THERE IS A sufficiency of news from politicians, the police and the media about terrorist plots, conspiracies, intercepts, arrests and the like, but one big remaining gap in our knowledge. How feasible was this plot? What are these liquids that explode? How explosive are they? Why has there only been one such attempt before, in the last century? On the face of it, here was a brilliant terrorist ruse that nobody on either side seems to have thought of before. Why not?

LUCKY THE MAN who has done good in secret, but been discovered in the act. Read on, then, George Galloway — about whom most of us, including me, have been pretty horrid. Here is a tale from a very elderly gentleman, now in his nineties and living in a care home, who has been corresponding with me via The Times for many years.

My correspondent was distressed at media attacks on the MP. He decided to help by contributing to the fighting fund Mr Galloway had established to defray his costs in suing The Daily Telegraph. “. . . Well, for a person of modest means I sent him a sizeable cheque, and was very surprised to receive an answer (three pages). ‘In view of your age and circumstances I feel I must return your generous cheque to you.’ ”

MOST GENERATIONS can recall a scientific or technological breakthrough that did more than advance the human race, but somehow gripped the imagination too. For me and my parents’ generation that first moonwalk by Neil Armstrong leaps from memory. For my grandparents, powered flight must have set pulses racing. Science met science fiction.

And in a subtler yet spine-tingling way, the next generation may have its own candidate. News this week, that using the frozen sperm of mammoths found beneath permafrost, it might prove possible to regenerate a living mammoth, thrills in a way that other (perhaps more useful) advances do not.

It was once my ambition to be the first openly gay man on Mars, but I now think that to touch the hair of a living, breathing, woolly mammoth would give me an even bigger kick.

CURIOUS, on Channel 4 News this week, to catch television footage of Lord Levy crossing a road. The scripted voiceover (about his other job as the PM’s personal envoy to the Middle East) lasted about ten seconds. It only took the great man five seconds to cross the road. So they ran it in slow motion.

The effect was strangely sinister. You wouldn’t see the Queen, for instance, or Julie Andrews, in slo-mo. The reason, I think, why in some viewers’ minds this device may unwittingly appear to slur its subjects is that it is so often used to eke out sparse videotape during a long voiceover; and this most often arises in the case of criminal suspects, convicts and brutes.

Poor Lord Levy is none of these things, just a bit camera-shy recently. Couldn’t a plaintiff in a defamation case argue that the very use of slow motion in a documentary has tended unfairly to diminish his reputation? He would have a point.

NICE people always apologise even when they are in the right. Nasty people have used this against then in court. So note, rejoicing, this clause in the Compensation Act, which received Royal Assent this summer. The Lords inserted it. The Government tried to remove it, then surrendered:

(2) An apology, offer of treatment or other redress shall not of itself amount to an admission of negligence or statutory duty.

MARY-ANN SIEGHART and Roy Hattersley, among other voices, were spot-on this week when they pointed out that the observation that British foreign policy has radicalised some young Muslims is a factual claim, not an argument against (or for) the policy. This highlights a deeper problem about the unhinged atmosphere surrounding Planet Blair.

On this planet a belief that something is “the right thing to do” implies a denial that attendant problems could even exist. Just as other craft could sail straight through the Mary Celeste, truths can sail slap bang through the middle of the Prime Minister’s mental framework — and out the other side — without ever impinging. This is a mentality familiar to psychiatric social workers. On ploughs the ghostly Tony Celeste into the night: lights blazing, nobody at home.

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden