As Beirut burns, Margaret Beckett is savaged for planning to pootle off to France in her Bailey Pageant Champagne caravan. Quite right too: what a stupid name for a caravan. But if she weren’t camping, what would she achieve?

Her trip would make no more or less a contribution to world peace than her other foreign visits; this is an honest admission of her — and our — impotence. America is the only power Israel heeds; with Hezbollah it is Syria and Iran. If peacekeepers are sought, our busy army is down to its last tin hat and crack brigade of gender awareness officers.

Even when Madge is here, she may as well not be. Fleetingly, she was cross America had sent Israel bombs via Britain; would she clonk Condi with her rolling pin? But later it appeared her gripe was merely that America may have breached health and safety-style rules. Well, such breaches are the last crimes you can still be done for here. It appears America failed to apply for the correct permission.

You might support arms shipments, as they could help crush terrorists targeting civilians. Or you might argue the hardware will kill more innocents and radicalise Arab opinion. You could argue either way, but Madge does neither; she’ll probably toddle off to do what she does best — light a Baby Belling. It is acceptance of her irrelevance.

If the Arab conflict grows really complicated, soon the man who put the clout back into Britain will be in charge — John Prescott. And if that makes you queasy, relax — we are told he will be assisted by Blair über-babe Hazel Blears, as if that were some kind of improvement.

But does it matter, even domestically? Those who fear the ship of state will not steam ahead with a former Cunard waiter at the helm miss the point. Labour is stuffed with busy politicos, but what have they done for us? We recall Tony Blair’s great activity, but achievements? It is failure by a thousand initiatives. At least when ministers are idle, and few are more idle than the croquet and crumpet fancier, they can’t do much harm.

Attlee shut himself in the loo for an hour a day. We wouldn’t blink if Prescott did likewise, but for Attlee the WC was the only place he could exercise his IQ undisturbed. If MPs spent the summer thinking how to exercise what little power they do have while roasting their chipolatas on the Calor gas, it would be their most useful bit of work in years.

• We knew the last property boom was out of hand when smart dinner party chatter had it that the new hotspot to buy a home was Tulse Hill, a drab London suburb so far south of the river it may as well have been in Calais.

  So how to take news that the boom has hit Delhi? A bungalow there has sold for £17m. Eat your heart out, Notting Hill. Can you afford it, Roman Abramovich? Apparently the bungalow isn’t even that special, but it is all about “location, location, location” — yes, in Delhi. As in “Delhi belly”. As in a decade back you could have bought all of Delhi for a semi in Surbiton.

  The Monopoly board must be redrawn: soon even downtown Calcutta will be more des res than the black hole of Mayfair. Novels will be penned called A Passage to England, chronicling the travails of all those wealthy, snooty Indians on grand tours of the backward colony that is sad old Blighty.

  But there is one final chapter we await on India’a passage to global superpower: like the Brit builders flocking to Ireland, we need a large family of Smiths opening an all-night grocery store in Delhi, with locals grumbling: “Typical English, coming over here. They work so hard. How are we expected to compete?”

  Wham, bam, shut up, George

  As the Queen cruised round the Hebrides, another queen cruised Hampstead Heath. The difference is that George Michael has been pilloried by the Glenda Slags of Fleet Street and in a TV interview. We didn’t quite hear that popular Fifties phrase “outrage to public decency” but there was certainly plenty of vigorous huffing and puffing.

  Why? If Michael likes to say wham, bam, thank you sir to an aged van driver to whom he has not been formally introduced that is his affair. Any question of fidelity can be raised only by Kenny Goss, the man who Michael wakes up before he go-goes cottaging.

  Michael’s only error was declaring he wants to sue everyone involved. Does this include the driver for poor service? If Michael’s contention is that his sex life is private, he might have thought of that before he skipped off to the heath to have sex outside.

  You can’t have it both ways — well, in Hampstead you can have it any which way you want — but don’t moan if the press overhears your careless whispers.

  Battle for free speech reaches Brick Lane

  Brickbats fly in Brick Lane: movie producers have axed plans to shoot scenes in the London street after the Bangladeshi community there began spitting hot chillies about filming Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane — a story about a troubled arranged marriage.

  You know the anti-film lot has a weak case when batty Germaine Greer takes its side. With similar inevitability Salman Rushdie, the socialite and occasional author, has waded in against the protesters.

  Rushdie is right. Few political issues are clear; but freedom of speech is. Books are burnt, theatres driven into darkness, filming is moved. And provocateurs like Greer agree for the hell of it.

  Agreeing to the Bangladeshi demands is patronising; it says “you can’t take criticism like we can”. It treats Bangladeshis as special needs. But no one is above criticism. If, say, the good folk of Chislehurst objected to the filming of a documentary there about white racists in its midst, would the cameras stop whirring? Exactly.

• It would not be accurate to say that one man and his dog tipped up for Bob Geldof’s last gig; well, the dog failed to show.

  Geldof cancelled the concert in Italy after only 45 fans bought tickets. Cruelly, the same weekend in Italy Robbie Williams drew 73,000. Perhaps Williams inflated his numbers by inviting 72,000 of his former girlfriends, but Bob’s plight shows that in pop that which was once cool soon becomes naffer than Dale Winton. It also shows that if you trade on your day job to do other things — Geldof set himself up as an eminence grise for Africa — folk gradually forget you have a day job. Your original claim to fame vanishes.

  Geldof’s autobiography was called Is That It? Alas Bob, it seems that it is.