What's so great about a public enquiry on Iraq?

So he sent messages to the Cabinet Secretary via a series of intermediaries, which were passed on to Mr Brown.

Now not only the fact of his intervention has been leaked, but so has the manner of it: so it looks not just like he was trying to orchestrate a cover-up, but like he was trying to orchestrate a cover-up of his attempt to orchestrate a cover-up.

All of which increases the pressure on Brown to reverse ferret and make the Iraq inquiry public.

It's easy - and fun - to bellow in tones of unsleeping outrage for a "full public inquiry", and there are sound political reasons for one: the electorate feels it has been diddled once already on Iraq by pooh-bahs acting behind closed doors. But it's at least worth considering that there may exist a case against.

"Transparency" is the great political idea of the moment - and, as the saying goes, when you're holding a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.

Big ideas can run away with you: and look what we ended up with thanks to a few bright sparks deciding "the free market" was the answer to any given question.

"Security concerns" have been routinely abused to redact documents that are merely embarrassing, and "invasion of privacy" has become a catch-all complaint of the cheat caught out.

"Wolf" has been cried often enough that the public is ceasing to believe in wolves at all. But secrecy is not in and of itself an evil in politics.

Politicians are more likely to reach sensible decisions around the Cabinet table if they are able to float ideas without worrying how each one would read as a headline. International diplomacy is made easier - arguably, made possible - by the Chatham House Rule.

It is far from a knockdown point, but worth considering nonetheless, that US presidents might not speak freely to our prime ministers if they anticipated their discussions being made public afterwards.

It works the other way: many disclosures of considerable public interest are made possible by the right of journalists to promise their sources anonymity.

Is it immeasurably more important that the Iraq war inquiry be transparent than that it be independent? Perhaps so. But that needs arguing rather than simply asserting.

The examples of neither the Hutton nor the Bloody Sunday inquiries gives much cause to think being public will automatically be enough to make an inquiry effective.

In his first article for a newspaper, Prince William talks about the problems of gang culture among youths.

He describes meeting former inner-city gang members, and reports he learned that marginalised young men searching for a place in the world often turn to gangs to find "status, respect from others and the role in a community that we all crave".

"The challenge, therefore, seems to me to be how to turn gang members into team members," he writes. Very true. Perhaps he had his own father somewhere in the back of his mind.

Pulling strings with the Qatari royal family to scupper Lord Rogers's design for the site of the old Chelsea Barracks: team behaviour? Or gang behaviour?

Oops... it's 200 miles oop north

"What's up, London?!" Britney Spears squeaked from the stage of Manchester's MEN arena at the end of last week.

The inside of one arena smelling of farts and chips and spilt beer doesn't look much different from the stage than any other, of course, but Manc Britney-lovers are reported to have been dismayed.

"If she can't tell the difference between London and Manchester, what hope has she got?" asked "one mum" present at the concert. Daft thing to say. Britney's hopes are neither here nor there: she lives in Los Angeles.

If she did stroll round town before she took the stage and still couldn't see any difference between London and Manchester, it's some of the rest of us who are entitled to lose hope.

Whether it's Londoners or Mancunians, I'll leave you to judge for yourselves.

No expense spared in this line of duty

Will we ever tire of hearing about MPs' expenses? Not me. Not till the crack of doom - or the ha-ha of doom, as it is more likely to be.

And speaking of ha-has, how about that David Miliband? The Foreign Secretary spent £50 of public money, we learned yesterday, acquiring photographs of himself line-dancing. The photographs were duly published.

You never did see such a gonk: awkward trousers, goofy grin, and hands waving like great pink paddles.

These photographs will now fill the slot for "March" in the David Miliband photo-calendar I am making, right after "January" (public pizza-eating catastrophe) and "February" (alien-looking banana pose fail).

There is no other politician who looks as infallibly, as preciously, ridiculous on camera.

How, you may wonder, can it cost 50 quid to buy a few amateurish snaps of a man line-dancing?

My suspicion is that Mr Miliband, in a tight spot, had been given to understand he was acquiring the only copies in existence.