When on Monday I saw headlines about the Ecclestone affair, Formula One, and £1 million donations to the Labour Party - and learnt that a freedom of information request has kicked Tony Blair's first big scandal back into the headlines - my mind went back not to Mr Blair but to his successor, Gordon Brown; and to a night eight years ago. I was at the party conferences in 2000 and attending a reception.

And there across the room was the political commentator Andrew Rawnsley, suddenly in the news. He looked so tense. His latest book had just been serialised: the book in which he claimed that Gordon Brown, then the Chancellor, after appearing to deny in a BBC interview that he knew anything about Bernie Ecclestone's donation, had returned to the Treasury in a “red mist”.

“Brown raged at his staff,” says the book. “‘I lied. I lied. My credibility will be in shreds. I lied. If this gets out I will be destroyed'.”

Rawnsley doubtless had his sources, but he had gone out on a limb in publishing that - and I know how scary this can feel.

But last year Alastair Campbell's diaries appeared to support his account. “I spoke to Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson,” Campbell wrote three days before that BBC interview, “and at one point... all four of us were agreed [to be open about the facts]. One problem was that the circle of people who knew was widening.”

Campbell's diary complains that his masters then tried to box too clever and were in danger of doing themselves more damage than the truth would.

That's the exactly the impression that these latest FoI documents from Whitehall reinforce. And it's what Rawnsley said all along. When a journalist sticks his neck out he deserves some credit if, years later, when the risk he that took has largely been forgotten, his account is supported.

Saint's alive

In The Times last week Ben Macintyre's entrancing account of his trip to East Africa to talk to Barack Obama's African relatives has only added to my worries about the Democrats' presidential candidate.

Is this man human at all? Is he not, rather, some kind of a saint? It seemed impossible to find any, even the poorest of his relatives who thought ill of him. And then there is that story of the woman in the airport check-in queue many years ago, who hadn't the money to pay for her excess baggage to Norway, and who heard a deep voice behind her - “I'll pay” - and turned to see a man of whom she then knew nothing. Yes. St Barack again.

Will we learn next that he was once Mother Teresa's publicity-shunning helper, bathing lepers in the slums of Bombay? Some months ago I quoted the American TV satirist, John Stewart, wailing on his Daily Show: “Obama's given so much hope to our country. How is he going to betray us? I do hope it's financial.” But still no dirt, nothing disappointing, nothing mean. Can Obama be real?

Go with the flow

On The Politics Show on the BBC last Sunday I watched Jon Sopel interview Alex Salmond. I can't remember a word that either of them said. I was transfixed by the backdrop. Sitting in (presumably) his garden, the Scottish First Minister was framed by a gurgling river flowing beneath a rustic stone bridge. The ripples and bubbles and waving trees were hypnotising. I even think I saw a frog.

But is that a good backdrop from the point of view of viewer/voter psychology? Ronald Reagan used a log fire. Tony Blair tended to have a naff table lamp and potted plant.

Academics have bookshelves. The problem about running water is that it's so... well, fluid. Does that convey permanence? Do I trust a man pictured with something sloshing around behind him? What is the feng shui of TV backdrops? Which politician will be brave enough to try a tank of thrashing alligators? One clear lesson has been learnt from poor David Miliband's recent accident: avoid bananas. Or any soft fruit.

Hopes and fears

Could we have an end to financial-crash commentary that solemnly opines that “fear breeds fear”, “fear is irrational” and that we should all take a cold shower and calm down? Of course fear breeds fear. But hope breeds hope, and hope is irrational, and when rising hopes fuelled rising markets, which, in turn, fuelled further rises in hope, was anyone suggesting that we take cold showers and calm down? It strikes at least this economic ignoramus that there may be natural underlying cycles in human sentiment that find their own peaks and troughs - and we should not spend too much money trying to buck them.

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