Michael White reads the latest conspiracy theory as to why Gordon Brown called off the election and joins fellow hacks on a panel discussing the unfolding Brown era. Why should that be bad news for Sir Ming? Does Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore stand a chance of getting into the 2008 White House race now ? And who was the greatest US president?
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Mid-morning, west London
How unusual: an industrial dispute, the postal strike, is at the top of the news bulletins. Once upon a time this was the norm, as it sometimes still is in France. Yesterday's ministerial guest at the French embassy, a self-confessed Blair fan, was gloomy about the pace of public service reform.
Talking of which, I read in the new edition of Private Eye that it was Rupert Murdoch who frightened GB off an early election. He wants both sides to wait 18 months and had his minions in the Sun slap down both Brown ("a political giant"), over Europe, and Dave, for cockiness.
I love Murdoch conspiracy theories. Is it true that GB had the Digger to Chequers, I wonder? Or that he has been courting the Daily Telegraph, as the Eye claims? I can confirm that one.
But I have woken up on my day off to confirm a suspicion that I picked up a sore throat and bad cold this week. I should not have taken part in panel of fellow hacks talking about the Brown era at last night's Newspaper Marketing Agency dinner. But putting ads into newspapers is a good cause, especially nowadays. Besides, we are all pathetically competitive show-offs.
The event is staged in the Cabinet War Rooms, the heavily fortified basement on the west corner of the Treasury from which Churchill and his staff conducted much of the second world war. It is now a fascinating museum, cramped and claustrophobic, but moving; well worth a visit.
I like calling it the Thermopylae of the modern world: the place where civilisation's line was held until reinforcements arrived, during the 18 months between the fall of France in June 1940 and Pearl Harbour, December 7 1941, when the old boy was able to tell aides "so we have won after all".
It may be objected that this is a self-serving comparison, that in 480 BC the mighty Persian Empire of Xerxes the Great was not exactly the Third Reich. But the Greeks had stumbled on something important in the history of human government which might have been swept away, as it later was, but not before it had taken root.
You could also say that King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans perished, whereas Churchill and Britain didn't. Well, yes, but the empire he thought he was defending didn't last. All those imperial subjects heard his and FDR's freedom-and-democracy rhetoric and said: "We'll have some of that." Not quite what Winston had in mind, but he remains a Very Good Thing overall.
In the war rooms our panel consists of Amanda Platell, the former Sunday Express editor and multi-media columnist, Danny Finkelstein, also ex-Tory HQ, now a Times columnist and blogger, Andy Porter, the newly-appointed pol ed at the Daily Telegraph at just 34, and, on the Labour-ish side, Steve Richards of the Indy, my old Guardian chum, Kevin Maguire,, now back at the Daily Mirror, and me.
But the chairman is that all-purpose hooligan Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail, ex-Sun and Sky TV, etc., etc. I am not a great fan of his bullying tone in print, but tonight he is quick and amusing as well as being the most opinionated chairman I have ever encountered. If he disagrees with an answer, and he does, he says so - for up to three minutes.
Never mind. We field half an hour of questions from the floor, then eat, then do another half an hour's worth. It is never possible to participate and take notes, so my recall is hazy even without the incipient cold and medicinal white burgundy.
The media is accused of being soft on Brown, which we say is only slightly true. I point out that his unlikely Fleet Street sweetheart has long been Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail. We are accused of whipping up election fever, which we deny; the Brownies did it.
Amanda is hostile to Brown but felt sorry for him under David Cameron's assault at prime minister's question time; he took it bravely. As Wiliam Hague's former director of communications, she remains sceptical about Dave.
I hear myself sounding more sceptical than others about GB's ability to master his fate. It's all to play for, there's plenty of time, the ball is at his feet, etc., etc. But we all reach rare agreement in predicting that Ming Campbell will be replaced by Nick Clegg next year and that might make life harder for Dave. Our unanimity may mean it won't happen.
We also agree 2009 as the likeliest election date, but divide on the result. Labour majority? Hung parliament? The Tories the largest party? No one predicts a Tory majority, which may be a mistake if things go badly wrong for GB.
What will be the key issues? The economy, of course, plus public services and fairness, or "time for a change", colleagues suggest. Hard to say at this stage; it could be a wild card like immigration levels, I chip in. Amanda expresses surprise.
At our table I sit next to an ex-Sky TV man called Martin Le Jeune, who now runs something called Open Road, a public affairs company, and asked a hostile question earlier: is Gordon B the new Richard Nixon, talented but paranoid? (No.)
We discover that we both read History at UCL in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Martin is an ancient and medieval man, me a medieval and modernist. So when I seek to compare the fall of the Roman Republic with the flagging of civic virtue in the American Republic we disagree.
He is gracious enough to concede me one point: that the collapse of Rome's tradition of citizen armies has a parallel in US over-reliance on its ethnic minorities and newcomers in the ranks.
Martin asks me and his colleague, Jess, to name the three greatest US presidents, apart from Washington himself. Jess, who is 24, sticks to the 20th century options. I say Jefferson, Lincoln and - since Martin is a free market man - either of the Roosevelts, Theodore or Franklin, both of whom helped save capitalism from itself.
Me, I'm an FDR man, the greatest political leader of the 20th century, though the dreadful Mao may have time on his side. (Do we count Gandhi as a politician? Discuss). Martin agrees about the brilliant Mr Jefferson, ignores Honest Abe and plumps for TR and Ronald Reagan.
At least I think he did, but the cold and the medicine are kicking in...
6pm, west London
Kevin Sullivan, the Washington Post correspondent in London, has just rung to ask what I think of Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in tandem with the UN's feisty Inter-Governmental Climate Change Panel (ICCP) earlier today. And why not? All sorts of saints and sinners have won the prize since 1901.
If Mother Theresa can win it, why not Albert Arnold Gore Jnr, to give him his proper name? A Tennessee hero of the Gore dynasty, Cordell Hull, one of FDR's secretaries of state, won it in 1945 - a good year to win.
Kevin's working hypothesis is that Europeans like Bill Clinton's ex-veep as the kind of civilised and multilateralist American the world prefers to George Dubya Bush. Many at home, where climate change denial - a loaded phrase, that one - is still widespread regard Al as "the Pope of bad science".
I tell Kevin I have mixed feelings about Al, whom I first met when I was the Guardian's US correspondent during the 1988 presidential campaign. He was then 40 and making his first bid for the White House. I recall writing that if he was still trying into 2012 he'd still be younger than another of that year's contenders, Senator Bob Dole, who was then 65. Bob later lost to Clinton and later still did Viagra ads on US TV urging his fellow-Americans to face up to erectile dysfunction.
Kevin's thesis is broadly correct, I think. But I explain my problem with Al, which is that he's dull and decent, but not a very good politician. As I always say about the "hanging chads" election of 2000: "Dubya may not have won it, but Al sure as hell lost it" - when it was his to lose.
"Al the Plank", one chum calls him. Some people are starting to worry that Gordon Brown, who studies US politics carefully, may be repeating Gore's mistake in airbrushing Tony Blair as Gore did the popular-despite-everything Bill Clinton.
I tell Kevin Sullivan that Al is a kind of "Michael Moore for grown-ups", but that I keep putting off seeing An Inconvenient Truth, not because I don't admire what Gore's done but because I fear I will find it priggish - "he's the kind of priggish American us foreigners like."
In other words the film will be a bit like muesli with no fruit in it, something to put off until tomorrow. I'm afraid I chuckled when Judge Michael Burton declared in the High Court this week that it contained nine errors and, though factually-based, had been placed in a "context of alarm and exaggeration". Watch out, judge, they'll be after your rubbish bins.
That suggests Gore may not have given up political ambition at a mere 59. "Draft Gore" then? But it will not be easy for him to break into the 2008 race for the Democratic nomination at this stage unless there's a train wreck - such as Hillary being caught in bed with the entire Harvard football team. From what we know it's unlikely.
Halfway through my conversation I remember telling several people last night that Rudy Giuliani, the ex-mayor of New York, would never be elected a Republican president. Why? Because he's from New York, his name ends in a vowel, he's soft on gays and abortion, he's been married three times... and wasn't he photographed in drag wearing a frock? Or was that Ronald Reagan?
What's being the 9/11 hero of Noo Yawk against that CV for southern Republicans? Kevin gently tell me I may be wrong; I forget how much they hate Hillary Clinton.
So unlike the charming black-and-white film version of Arnold Bennett's 1911 novel, The Card, which Mrs White and I have just watched on TV to aid my recuperation. Directed by Ronald Neame in 1952, it stars the great Alec Guiness as the rascally hero, with Glynis Johns and Petula Clark - who gets her first screen kiss at the end.
Witty and wise, it is also very sharp, there's a lot of moral complexity beneath an innocent surface. And no one swears at all. Unlike me.
