Breakfast, west London: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is in town and the BBC laid out its biggest red carpet for the 82-year-old monarch with the deep pockets. On the Today programme this morning he told his interviewer (John Simpson) that the Brits had ignored a lot of Saudi intelligence about Islamist bombers.
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This is probably true, though what we know about the Saudi royals buying off the threat of Wahabi fundamentalism over many years suggests the remark was also a fine example of what the Middle East tribe-we-never-mention-in-Riyadh would call chutzpah. The 9/11 boys were Saudis.
And did you notice how the interview ended with a ''Thank you very much Your Majesty for talking to us?'' That's how BBC interviews with cabinet ministers used to end in the fawning 50s before that dangerous ITV leftie, Robin Day, got stuck in with a less deferential approach.
We've swung too far the other way now. If I have to choose between ''Thank you, Your Majesty'' and ''You can piss off now,'' I'll tick the box for politeness.
None of which has intimidated the great Vince Cable, acting leader of the Lib Dems, who is clearly enjoying his 15 seconds of comparative fame. Dr Vince has announced he is boycotting the king's visit (will anyone tell him?) because of the kingdom's spotty human rights record.
Good for him. But I'm always a bit wary of campaigns to derail dubious arms deals with the Saudis. We don't have a huge high tech industrial sector and if we are going to produce arms we have to sell them, as respectably as we can in a dirty corner of commerce.
Had I been nearer the front of Robin Cook's ''ethical dimension'' press conference at the FCO in 1997 I'd have asked him ''what happens when you have to choose between BAE workers jobs and Hawk trainer fighter sales to Indonesia?"
The answer I would not have got was what actually happened: Cookie split the difference and BAE's contracts were honoured. Incidentally, my man with good Saudi contacts insists the royals would have cut off intelligence-sharing with Britain - against the advice of their own officials - if the Serious Fraud Office probe into bribery at BAE had not been pulled.
Talking of royals I do now know who the ''minor royal'' at the centre of the weekend's sordid blackmail allegations is alleged to be - though the media is injuncted from identifying him or her, which seems reasonable.
(So please don't use this blog to speculate about the person in question, as we will only have to remove your comment, as the injunction requires all UK media to do)
In any case, we will probably learn all about it in foreign papers - and be able to decide for ourselves how minor is minor. On such occasions careful readers can often pick up hints and clues from the tabloids which I read later in the day - when I feel stronger after my first coffee.
Talking of sex and Monty Python sexism and the 70s, as I did here yesterday, I quite forgot to report news of how the British cinema's new wave of gritty social realism went wrong - and who was to blame. Tom Jones. No, not the Welsh one.
Part of UCL's ''40 Years On'' programme I attended on Saturday was a lecture on 60s cinema - ''this is where we came in'' - by Dr Melvyn Stokes from the history department. His thesis was that films like Arthur Penn's still-stylish Bonnie and Clyde reflected the new feminism, Faye Dunaway as emancipated killer.
Just so Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner- also issued in 1967 - reflected the US civil rights movement. It contained, incidentally the first inter-racial American kiss since D.W.Griffiths' racially-notorious Birth of a Nation in 1915, which portrayed all black males as lusting for white women.
Though British films of the period were influenced by American themes, as they were by handheld camera/new wave techniques from Europe, they remained remarkably male and even misogynist. Thus even the emancipated Julie Christie - Diana in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965) - is controlled by her two men, Dr Stokes told us.
His take suggested that the two films which killed British social realism almost at birth arrived earlier - in 1963, the year I arrived in London too. One was Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life, in which Richard Harris plays a brutal rugby league hero who destroys his wife (Rachel Roberts).
Shot in black and white - and in Wakefield - it was so miserable that I liked it but it bombed at the box office. The big hit was Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, which grafted French new wave techniques on to a burlesque tone - Henry Fielding meets the Carry On films - which allowed Albert Finney (Tom) to make everyone laugh. Filmed in colour too.
I remember them all well, as I do UCL's long-demolished local cinema, the Tolmer, where you could get in for a shilling - 5p. Looking back on it, what all the above films and many like them were leading us to was celluloid sex and violence on today's grisly scale. Or am I just getting old?
The renewed excitement over abortion reminds me of the old joke about the priest, the Anglican vicar and the rabbi discussing when exactly human life begins. You know this one? Ok, read the next item.
''At conception,'' says the priest. ''At birth,'' says the vicar. ''When the kids leave home,'' says the rabbi. The earthiness of Judaism, which always strikes me whenever I witness a bar mitzvah or a Jewish wedding, is insufficiently appreciated. A proper chuckle would do those uptight Saudis no end of good.
So desperate are the tabloids to carry any old rubbish about the poor McCann family that the Mail (Ok, I do read the Mail at home and have the high blood pressure pills to prove it) took what may be an unprecedented step today.
It published a story attributed to its erstwhile, fallen rival, the Express group, which it normally dismisses as a ''down-market tabloid'' - because the high-budget Mail sees itself as a ''compact'' just as I see myself as thin. Why did it stoop so low?
Because the Sunday Express had run a piece by ex-top cop, John Stalker, suggesting that the ''Tapas Nine'' - the group which dined nightly with the McCanns - are hiding something embarrassing. ''I have a real suspicion we are not being told the whole truth,'' writes Stalker, who ought really to know better.
In the adjoining column the compact Mail solemnly quotes Dr Kate's mum fearing for her health under the strain. But yesterday's harrowing shot - it's always a fresh one - shows she still photographs beautifully. And that's all that matters really, isn't it ?
