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Meanwhile, now that Project Merlin has been agreed and bankers’ bonuses no longer dominate the front pages Barclays has released details of bonuses and compensation paid to its boss Bob Diamond and other staff members. Chief executive Diamond, the public face of the bank, did not actually get the £9.5 million bonus for 2010 everyone thought he would and, we are told, got a much more modest £6.75 million – emblematic of restraint and sensitivity to these straitened times. Mr Diamond wasn’t even the best paid in his bank. Two of his lieutenants, Jerry del Missier and Rich Ricci of the Barclay’s Capital received something like £77 million in bonuses, incentives and rewards for past performance. Some 231 senior employees – known as “code staff” – took home £554 million between them, an average of about £2.4 million per executive. In deference to political and public sensitivities, we are told, Mr Diamond’s pay for 2011 will be an annual salary of £1.35 million, up from his current pay of £250,000. His annual bonus will be 2.5 times his salary – £3.37 million – and he will also receive a long-term incentive plan of five times his salary. Some 10 per cent of his long-term rewards will be based on “sustainability” of the business including factors such as the bank’s relationships with regulators.

It’s the Oscars for the super rich: Forbes Magazine this week published its annual survey of the world’s billionaires.  Whatever its forensic accuracy it is nevertheless used as a handy barometer of the state of the world’s economies, not least that of the United States where year in, year out for the past couple of decades the list shows that around 400 of its richest possess as much wealth as 155 million of their compatriots – the so-called bottom half of society. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, 55, would have topped the list with a personal fortune of $88 billion – if he and his wife Melinda had not given away $28 billion to good causes such as the eradication of malaria and polio in poorer, developing countries through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Berkshire Hathaway investment vehicle founder Warren Buffett whose fortune is estimated at $47 billion would have been second if he, too, had not given away billions to philanthropic causes. Both Mr Gates and Mr Buffett have been trying to persuade their fellow billionaires, through their charity The Giving Pledge, to give way at least half of their immense fortunes either during their lifetimes or as bequests. Their campaign has met with mixed responses probably best characterised by Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican telecoms entrepreneur who is officially the world’s richest man (according to Forbes, at least), with an estimated personal wealth of $60 billion. Businessmen do more good by creating jobs and wealth through investment, “not by being Santa Claus”, says the no-nonsense Mexican billionaire.

This has been doing the rounds in Westminster, Twitter, cyberspace and elsewhere for a few weeks now and has been attributed to many, including TV presenter Andrew Neil, but it still merits an airing: “Q: What is the difference between ‘The Big Society’ and ‘The Big Issue’? A: Nobody buys ‘The Big Society’.”

David Cameron’s voluntarism initiative has also become synonymous with redundancy, as in losing your job is “joining the Big Society”. Even the man put in charge, Lord Wei, found he could not do it and make ends meet so had to scale back his hours. So far, so inauspicious – couldn’t really get much worse, or could it? TimeBank, the charity hailed by Office for Civil Society Minister Nick Hurd as the retort to the cynics faces possible closure – just months after celebrating its 10th anniversary – following his department’s refusal to give it a £500,000 grant. The organisation, which employs 35 staff and co-ordinates 300,000 volunteers and work experience candidates, was one of 42 organisations receiving government funding and invited to reapply to become a “strategic partner” and get up to £500,000 a year until the programme’s closure in 2014. Spending cuts means that only 14 designated “strategic partners” will get any funding. The Cabinet Office, we are told, is mulling whether it will publish the full list of organisations that have already been told they are being cut loose and won’t get any money. As for TimeBank, which says it is considering a legal challenge, a Cabinet Office spokesperson said drily that the organisation was given six months notice “which is ample time to plan for the future”.

The combative governor tried unsuccessfully to force the senators back to give constitutional legitimacy to his plans to end health care, collective bargaining and pension rights for teachers and other public sector workers. Walker’s strategy has been to pit hard-pressed blue collar and middle class (in the US, it means lower-waged employees) workers against state employees and to blame them for the state’s $137 million deficit by claiming that, with benefits, they earn as much as $75,000 a year and enjoy job security. Meanwhile, his party has been pushing for lower corporation tax and tax breaks for the top 2 per cent of the country. Any opposition is denounced as “class war” or “politics of envy”. Sound familiar? Tensions became so heated in the past two weeks that  protestors occupied the state’s ornate Capitol building in Madison for a prolonged “sleep over” – prompting an unsuccessful appeal to them to leave to allow the authorities to steam clean the legislature because of the overpowering smell of, erm, well, irate workers and voters, not to put too fine a point on it.

Mr Emanuel is a man who could teach the Israeli Defence Forces a thing or two about coming at an opponent the hard way. Among the many euphemisms used to describe him when he announced he was leaving the West Wing for the Windy City were “bombastic”, “brusque”, “tough personal style”, “not afraid to break a little china”, “not a shrinking violet”, “will use the f-word”. They were from, if not exactly his admirers, certainly not his enemies. His enemies tried shamelessly to have him thrown off the ballot as recently as January 24, claiming that because he worked in the White House, he didn’t live in Chicago – despite the fact he kept all his possessions stored in the house he rented out to tenants who, apparently didn’t want to give him back his home. Among those items was his wife’s wedding dress and an overcoat worn by his maternal grandfather when he arrived in America in 1917 after he fled persecution on the Russian-Romanian border. Emmanuel saw off the procedural dirty tricks without even breaking sweat but Chicago – where his predecessors included the formidable Richard J Daley and his son Richard M Daley – breeds its politicians hard-nosed. In fairness, they have to be – six of its parent state Illinois’s governors were charged with crimes during or after their gubernatorial terms, four were convicted and Rod Blagojevich (who tried to extort a children’s hospital) was succesfully impeached.

In particular, the council wants to stop soup runs and rough sleeping in the area around Westminster Cathedral and has commenced a four-week consultation intended to close on March 25. It hopes to introduce a new by-law banning them by October. The issue – which has divided charities – may turn out to be a genuine acid test of the bona fides of the “Big Society”. The justification offered by Westminster council is that charitable provision only encourages dependency and traps recipients in a downward spiral of poverty and life on the streets. It says it has plenty of professional programmes for tackling homelessness. One of these, Supporting People, has had its budget cut from £17 million to £14.4 million in the coming year. Critics say Westminster’s real policy is to drive homeless people out of the borough entirely, a charge which is met with a shrug and a smile by some of its more hard-line councillors. The most even-handed research on the issue was published in 2009 by Laura Lane and Anne Power of the London School of Economics, Soup Runs in Central London: The right help in the right place at the right time? It addresses just why Westminster is uniquely such a focus for the homeless and applauds the Simon Community’s Street Cafe initiative. Housing Justice also casts a  much-needed perspective on the debate. Estimates of the numbers of people directly affected vary. Westminster says between 100 and 150 people sleep rough near the Cathedral, while other estimates say 1,600 people – ex-servicemen and women and Eastern European migrants prominent among them – are directly affected. The prospect of homeless people being swept off the capital’s streets while the rest of the world visits to attend the Olympics is not without precedent, but surely it’s not the kind of thing we would wish to see in London?

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming and denying. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has come out in support of Chancellor George Osborne’s  £81 billion of spending cuts and says Britain’s light touch regulation – intended to attract bankers from New York (whom he oversaw when he ran the New York Fed) to the Square Mile – was partly to blame for the 2008 banking crisis and was “deeply costly strategy for financial regulation”.

Says Mr Geithner: “I am very impressed – just as one man’s view looking from a distance – at the basic strategy that (George Osborne) has adopted. What he did was a very remarkable thing. At a time when it was easier to make tough choices quickly, because they were not problems created by this Government, he locked his coalition and the Government into a set of reforms that were very good.” The US has a deficit of $1.6 trillion or 11 per cent of GDP.  Fed chairman Ben Bernanke says its policy of printing money (quantitative easing) to buy back Treasury securities – $600 billion in the last round known as QE2 – has nothing to do with forcing up food and commodity prices or inflation in BRIC countries. At last month’s Davos economic forum, Mr Geithner had said that for the US rapid, drastic spending cuts were “not the responsible way” to deal with budget deficits.

Just as generations were encouraged to believe that student Gavrilo Princip virtually single-handedly started the First World War by shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand, we appear to be in the early stages of the drafting of a new myth. We are now being invited to believe that the Iraq invasion, and everything that has ensued, is all the fault of a lying fantasist called Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, otherwise known as “Curveball”. Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who used Curveball’s dubious testimony to galvanise the United Nations into supporting the war, is said to be incensed and seeking to rehabilitate his tarnished political credibility.

A CIA station chief says his doubts about Curveball are vindicated. And just when we think the line between farce and bloody tragedy cannot get any fuzzier, we learn that 57-year -old computer expert Dennis Montgomery was paid more than £13 million after fooling the CIA that he had developed software to decipher coded al Qaida plots supposedly hidden in al-Jazeera broadcasts. On the strength of his “intelligence”, President George W Bush ordered passenger jets flying from London to be turned back over the Atlantic or face being shot down. A French investigation into the technology found it to be bogus. Mr Montgomery was behind claims that Somalian terrorists planned to disrupt Barack Obama’s inauguration. His software was also said to identify terror leaders from photographs taken by aerial drones. The CIA admits it was “played” or “had”, but no more is to be made of it.

Meanwhile, Dennis Montgomery awaits trial in Nevada on charges of passing dud cheques worth £1.1million to Las Vegas casinos. The dodgy dossier of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell is – almost – quaint by comparison.