You like potato, I like potahto . . . you like tomayto, I like tomahto - let’s call the whole thing off!

The term “rendition”, according to my English dictionary, means a performance, such as singing a song, acting in a play or reciting a poem. For the Americans, however, it means wiring a Muslim up to the national grid in the blacked-out basement prison cell of some Third World dump and zapping him till he ’fesses up to various real or imagined terrorist offences. Yee-haw! These are, I think you’ll agree, very different interpretations of the same word, indicative of two countries sadly divided by a common language. Perhaps this is the problem that afflicted our government - a simple linguistic misunderstanding.

Time after time, government ministers insisted that there was no evidence to suggest that the Americans’ filthy and immoral practice had been partly facilitated by our connivance. Time after time Tony Blair refused even to investigate the business, insisting there was no direct evidence to suggest such a thing had occurred. Well, no, Tony, maybe there wasn’t; there was simply a strong suspicion, which is why you would have an investigation. When there’s direct evidence, you don’t need an investigation.

Now it transpires that two US detainees were transferred for a bit of torture via a quick stop-off on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, which somehow we still own. Everyone is now saying, “Lordy, how did that happen?” Our government is responding in the way in which it responds to every allegation of wrongdoing - by saying, “You’re joking - how on earth did that happen? We knew nothing about it. Paperwork must have gone missing or something.” That will be the epitaph of new Labour when it is finally laid to rest about two years from now - “Wasn’t me, guv. We lost the files.”

I suspect that Blair’s government took a similar view of rendition to that of Colin Powell, who insists that the Europeans are working themselves up into a tizzy about nothing. Rendition works, he says. Well, yes, I wouldn’t doubt the efficacy of torture; just its morality and legality under international law.

Two points occur. The first is this: what have we done to stop the US using Diego Garcia (or Heathrow or Stansted) for such a purpose in the future? Nothing, so far as I can see. The CIA has said that it doesn’t think any more people have been sent for torture via British soil but it’ll check.

The second point is an eternal verity that all British governments should understand. No matter how special you think your relationship with Washington, the US will do whatever it likes in pursuit of its own goals regardless of the effect it may have on Britain. Let’s call the whole thing off, indeed.

- Jack Straw has called upon magistrates to stop putting offenders in prison, suggesting that there are many socially acceptable alternatives to dealing with even the most repulsive of lawbreakers. Sooner or later a government minister will berate the fire service for taking a perpetually oppositional approach to fires - and go on to suggest that Britain’s diverse and vibrant community of fires should be allowed to continue their business unimpeded and that there are very real alternatives to putting them out - such as watching them, or toasting marshmallows on very long forks.

It is only a few weeks back that the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, announced she was too scared to step out of her front door in case she was stabbed in the throat by a mugger. It was pointed out that there were so many muggers wandering around our city centres because Labour had been telling the courts for years to find alternatives to locking them up.

Most of these alternatives, it transpired, boiled down to letting them out provided they wore an electronic device on their legs that informed the police they were, at that very moment, stabbing the home secretary in the throat. Perhaps Jack wants all these people out of prison precisely so they can frighten Jacqui Smith, because he doesn’t like her. I can’t see any other rational explanation.

Livingstone’s loaded Olympic parade

Ken Livingstone has denied inviting Linford Christie, who was banned from athletics after testing positive for nandrolene, to carry the Olympic torch as part of the relay that precedes the Olympic Games. Christie says he did. I wonder whom one should believe - the disgraced former athlete or the highly esteemed mayor of London? Yep, I agree - and this obvious conclusion was reinforced by a signed letter that Christie’s agent read out on the BBC. Now Livingstone is whining that Christie may have been invited but it was all a terrible mistake.

Other top athletes invited by the Greater London Authority to carry the torch include Dame Kelly Holmes - and, er, Sir Trevor McDonald and an actress nobody has heard of called Amara Khan. I don’t think the GLA intends inviting any whites or Jews to take part, which is fair enough because the Olympic Games isn’t really for agents of imperialist oppression.

And presumably room is needed for more of Ken’s mates - Lee Jasper, his race adviser (who was suspended from work while the police had a poke around in his activities), for example. And maybe Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the exciting Muslim cleric. Or Ken himself, held aloft on a plinth by a phalanx of cheering newts.

Posting my revenge on Joy the junk mailer

I am going round to Joy Goodman’s house to put 22,350 leaflets through her letter box. The leaflets will advise Goodman that her house can be double glazed by Seamus’s Totally Plastic Windows Emporium for only £2,000. There will be local pizza delivery menus, charity Christmas card stuff and instructions on how to avoid receiving junk mail (in case she appreciates irony). Then I intend to erect a tent on her lawn, cook supper and get my head down with a good book.

Goodman was delivering junk mail to a man in Leeds called Paul O’Brien when his letter box snapped shut and hurt one of her fingers. My guess is that the letter box saw her coming. She is now suing O’Brien for the injury she received.

He should sue her for trespass and join me for a nightcap on her lawn where we shall sing excerpts from Aida, The Phantom of the Opera and the So Solid Crew’s Greatest Hits and sue her ass off, as the Americans say, if she objects too strenuously and thus injures our feelings.

- That gurgling ball of self-satisfaction, Diane Abbott MP, pronounced on television last week that she thought Chairman Mao had done “more good than bad”.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first, and kindest, is that Ms Abbott is pig-ignorant. The second is that she is perfectly well aware of the millions upon millions of people Mao starved to death during his “Great Leap Forward”, and the millions more who were killed or had their lives destroyed by his cultural revolution - but thinks that by and large, these are trivialities, mere footnotes to history.

Frankly, having watched Abbott closely over the years, it could easily be either.

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