Cary Gee - Out and about

IN 1804, black slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue staged the first African slave rebellion resulting in their emancipation, the defeat of the French occupiers and the establishment of modern Haiti as the first black-ruled republic in history. Napoleon quickly divested his empire of other colonial assets in the Americas. Others followed and Haiti directly aided the liberator of South America, Simon Bolivar. The island has been paying the price of its success ever since.

REASON, if that can possibly be the right word in the circumstances, appeared to intervene unexpectedly in the Russian excursion into Georgia. With expectations that Moscow was about to commit a reckless blunder, or a calculated provocation, by pushing the tanks on to Tbilisi, a halt was called. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, through his mouthpiece President Dmitri Medvedev, announced in that chilling euphemism that the security situation had been “stabilised”.

Paul Anderson - Out of the loop

WHAT an extraordinary fortnight in politics. Labour, in the doldrums in the polls and recently humiliated in local elections in England and Wales, loses what was a safe Westminster seat in a by-election in urban Scotland, and there is an outbreak of apocalyptic doom-mongering among columnists and backbench MPs.

Joan Smith - As I please

IT’S all awful, of course, but saying so doesn’t get us very far. Nor does the atmosphere of panic which is currently gripping the Parliamentary Labour Party. Emotional outbursts are great fun for political columnists, whether they come in off-the-record briefings from Cabinet ministers or unnamed sources at Number 10, but they simply reinforce the impression that Labour is in meltdown.

EVEN before the ink was dry on the reports disclosing massive profits, and before the eye-watering record hikes in domestic fuel prices were announced, the energy companies were inside the door of Number 10. Their mission: to head off any chance that the Government might entertain a windfall tax to alleviate the plight of the increasing thousands of people being added to the millions already suffering fuel poverty, an inability to meet the bills without going short elsewhere in the family budget. The pre-emptive effort to create a bulwark against a windfall tax has already shown signs of success.

SAY what you like about the Nazis, the American journalist PJ O’Rourke once wrote, but none of them ever had sexual fantasies about being tied to a bed and whipped by someone dressed up as a social democrat. I remembered this gag after the conclusion of the Max Mosley trial, but in the way you do, I let it go for a stroll through my imagination and, sure enough, I was soon relating it to Gordon Brown. Not that he’s a Nazi (although these days he’s hardly a social democrat either). Nor, I suspect, has he been absent from a fair few sexual fantasies. In the glory days of his “Iron Chancellorship” and during her own 15 minutes of fame, Ulrika Jonsson interviewed him for the telly and hardly seemed able to contain her lust.

ONCE upon a time, you would never have bracketed Rossington with eco-fame. It’s a former pit village pretty much off the beaten track south of Doncaster. Seeing the colliery winding gear from the East Coast Main Line always made me feel I was back home.

IT’S no wonder some trade union leaders came out of the Warwick National Policy Forum proclaiming the game is not yet over. There remains a long way to go before the radical change of direction is attained that will make Labour in Government a fighting force with a justifiable purpose for re-election other than the fact that they are not the Tories.

BLAMING Gordon Brown for all Labour’s woes is easy but wrong. The current economic crisis began in the United States – first with the war in Iraq and second with the subprime mortgage market. Getting involved in the first was within Britain’s control; becoming sucked in by the second was not. Without the catastrophic intervention in the Middle East, the Labour Government might have had the wherewithal to withstand the subsequent economic tidal wave.

Kevin Maguire - As I please

DAVID CAMERON suffers, whispered a politician who attended another of our more expensive private schools, from a “sense of entitlement” – the belief he was born to rule. I suppose a stockbroker’s son who went to the same establishment for tiny toffs as a couple of royals, before graduating to Eton, might well feel a sense of entitlement if he can also trace his family back to William IV and is a distant relative of the Queen. And when a telephone call from Buckingham Palace helps land him a job with the Conservative Party (as a researcher – the leader’s elected these days) by putting in a quiet word, string-pulling ensures that sense of entitlement is fulfilled.