I’m delighted to be able to sign up to this newspaper’s campaign to make London restaurants offer their clientele tap water as a matter of course. It’s long been difficult for the cynics among us not to imagine that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the establishment, there isn’t a bus boy resolutely refilling fancy bottles from a rusty faucet, especially if those bottles have reusable lids and are blazoned with the restaurant’s own logo.

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John Williams, the then press secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote the “first draft” of the so-called “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, after concerted campaigning, the Government has finally released this “first draft” only for David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to say that it’s nothing of the sort.

Williams’s draft doesn’t have the key stuff about Saddam Hussein being able to target Britain in 45 minutes, or the long-since discredited cobblers about uranium being sourced from West Africa, but it does paint up a picture of an aggressive state with a capability for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Is Miliband’s bizarre statement that this was not the basis for the later dossier meant to suggest that more information will somehow come to light showing there was sound intelligence for these claims? It hardly seems likely.

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Boris Johnson is the latest visionary to wade into the soggy morass of the Thames estuary and propose that an airport be sited there. The Tory mayoral candidate describes Heathrow as a “planning error” and proposes that it be shut down and a new London airport built to the east of the city.

I well remember my late father, Professor Peter Self, sitting on the Roskill Commission in the 1960s, although mostly because of his vivid description of going on an amphibious vehicle out to visit Foulness Island. The Commission was considering sites for a third London airport, and the Thames Estuary was on their list - only to be abandoned for Stansted because of cost considerations.

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Read Will’s piece about the smoking ban from the Evening Standard
04.02.08

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Read Will’s latest Evening Standard column about McDonald’s latest attempt to ‘crawl back to respectability’ and why he won’t take his children there.

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To Video City in Notting Hill Gate, a fine emporium for the rental and purchase of videocassettes and DVDs. During my brief incumbency as this newspaper’s film critic I often called on them to obtain some obscure early Kurosawa. The same staff are behind the counter as when I joined 20 years ago and they offer the same olde worlde service: on this occasion heading into their musty vaults to disinter an ancient Tom Sawyer for my young shavers.

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Wet outside it may have been, but for many Londoners January has been a dry month. Lots of people, after the excesses of the festive season, make a point of renouncing alcohol for the first gloomy part of the year. Some will find abstinence unutterably tedious and stressful, others will experience it as a mild drag, still more will be pleasurably surprised by how easy it is.

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The rehabilitation of Chris Langham is well under way. On Sunday, The Observer ran a searching but evenhanded interview with the disgraced comic actor and his wife, Christine, and Langham will shortly appear on Pamela Stephenson’s More4 show, Shrink Rap, to be comprehensively grilled by his former Not the Nine O’Clock News colleague, now turned psychotherapist.

This is not the behaviour we expect from a man who has loomed large in the public eye but then been convicted of downloading child pornography. If there is a profile for the celebrity paedophile, it’s exemplified on the one hand by Gary Glitter, pursued by the redtop vigilante squad from one Cambodian brothel to the next and on the other by Jonathan King, bumptiously continuing to maintain his innocence to all-comers.

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To the London Weekend Television studios to record an episode of Have I Got News for You (HIGNFY). The production runner, as is their wont, reminded me as he showed me to my dressing room that I was the long-running show’s most frequent guest, with 10 appearances notched up over the past decade or so. Sadly, I think last week’s was my last.

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Standing in the offie last night I witnessed a happy interchange between the proprietor, who I assumed to be from Pakistan, and three, blonde, giggling customers who I assumed to be Polish. The proprietor had very little English and the Polish girls hardly any at all, yet they all seemed to get along just fine. Of course, I doubt these are the kind of “skilled workers” who, the Prime Minister announced yesterday at the TUC conference, will henceforth have to learn English before they’re allowed to permanently settle in Britain. For a start, the new rules only apply to those from outside Europe, and I doubt the offie proprietor pitched up at immigration with a business plan in broken English: he’s somebody’s son, father or husband.

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