Sunday Update

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith appears to have been claiming expenses worth £116,000 on a second home that is actually her main home. The Mail on Sunday, not the most obviously impartial observers, have the story. Even with reservations, however, it is hard to see how Ms. Smith can emerge with much credit from this issue.

David Cameron talks education in a Daily Telegraph interview, and says that he would like his children to be educated in the state sector. However, he remains positive about his own Eton education.

In the third of the Bourne films trilogy, CIA officer Pamela Landy turns to helping Jason Bourne, explaining that she is appalled by the CIA black operations activity that created Bourne - "this isn't what I signed up for" she says. A point Tony Blair might have been interested in taking on board, according to the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley, who claims that Blair's refusal to challenge Bush on the issue of torture is one of his greatest moral failings:
As for Tony Blair, he did underestimate how wrong it was. He was never quite appalled enough about torture to remonstrate publicly with his ally in the White House as the Bush administration betrayed the west's best values and the very causes of human rights and the rule of law that they were supposed to be fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is something about Shami Chakrabarti, the boss of Liberty, that makes me squeal with irritation and start clawing at my throat whenever I hear her speak. So says Rod Liddle, in a Sunday Times article that many politics students might be instinctively in sympathy with.

Matthew D'Ancona in the Sunday Telegraph writes about the scorn and ridicule being heaped on Gordon Brown - to say nothing of being upstaged by Tony Blair this week.