• A celluloid headache awaits the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The controversial memoirs of Craig Murray (former Ambassador to Uzbekistan) are to be made into a movie.

  Slightly weirdly, Michael Winterbottom, the director (24 Hour Party People, The Road to Guantánamo), has optioned Murder in Samarkand, which — court battles permitting — is due to be published in June.

  Very weirdly, he plans to cast Steve Coogan in the lead role. Can it be true? “Actually, yes,” says Murray. “It’s extremely good news. I’ve met with Michael, and with Steve Coogan, and with a, well, a very well-known screenwriter, whose name I’m not going to divulge.”

  Murray’s book lifts the lid on torture and corruption in the former Soviet state and alleges lazy complicity on the part of Downing Street and the FCO. It doesn’t, in short, sound like typical Alan Partridge fare.

  “There are elements of dark comedy in the story,” shrugs Murray, “and Steve Coogan has shown that he has quite a dramatic range.”

  And who should play Jack Straw, the man whom Murray evidently considers to be his nemesis? The former ambassador lets out a dark laugh. “I think it is a role tailor-made for Alan Rickman,” he says.
  

• At the Trade & Industry dinner at Mansion House yesterday, Alan Johnson, the Trade Secretary, called for “Sgt Pepper economics” — for businesses to innovate like the Beatles did.

  We read the news today, oh boy, we tell his department, about a lucky man who made the grade. “Made the what?” asks a press officer.

  Never mind. Picture yourself on a boat on a river. How is the economy doing? “I’ll . . . get somebody to call you back.”

  Splendid. Any time before we’re 64 will do.
  
  
  

• And then, something almost unheard of happens. The DTI calls back.

  We’ve got to admit, we tell the press officer, it’s getting better. A sigh. “It doesn’t really help that I’m called Lucy, does it?,” she says.
  
  

• Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police chief, caused uproar last month when he criticised the media for focusing disproportionately on white murder victims, citing the Soham case as an example. Don’t remember? Don’t bother checking the newly released minutes of the police authority’s meeting. Soham isn’t mentioned.
  
  
  
• A new take on an an old gag from Ann Widdecombe, at a Holborn & St Pancras Conservative Association auction on Wednesday. Widdecombe raised a bottle of whisky, signed by her old boss Michael Howard, and informed the assembled company that there was “something of the nightcap about it”.

  That’s quite good, we tell the Tory MP. You didn’t just just think it up off the top of your head, did you? “I did,” says Widdecombe. “It is quite good, isn’t it?” The whisky went for £70.
  
  Ps
  
  “Some of what people assume about me, Kelsey Grammer, is evident in him. You know, a kind of innate intelligence and a well-spoken way of communicating. He’s very wise, so he’s a bit like Jacques in As You Like It. And he’s a little bit like Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, because he understands the role of society.

  “And he’s also a bit like Henry V, because he likes to rally round a cause.”

  That’s Kelsey Grammer, once of Frasier, talking about his new character. In X-Men 3. Called “Beast”.

• Google’s publicity people must be even better than David Cameron’s. To head its new charitable foundation, Google.org, the company has just appointed a new director. His name — honestly — is Dr Brilliant.

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