"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead."

Well, who’d a’ thought it? An American TV News leading with a cricket story! Not, of course, England’s record win over Pakistan but the gambling scam. ‘A disastrous day for cricket’; ‘the world of cricket on its knees’. Steady on, dears; it doesn’t even begin to compare with the Hansie Cronje scandal – team captain, good looking, rich, one of the world’s top batsmen national hero fixing matches. It was like discovering that Mary Poppins was on the game.

If TB expected phrases of praise on the donation of his loot from the biog to wounded soldiers he had another think coming. The media is now probing the sources of the £20 million he seems to have made in 5 years. The latest is the news that he has just forked out £1 million for his daughter’s apartment just round the corner from Chateau Blair in London. She already has a £250.000 crash pad in Strasburg. The Blurs now have 9 properties. Latest reports suggest that they are now looking at properties in Barbados. How naf! Suggested price tag is £4 million. The autobiography is not even published yet but the Blairs have received no plaudits for their donation; the general view is that it is conscience money. I disagree on the grounds that he doesn’t have any such thing. There is much speculation as to whether they are worth £20 or 60 million, but it has not gone unnoticed that the UK taxpayer is still picking up the bill for their security.

And still in relation to Blair, the establishment has rushed into print to rubbish speculation about the strange death of Dr Kelly. The Home Office pathologist asserts that it was a classic case of suicide by cutting his wrist and overdosing on pain killers. He also had a dicky ticker, we are somewhat belatedly told. He said that he was so incensed by the way Dr Kelly had been treated during the WMD inquiry that he went out of his way to detect signs of homicide. Call me an old cynic (what, moi?) but trying to find evidence to support a prior opinion hardly strikes me as scientific objectivity. He makes the quite telling point that the doctors who published their misgivings and started the story running again were orthopods and the like without his specialism in forensic pathology. This prompted a response from a Professor that the pathologist was not a toxicologist but no report had been revealed giving an expert view on the effect of the painkillers. The truth should come out if there is ever an inquest, but I think the real truth is that the Government of the day had acquired such a corrosive reputation for preferring spin to truth that people became inclined to believe the very opposite of everything the Government said.

In addition, I reckon that the public has become distrustful of experts because they have seen all too often how charlatans will craft their findings to fit the conclusions demanded by their paymasters. As a result there have been some spectacular cock-ups - the millennium bug (I’m sure a lot of people made a bundle out of that), the assertion that AIDS and CJD would wipe out vast numbers of people (I recall that the media said that AIDS would affect one UK family in four), the prediction in the 1970s of the coming of a new Ice Age, the forecast in 2006 that drought would be the usual climate of the UK because of decreasing rainfall, the swine flu epidemic which according to our grandstanding Health PS would infect 5 million people (or was it 15 million?). I could go back to when it was authoritatively predicted that manufacture of motor cars would be limited by the number of chauffeurs available.

‘Deepwatergate’ has now moved to the financial pages but I guess that it will be back up front when the Bly Report commissioned by BP is published in a couple of weeks. With inquiry reports from the Justice Department and the Congressional hearing plus the Presidential Commission into industry practice due to come out at various times, it looks as if the story will run and run. Focus is now switching to Transocean. It seems to be a rum set-up, with management in Geneva, operations in Houston, rig-building in South Korea and Singapore, and drilling all over the world. Last December, Transocean had a blow-out at a North Sea rig, but this time the blow-out preventer worked. ‘Deepwater Horizon’ had apparently not returned to port since it was built 9 years ago.

Within a month of the spill, Transocean decided to pay a € 1 billion dividend, in stark contrast to BP, which forewent the divi and instead deposited £2 billion for compensation. The Swiss Government blocked the payment.

Elsewhere, we learn that Big Oil now has the technology to deal with a repetition of the Deepwater disaster. This begs the question as to why the technology wasn’t developed before it was needed rather than afterwards.

Your comments about the US media indicate that the exasperation is transatlantic. Your domestic CNN seems to be as bad as CNN International is good. Most anchors should have a ‘w’ in their title. Unlike your version, CNN news here carries almost no commercials, which means that I have to dash to refill the glass during the very short breaks. ‘Quest means Business’ often runs for 45 minutes instead of the full hour, the quarter-hour then being taken up with excellent short news reviews from Africa and the Middle East. Quest has been around a long time. I first came across him as BBC World’s Wall Street man; then he had a news-magazine programme on CNN with Alison Bell until she disappeared overnight in a scandal involving the sainted princess’s ex-squeeze. The silly woman who was over-promoted as Editor of the DT described his voice as ‘like gargling in vomit’, so it’s not just the Yanks who cringe at his throaty delivery. She got fired shortly afterwards.

We also get interesting snippets out of ‘Backstory’; it has just covered Katrina five years on and getting back to normal in Florida after Deepwater. The activities of the Federal Government and the Army Corps of Engineers seem inept. New Orleans is still a bit of a shambles. In Florida people got fed-up with waiting for the Government to get going that they did what was needed themselves.

We have abandoned the print media apart from the Sunday Times, which passes the morning until the pubs open. Half of it is thrown away unopened. We usually get to about page 16 before finding anything of interest. The big story this week was the Pakistan cricket gambling scam, but the ST didn’t mention it. We no longer watch TV news; we have Skynews running at 6 p.m. in another room so they we can catch any interesting headline, which is very rare. All the news services are partial and biased. For instance, over the week-end there was a confrontation in Bradford between mobs of whites and Asians. The whites were described as ‘right-wing extremists’ and the Asians as ‘anti-racism protestors’. As nobody interviewed anybody from either group, how did they know? Which reminds me of being at lunch a number of years ago with a Scottish Chief Constable. He said that the best way to disperse a mob in Aberdeen was to rattle a collecting box.

We certainly have no intention of paying the Dirty Digger to get into Timesonline. It is difficult to forgive The Times for outing one of the most popular bloggers whose topic was real life in the Police. He was a serving copper and the Times dropped him deep in the merde; the blog was closed down. We now get most of our news from the Economist, the Torygraph online (not much these days since it became an oversize red-top), the BBC website and, particularly, surfing.

And finally

Ten reasons to get out of the EU from the excellent Dan Hannan MEP:

1. Since we joined the EEC in 1973, we have been in surplus with every continent in the world except Europe. Over those 27 years, we have run a trade deficit with the other member states that averages out at £30 million per day.
2. In 2010 our gross contribution to the EU budget will be £14 billion. To put this figure in context, all the reductions announced by George Osborne would, collectively, save £7 billion a year across the whole of government spending.
3. On the European Commission’s own figures, the annual costs of EU regulation outweigh the advantages of the single market by €600 to €180 billion.
4. The Common Agricultural Policy costs every family £1200 a year in higher food bills.
5. Outside the Common Fisheries Policy, Britain could reassert control over its waters out to 200 miles or the median line, which would take in around 65 per cent of North Sea stocks.
6. Successive British governments have refused to say what proportion of domestic laws come from Brussels, but a thorough analysis by the German Federal Justice Ministry showed that 84 per cent of the legislation in that country came from the EU.
7. Outside the EU, Britain would be free to negotiate much more liberal trade agreements with third countries than is possible under the Common External Tariff.
8. The countries with the highest GDP per capita in Europe are Norway and Switzerland. Both export more, proportionately, to the EU, than Britain does.
9. Outside the EU, Britain could be a deregulated, competitive, offshore haven.
10. Oh, and we’d be a democracy again.

Keep buggering on, as Winston used to say.