Perhaps because Cheney feared that the world might be running out of fresh reasons to snigger at the Bush Administration, the US Vice-President has just launched a new golden age of comedy for America’s stand-up comedians by shooting (and let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be fatally) a Republican lawyer friend during a bird-hunting trip in Texas; possibly by accident, or possibly because the friend wouldn’t reveal where the quail were hiding, and Cheney didn’t have time to call the CIA to airlift this fellow to another country to “cajole” the information out of him.

But the accident has made such headlines that it makes you wonder if it might not suggest a way of making the Winter Olympics more magnetic to those who have only so much appetite for watching men in body-size, petrol-blue condoms moving very fast on ice (just how long can you milk entertainment from watching people sliding downhill again and again?). This is what it makes you wonder: what if it were Cheney taking part in that Olympic event where you ski cross-country, stopping occasionally to shoot at things? Or George Bush and Tony Blair pairing up to see how long they could skate together over thin ice (stiff competition in this event from O. J. Simpson and Danish cartoonists).

If there’s an Olympic committee exploring ways to inject more zip into the Winter Games to make them more relevant to people’s lives, maybe they could introduce the following:

The “Where’s Wally” Michael Jackson Slalom: in this event the singer lies naked at an undisclosed location on the side of a snowy mountain. The winner is the first Olympic skier to identify Jackson’s all-white body amid the snow-covered landscape.

The Blair-Brown Pairs Downhill: this requires pairs of competitors to ski down a precarious incline separately, and in icy silence, often facing in opposite directions, while nevertheless giving every impression that they are progressing, chattily and in unison, towards the same finishing line. Current gold-medal-holders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown face a strong challenge from the young Turk pairing of David Cameron and George Osborne. The final outcome can be heavily dependent on the weather. If the conditions on the Olympic piste are stormy, it could favour the experienced title-holders. But if the weather is fair, the CameronOsborne duo might win. And if it snows in Hell, Simon Hughes will win.

The Chip and Pin Slalom: skiers descend through a series of gates, passage through which is granted by punching into a keypad a four-digit code. Each gate is unlocked by a different pin number — those for a competitor’s credit card and debit card; the code used to unlock their mobile phone; the code they give to gain access to their PC; the code that disarms their burglar alarm; and so on. Contestants who have forgotten one of their codes can get assistance by dialling a special Olympic helpline — if they can remember the number.

The CD Luge: competitors belt around the course on a luge while having to remove the Cellophane wrapping from a new CD. The wrapping must be removed by the time the competitor crosses the finishing line, in as fast a time as possible — forcing the lugist to make a choice between lifting his head to assist in the Cellophane-removal (thereby slowing his descent), or keeping his head low and hoping that he can remove the wrapping by touch alone.

The Call-Centre Cross-Country: a test of endurance. Armed with only a mobile phone, competitors are dropped in remote mountainside locations and must try to phone their bank to get their current account balance. The winner is whoever manages to get to speak to an actual human being in Bangalore before any signs of frostbite appear in their fingers or toes.

The Al Gore Invitation: a race inspired by the former US Vice-President’s success in relaunching himself as a movie star at the recent Sundance Film Festival with An Inconvenient Truth, his documentary about climate change. Skiers must dodge Gore as he seeks to block their descent and render them comatose by droning on about greenhouse gases, solar ray absorption, and the convection energy of hurricanes. Skiers win by staying awake for longer than it takes local beavers to fell the wooden Gore by gnawing through his ankles.

You’d watch those, wouldn’t you?

Warning: smoking isn't scary enough

Isn’t it a little heavy-handed for Parliament to ban smoking everywhere, even in private clubs (though, curiously, not in private homes)? When people take extreme action it is often because they have failed to take more modest steps that could maybe have nipped the problem in the bud. For instance, if someone had stopped Joan Rivers from having another facelift, she wouldn’t now have a forehead covered in what used to be her ankle skin.

Take those warnings on cigarette packets. They always seemed far too timid to scare anyone who smoked. Just warning smokers that they would die? Everyone dies. What you needed to do was really scare them with warnings on cigarette packets such as: “Warning: Smoking cigarettes will make you sound as shifty as Patricia Hewitt.”

“Smoking can change your appearance and may even result in your looking like Charles Clarke, requiring you to carry an Identity Card to prove who you really are.”

“Marlboro Man? It turns out he’s a little Brokeback.”

“You banked on global warming putting an end to the world before cigarettes put an end to you. But after 27in of snow in New York in a day, cigarettes are back in pole position.”

“Warning: If you smoke after sex then you may need to consider lubrication.”

Blue-eyed asset

Warm congratulations to the Tory leader David Cameron and his wife, Sam, on the birth of their son. What Cameron told journalists after the birth was: “We’ve had a beautiful baby boy. He’s lovely, he has blue eyes and black curly hair.”

On such a joyous occasion, only a truly hardened cynic would imagine that what he meant was: “My wife has just given birth to a beautiful, blue-eyed electoral asset.”