deeply implicated in the plot were cutting deals to testify against him. But plans had changed; in the midst of the legal arguments in Spanish, the name of “Mark Thatcher” could frequently be heard, and the case was adjourned indefinitely while efforts to extradite the ex-prime minister’s son went ahead.Cut to Cape Town that November, where I watched Sir Mark appearing in three different courts on three successive days as he sought to fight off multiple legal assaults.