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Tuesday 2 December 2008

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We should resist the globalisation of smells. From London to Delhi, stench is truth

Who knows how London will smell in a decade? But wouldn’t it be sad if it smelled just like Delhi, and Tokyo, and Maputo, and Murmansk? Resist, Asia! To lose touch with your smell is to lose too much. They look great in Mad Men, and their lives are awful. That’s the point. Stench is truth. It is not to be sniffed at.

So Alastair Campbell did not, at any point, remind Andre Suard that he was ‘only a f***ing hairdresser’. Is this not a shame? It seemed like the perfect distillation of the clash between the worlds of Tony and Cherie Blair.

Downing Street has descended into farce, entirely because Cherie has built her own circus Cabinet of freaks, cranks, groomers and spivs, as some sort of grotesque shadow of Tony’s own. Campbell has inadvertently lied to the press and it looks like he might have been found out. And in the middle of all of this, he is called up to value the view of the man employed to make Cherie’s hair look like a good wig rather than a bad one. Who wouldn’t be on his side? It is about the most sympathetic he has ever been.

And he denies it. I can’t figure out why. It doesn’t make him look any better, and it doesn’t make Cherie look any worse. Maybe he just felt bad for Andre. ‘I always liked him,’ Campbell said, in his denial, ‘and was always grateful when he saved me a time-wasting trip by cutting my hair in Cherie’s bathroom.’

What a time it was. So much human clutter, so much drama. So many people storming in and out of rooms, with slamming doors and strange personal ties. And now we have a new PM with no meat on his released expenses beyond cleaning bills and a Sky TV subscription, who seemingly governs the country all by himself. What does he do all day?

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for The Times.

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