When the British government surveyed employment in the City of London recently, it came across a pleasingly symmetrical fact. About one-third of the high-skilled workers were foreigners and so were about one-third of the low-skilled workers.

This knowledge that foreign workers are critical to the most dynamic sector of the economy has not stopped Gordon Brown, the prime minister, from growling about “British jobs for British workers”. Across the developed world, politicians such as Mr Brown are responding to public fears about high levels of immigration. In Italy last week, police backed by bulldozers swept through settlements of Romanian immigrants. In the US, Hillary Clinton recently made the first false step in her formidable presidential election campaign by sounding soft on illegal immigration.

Some anti-immigration activists think we are now reaching a tipping point in both western Europe and north America. Immigration is becoming such a hot political issue that politicians will be forced to clamp down. The period of high migration will come to a close.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Comments can be made below.

I was sorry to read today that Joseph "Erap" Estrada, the former president of the Phillippines, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption. I have a soft spot for Erap. He is the only politician I have ever interviewed who actually fell asleep during the interview.

It was in the mid-1990s and Estrada was vice-president at the time. He was also enormously popular with the poor in the Phillippines - largely because he had played a series of heroic roles in low-budget thrillers. He was clearly the coming man, so getting an interview with him was quite a big deal. He had a large office, full of note-taking flunkies. They were as horrified as I was, when the great man nodded off and began to snore during the course of our interview. But I can’t really blame him. It was hot; I was asking a lot of damn fool questions about development and foreign policy. He might have had a few at lunch. He has a reputation as a world-class drinker and womaniser. Eventually I was ushered to the door by a staff member who said:  "I’m sorry about that, but I could tell the vice-president was very interested by your questions until he fell asleep."

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I have sat on several black leather sofas today, which suggests to me that I might be in Germany. If so, that is a good thing. The Germans are running both world and European affairs during the month of June. Next week they will be hosting the G8 summit. Then on June 22 Angela Merkel will be chairing a European summit in Brussels.

Things aren’t looking great for the G8. President Bush’s speech on climate change has been hailed as a huge breakthrough by Tony Blair. But I met a senior German official shortly after Bush had finished speaking and his first reaction was downbeat. As the Germans see it, there are two big things separating the European and American positions on climate change. The Europeans want to run climate change programmes through the UN and the Americans don’t. And the Europeans want strict, binding targets on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. And they still don’t think the Americans are ready for that. It will be interesting to see if closer analysis of the Bush speech changes that view.

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I seem to have arrived in Pakistan at a lively time. On Sunday more than 40 demonstrators were shot and killed at an anti-government rally in Karachi. On Monday there was a general strike and the mysterious murder of a senior official of the Supreme Court. Yesterday there was a suicide bombing in Peshawar and 25 people were killed. I wonder what will happen today?

The Pakistani opposition seem convinced that this is beginning of the end for President Musharraf. One of the people I called on yesterday was Avida Hussein, an ebullient woman who is a former ambassador to Washington and now a leading opponent of the president. She was caught up in the shootings in Karachi on Sunday and says – “I’ve been mucking around in politics for over 30 years and the first time I saw a human being shot dead in front of me was on Sunday in Karachi.”

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This is a very big moment in British politics. Tony Blair announced his retirement as prime minister yesterday. Gordon Brown has just launched his bid to be the next Labour leader and prime minister. And which stories are readers flocking to on the BBC website - the most popular in Britain? Top of the ratings is a story about Google; second most popular is a macabre little tale about vultures; and the fourth-rated story is about a penguin who went for a very long walk. In one recent week, the BBC’s most popular story was headlined - "Man cuts off own penis in restaurant".

This is entirely typical. My analysis of the "most read" stories on the BBC and at most newspaper web-sites suggests that the most popular broad topics are - in rough order of preference - sex (preferably deviant), animals (preferably cute) and anything really macabre.

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The row about whether Paul Wolfowitz should step down as president of the World Bank has nothing to with Iraq. But it also has everything to do with Iraq. How so? Well, as even inattentive readers of the FT will have noticed, Mr Wolfowitz is in a spot of bother about the salary and job he helped to arrange for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza.

Those calling for his resignation (including the FT) argue that it is untenable for a man who has made the fight against corruption the centre-piece of his time at the bank, to hang onto the presidency in these circumstances.

None of that has anything to do with Iraq. But it would also be naïve to suppose that people’s attitudes to Wolfowitz are not deeply coloured by his central role in the origins of the Iraq war.

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Scooter Libby can be counted another casualty of the Iraq war. Compared to most of the other casualties, he has got off pretty lightly. The consensus seems to be that he will get a relatively short spell in prison – not the 25 years he could be liable for.

In the end, the case against Libby rested on the outing of a CIA agent and the messy details of a cover-up. But the origins of his downfall lie in the Bush administration’s frantic efforts to make the case for the Iraq war. Libby’s boss Dick Cheney asserted in the run-up to the war that there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and had an active nuclear programme. It was Libby’s efforts to try to shore up the argument that Saddam was going nuclear – by smearing people who had cast doubt on the claim - that ultimately did for him.

The Libby affair is reminiscent of the Kelly affair in Britain – which led to the suicide of a government scientist and two government inquiries. Once again, it was the belated realisation that the evidence on Iraqi WMD had been wildly over-spun that lay at the origins of the scandal – and that ultimately ruined lives.

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When Gordon Brown arrived in India for his first ever trip, he probably thought he had a clear idea of what would be involved. The British chancellor would visit Bangalore to get a first-hand look at the Indian hi-tech miracle; he would discuss important issues of world trade in an effort to re-start the WTO’s Doha round; he would make a speech or two, burnishing his credentials as an international statesman and a prime minister in-waiting. Hell, if he was lucky, he might even get time to take in a bit of culture - the Taj Mahal, that sort of thing.

What the chancellor cannot have imagined is that he would be dragged into a diplomatic incident, sparked by events in a reality TV show back in Britain.

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When Chou En-Lai was asked about the long-term impact of the French revolution, he famously replied: “It’s too soon to tell.” That sort of lofty vagueness can earn you a reputation for great wisdom if you happen to be a Chinese revolutionary leader. But for a journalist to adopt a similar approach would be professional suicide – rushing to judgment is all part of the job.

So, in that spirit, my offering this week is a shortlist of the five most significant events of 2006. Here they are, in chronological order.

January: Russia blocks gas supplies to Ukraine. A cut-off of energy supplies between two neighbouring countries, which lasted just a couple of days, could have been trivial. But Russia’s decision to turn off the taps to Ukraine marked the moment at which western Europeans began to feel directly threatened by developments inside Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The cut-off temporarily affected supplies to western Europe. That underlined both the European Union’s growing dependence on Russian energy and Russia’s willingness to use energy as a political weapon.

This is an extract from Gideon’s regular FT column. You can read the remainder here, or comment below.

The news that David Duke has turned up in Tehran to speak at the Holocaust denial conference, brings back fond(ish) memories of interviewing the former KKK leader, when his political career was really on a tear in Louisiana in 1990. It is startling to remember that – in that year – Duke got 43 per cent of the vote in the Senatorial race.

I did a formal interview with a rather evasive Duke in the garden of his house in New Orleans. My main memory of this was his rather peculiar appearance: following recent plastic surgery – he had very tight skin, highlighted hair and a very prominent chin. (He had recently had chin implants).

I then had a much more interesting conversation with Duke’s campaign manager, who gave me a lift to a campaign rally – somewhere out in the state’s backwoods. It was a long drive and the manager (I’ve forgotten his name) had a large gun on the floor of his pick-up truck, which kept sliding around beneath my feet.

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