Ibrahim gave me a present for my birthday: a leather pouffe that he had had specially made to mark the occasion. It’s beautiful. I’m not – I am beginning to look a bit tatty. Still, I’m lot older than the pouffe so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

Quite rightly, private schools are being required to demonstrate precisely how the tax saved by their charitable status is genuinely spent in charitable ways. Subsidising the rich in schools or in hospitals (by suggesting that private insurance company premiums should be tax-allowable) is wrong.

Vaclav Klaus, the president of Czechoslovakia, describes global warming as a false myth perpetrated by political scientists. Quite right – the myth is not the warming itself but its supposed causes. He might now like to turn his attention to the editor of the Lancet on publishing an account of surveillance deaths in Iraq that had numbers coming out of the air and as much relation to science as Soviet agricultural and industrial output figures.

At the end of my days of active addiction I had very few friends left. I had exasperated and offended them. I feel very privileged now to have been able to win some of them back and to have made new ones.

I don’t feel the need to defend myself. If I have done something wrong I shall apologise. If I haven’t then all I shall do is to listen. The problem is that, as with anyone else, I may not be the best judge of my own behaviour.

“If you don’t give me another ten milligrams I’ll go back to the previous treatment centre. They gave me fifty.”

I don’t suppose a further ten milligrams on top of the ten milligrams that I had already given him will make any substantial difference. It is appropriate to help him to settle – but I don’t like the threat because he won’t get better if he continues with attitudes like that.

The problem is that he has the least capacity to think rationally when he is still under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. Providing a gradual detoxification to cover his withdrawal symptoms is not an exact science. It has to be judged according to the individual – but that doesn’t mean that he can call the shots.

I searched absolutely everywhere for the keys. I knew they were in the kitchen somewhere. Eventually I found them – under a cat.

What is that lunatic up to now? I don’t like the sound of his sabre rattling.

Phoebe came to me, apparently for comfort (as I interpreted it). I remember her predecessor doing that shortly before she died. Phoebe is bound to die sometime but now would be too soon –for her and for me.

As Simon Jenkins points out in The Sunday Times “others have taken the rap for [Gordon] Brown’s mistakes over rail and tube privatisation, tax credits, foundation hospitals, doctors’ pay, the rich-poor gap and the obsession with central control and red tape”.

And this is the man who has a reputation for being a good chancellor! The one and only good thing he did was to give control of interest rates to the Bank of England monetary policy committee. For the rest, from plundering pension schemes onwards, he has been an absolute catastrophe. As Prime Minister, with even more power to destroy, he will bring calamity on all of us.