Fact: unsourced rumours circulated in the media last weekend that Lord Mandelson had rescued the Government by smoothing ruffled feathers in India after the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, “mishandled” his visit there.

Surmise: The source of these rumours was Peter Mandelson.

Fact: Miliband has entertained ambitions for the Labour leadership.

Surmise: Mandelson wants to finish off Miliband's hopes.

Fact: It has been reported that Mandelson believes Gordon Brown is rubbish.

Surmise: His Lordship has somebody else in mind as leader.

I'm serious. Labour's Christmas sugar-rush of optimism that all might not be lost is fading. The polls are tipping back down. Next will come despair. After despair comes mutiny. By summer, I bet gossip resurfaces about a pre or post-election leadership challenge. Lord Mandelson has not re-entered politics in order to sink with Mr Brown's ship.

Fact: But Mandelson is in the Lords.

Fact: So, once, was Anthony Wedgwood Benn. So was the 14th Earl of Home. So was the 2nd Viscount Hailsham.

Fact: But Labour would never choose him.

Surmise: A chap can dream, can't he?

I'll be jiggered

When I put the above theory to my partner, adding that if I were Peter Mandelson this idea would certainly have formed in my mind, he replied - brutally, I thought: “But you're rather lower in the food chain.” How much lower I was to learn moments later, as an e-mail pinged into my inbox from the manufacturers of Dairystix.

It seems a battle is raging within the food industry - and all started by this column. A fortnight ago I reported my struggle to open those new pencil-sized plastic bags of milk (hereinafter referred to as Dairystix) which in many cafeterias are replacing the tiny plastic tubs (hereinafter referred to as jigger-pots).

In their war against the usurping Dairystix, the jigger-pot people are taking out full-page ads in major food-industry publications, quoting The Times - this column. By its e-mail, Dairystix was sneaking on the jigger-pot brigade, warning me that The Times's name was being used; and asking (politely) if I was aware that: (1) “Dairystix contain 50 per cent less plastic than jigger-pots”; (2) “Jigger-pots have always been difficult to open, after 40 years of practice we still struggle! Dairystix have been improved and do open more easily”; and (3) “Dairystix is 100 per cent UK Farm Assured milk, not Irish milk that has travelled twice as far” and “if it's good enough for the Queen it's good enough for Dairystix”. There followed some insinuations about the use of vegetable oil too unpleasant to be repeated.

Your diarist wavered. Had I been fair? Had I been unkind to plucky little Dairystix, the environmentalists' friend? Then, just as my allegiances were tipping their way, came an e-mail from Alice Thomson, of this paper. She had mishandled the opening of a Dairystix packet on a train, squirting milk all over Alan Milburn. “He was unbelievably nice about it.”

Whatever shall I do now? Torn between Dairystix and jigger-pots and loyalty to Alice. Heavy lies the moral burden on a Times diarist.

Pedantification

On Tuesday night, before a grand do in Park Lane, I chaired the judges' meeting to decide the overall winner of the 2008 Costa Book Awards. Now I must pen a mega-column about all this for The Times's Saturday Review.

It's been absorbing, with lots of lovely reading; but I've more than once caught myself becoming a grammar-and-punctuation bore. Reading Sadie Jones's (fantastic) first novel, The Outcast, I kept tut-tutting when she wrote “He loved that she liked... etc” or “She hated that he thought so, etc,” just as I tut-tut at that line from a pop song “I love that you love me”.

But how silly to resent what is really an improvement to the efficiency of language. Why say “I love the fact that you love me” when “I love that you love me” does the job? I must de-grump.

Meaningless

Oh no. Another grump. All these news reports from Westminster about how this or that sleaze-accused peer has “refuted” the allegations against him. The reporter means “rejected” or “denied” or “dismissed” or “defended himself against” the allegations. “Refute” means “disprove” and implies acceptance that the allegation has been knocked down.

Or does it any more? Maybe we've just got to accept that a once-useful word has gone beyond recovery? Farewell “refute”. Farewell “disinterested”. I love that I'm learning to get hip.

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