In a recent magazine interview in which she floated the possibility that her husband might run for a third term as French president next year, Bernadette Chirac said enticingly – “Have you seen what good shape he’s in. My husband’s not senile.”

Yet even this modest claim must be thrown into doubt by Mr Chirac’s efforts to celebrate his 74th birthday, by holding an intimate dinner with Vladimir Putin on the margins of a Nato summit in Latvia.

Where does one start? To invite any Russian president to dinner in one of the Baltic states is tactless. To invite this particular president at this particular moment is crass. To do so at a Nato summit, while pointedly not inviting the American president and the British prime minister, is extraordinary.

While the Americans and the British are clearly increasingly concerned about the direction of Putin’s Russia, Mr Chirac’s admiration for the Russian president only seems to grow. In September he awarded Mr Putin the Grand Cross of the Legion d’Honneur, the highest honour that France can bestow on a foreigner. Previous recipients have included Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II.

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I sometimes ask myself whether, in 20 years’ time, I will look back on everything I am writing at the moment and wonder why I wasted so much time on relative trivialities such as the Iraq war or the future of the Bush administration. Will such issues seem like footnotes in history, compared with the consequences of global warming?

A similar question of priorities has obviously occurred to Tony Blair. In the run-up to the most recent European Union summit, he and Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, sent a joint letter about climate change to the other 23 EU leaders. “We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points,” they warned.

None of the other European leaders disputed this vision of impending catastrophe. But if you look at the conclusions that came out of the summit, global warming appears like just another issue on the EU leaders’ “to do list”: review innovation policy; reach agreement on EU patent; improve internal decision-making procedures; save planet.

This mismatch between rhetoric and reality may be about to change, however. Climate change is moving sharply up the EU’s agenda.

This is an extract from Gideon Rachman’s regular Tuesday column in the FT - the remainder is available for FT.com subscribers here.

It is unfortunate that the murder of Alexander Litvinenko has coincided with the release of a new Bond film in Britain. The result has been that the British media has been tempted to treat the assassination of a British citizen as just an extension of the Bond series – witness the headline in the Sun newspaper, "From Russia with Lunch".

But I must say that the papers probably accurate reflect the public mood. The Litvinenko killing has become one of those “water cooler” stories, which are the subject of fascinated conversation by lots of ordinary people. And to judge from the conversations I’ve overheard in London, the tone is pretty much one of hilarity. At a breakfast with a bunch of corporate types last Monday, somebody made a reference to "Russian sushi" to guffaws all round. Then on Saturday I was at a lunch at the Carlton Club, the home of Tory London (not my usual hang-out, I assure you) and the old gentlemen could scarcely contain their mirth as they discussed the poisoning. But while Vladimir Putin may be regarded in much of Britain as simply the latest in a long line of amusing Bond villains, that is a signal that the Russians seem to have lost the public-relations battle about responsibility for the killing. Whatever the real truth, in all the casual conversations I’ve overheard, everybody seems to assume that the order to kill Litvinenko came from the Kremlin.

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I am on a new platform this morning – or so they tell me. As I understand it, this means that there have been some changes made to the way the blog looks and operates. This should make it easier to read and respond to – and incorporates some exciting new features like trackback and permalink. Please don’t ask me to explain further.

I slightly regret the fact that I am in London not The Hague this morning. I had been thinking of going to cover the Dutch elections. But I kept reading that the Dutch crisis was over. After the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, it was back to politics as normal. Naturally, that is excellent news – if true. But it has to be admitted that it made the election a less interesting story.

As it turns out, however, the poll results have shown that “fringe” parties are gaining in support – which hardly suggests complete contentment with the current status quo. The biggest gainer was the left-wing Socialist Party led by the charismatic Jan Marijnissen, who became something of a star by the leading the opposition to the EU constitution – in the Dutch referendum of last year. His party is now the third biggest in Parliament.

The Pim Fortuyn list, named after the murdered anti-immigration leader, has lost all its seats. But they seem to have simply transferred across to another Islam-allergic party, the Freedom party, led by Geert Wilders – who advocates an immigration freeze and a ban on the building of new mosques

I read in the FT this morning that Wilders is still living in hiding. It seems to me a disgrace that the Dutch government is unable to take the necessary security measures to ensure that its leading politicians are able to live in their own homes. I met Wilders a couple of years ago and he complained to me then that he was having to live at secret addresses  – and was being moved every night – for fear that he would be murdered by radical Islamists. Even then, it seemed extraordinary testimony both to the level of the threat – and to the Dutch inability to cope with it. This after all was the country which was once famous for the fact that its royal family cycled around town on bicycles.

Surely this swing from complete relaxation about security to complete paranoia is excessive. After all, British politicians were almost always able to live in their own homes throughout the period of IRA terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. My assumption was that the Dutch would have got their act together by now. Apparently not. Under the circumstances, it’s almost surprising that Wilders did not get a larger sympathy vote.

Finally, it struck me that the last two subjects I’ve written about – Lebanon and Russia – have a certain similarity. It is not just that in both cases an assassination or attempted assassination was at the heart of the story. It is also that they are both parts of the world which attract extraordinary conspiracy theories.

When it comes to poor Alexander Litvinenko – and the news on him this morning is not good – it has been suggested to me that it is way too obvious to suggest that friends of Vladimir Putin might be behind the attempted killing. On the contrary, some Russians suggest, the attempted murder of Litvinenko makes Putin look bad. Therefore, it must be Putin’s enemies who have done it – perhaps one of the London-based oligarchs.

A similar contorted logic is applied to the murder of Pierre Gemayel. Take a look at a posting on the subject in this blog and at this article in the Guardian. Once again, a knowing question is asked – cui bono? who stands to benefit? Because the finger for the killing is being pointed at Syria, clearly it must be Israel or the United States who are manipulating events. Well, call me naïve – but I cannot see that it is in either America or Israel’s interests to create another failed state in the Middle East.

The murder of Pierre Gemayel in Lebanon seems to support some of the darker predictions for the Middle East that I have been hearing over the past month. As I reported in my blog on November 9, even members of what might be called the “international peacemaking fraternity” are very gloomy. Several of those who have been predicting a new crisis have been pointing to Lebanon as the place where it will erupt.

Lebanon is not just divided on sectarian lines. It also once again has the misfortune of being the battleground for regional conflicts fought out between more powerful neighbours. Syria is clearly fighting to retain its influence in the country and has been directly accused by several parties of being behind the Gemayel murder. Saad Hariri, the son of the murdered Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, put the accusations most directly when he said on Tuesday: “The Cedar Revolution is under attack. Today one of our main believers in a free democratic Lebanon has been killed. We believe the hands of Syria are all over the place.“

Iran is also a big player in Lebanon. Like Syria it is a major backer and supporter of Hizbollah. And, of course, Israel invaded southern Lebanon over the summer to take on Hizbollah. Behind Israel stands the United States, which is also anxious about expanding Iranian influence. The moderate Arab states also have their own interests. The Israelis and their supporters argue that they are tacitly behind any attempt to cut down Hizbollah and, by extension, Iran. And caught in the middle of all this are the Lebanese – with their own bitter sectarian divisions flaring up again, under the pressure of events.

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We should know by late on Thursday night whether Ségolène Royal has got the Socialist nomination for the French presidency. Party members are voting all day Thursday and the polls close at 22.00.

A few months ago Ségolène (everyone seems to call her by her first name now, like Oprah) was thought to have it in the bag. But she had a tough time in the candidates’ debates with Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, and the last time I checked with the FT’s Paris office, they were refusing to predict whether Ségolène would get the 50 per cent of votes she needs to clinch the nomination. If she falls short of the 50 per cent threshold, it goes to a run-off on November 23. And that would give the “anyone but Ségolène” camp a chance to rally against her – as well as puncturing her aura of invincibility.

It still seems hard to believe that the French Socialists would do something as stupid as rejecting the one candidate they have who seems to have a genuine chance of winning. Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be a particularly odd choice. Not that I have anything against him, I’ve met him a couple of times and I thought he was charming and clever. But he is also a Euro-fanatic – which would make him an odd choice given that France voted down the EU constitution only last year.

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I spent yesterday evening in New York, watching the mid-term election results roll in on television. It was clear who the real stars of the evening were - and wasn’t the politicians. It was the pundits.
There is even less turn-over in the American punditocracy than in the United States Congress. It’s almost 15 years since I last lived in the States, but the same faces are still on television, holding forth: Brit Hume, Cokie Roberts, Juan Williams, Larry King, Bob Schieffer, Bill Kristol etc etc. Some of them now seem to have strangely immobile faces, which I take to be evidence of the long-term effects of too much botox. But after hours of gawping at the television, the most succinct summary of the night’s events came from the elderly Jamaican taxi driver, who drove me home - "The Republicans are being whupped."

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