Michael Hayden, the CIA director, gave a characteristically candid assessment of Basra on Sunday that is bound to make British ministers and officials wince. The remarks blow a Basra size hole through any pretence that Britain handed over a city that Iraqi authorities were in any position to run.

He said 70 per cent of Basra is “controlled by militia, armed gangs, criminal elements”, adding that it was “a real stew down there”. In his view the reduction in violence — which underpinned Gordon Brown’s justification for the handover — was little more than a temporary stand-off between the armed factions. He finished his answer with this scathing quote: “I don’t think anyone could think that that equilibrium was an acceptable long-term solution.”

It gets worse. Later in the interview with NBC, Mr Hayden says the military campaign in Basra was “inevitable”.  “This had to be resolved,” he said. “You just can’t have the second major city in the country…beyond the control of the government.” Ouch.

Interesting interview last week in The Times between reporter Tom Baldwin and George W.Bush. The president of the free world, discussing the US/UK partnership, cited the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt as well as the more recent one “between Tony Blair and myself”. Not much mention of Gordon Brown.

Which reminds me. I overheard a tour guide at the House of Commons a few days ago talking to his posse of American/European tourists. He asked: “Can anyone tell me who is prime minister of the UK?”

The resounding answer: “Tony Blair”.

Confirmation earlier today of our story this morning that a handful of police authorities are to be capped after trying to lift their council tax payments by more than the target 5 per cent. One of these, Lincolnshire, had gone for a 79 per cent rise - so perhaps no surprise it was curtailed.

The net effect could be fewer police on the streets in parts of the country.

A more peculiar capping is that of Portsmouth City Council, the only council to be thwacked today by the department for local government. It had the temerity to go for a 5.04 per cent rise.

Gerald Vernon-Jackson, leader of the council there, says its bills are the lowest out of 13 councils in Hampshire. The 0.04 per cent breach amounted to “a quibbling 75p”, he pointed out. “It will cost more to send out a new bill and I’m quite cross.”

Portsmouth would have gone for 3 per cent but needed the extra money to meet the £1.3m bill for offering free bus passes to the elderly - a policy imposed by central government.

So why is the DCLG bothering? Could it be an attempt by Whitehall to demonstrate that it’s not to blame for this year’s inflation-busting council tax rises around the country? If so that would seem disingenious.

 The word in from John Healey, local government minister, is that police numbers have risen by 14,000 since 1997 thanks to extra funding from Labour. In that light, he says, it is “disappointing” that police authorities demanded more cash.

He said: “Let me be clear, I am not today announcing a cap on the council tax of these authorities. I am confirming the start of a process not its conclusion, and during the coming weeks I am inviting all these authorities to come and make their individual cases to me before making final decisions.” 

One Downing Street official expressed surprise to me the other day that the Stalin nickname had stuck to Gordon Brown more than Macavity, T.S Elliot’s mystery cat.  Both names, of course, were pinned on the prime minister by Lord Turnbull in his infamous interview with my colleague Nick Timmins.

The thought of Macavity disappearing from the scene of any crime reminded me of an answer given by Mr Brown in his last Downing Street press conference.  One journalist had the gall to suggest that as chancellor Mr Brown should have spent more time watching the problems in the credit markets and less time preparing to take over from Tony Blair.

“Maybe your right,” Mr Brown sneered. “Maybe I should have spent the first half of last year looking at the subprime crisis in America and looking in intricate detail at what was going to come out of it.”

A couple of journalists couldn’t see the joke and shouted “yes, yes”. Mr Brown pressed on: “No-one could have anticipated what was going to happen out of the subprime market”.

It is a refrain that is becoming more and more common, and indeed emerged as one of the main strands of the Budget.  The prime minister is betting that the public will see any downturn in the economy as triggered by “global” forces out of the government’s control. Britain is more prepared than any other economy to withstand the troubles, he says.

This is a bold claim, particularly as it is likely that the worst of the downturn is yet to come. With Labour’s polling numbers for economic competence slipping, one has to wonder whether it is convincing the public. Perhaps Mr Brown is losing his Macavity touch.

I wish I could find a screen shot of Michael Martin, the Commons speaker, slapping down an David Winnick for questioning his decision to appeal the release of MPs expenses. What he said was remarkable. But the colour he turned was quite spectacular. As he said the words “media” and “expenses”, his face turned a shade of scarlet that could have set off the fire alarms in the Commons.

For those who missed Mr Martin’s outburst, here is Jim Pickard’s rough transcript of what he said:

“For the House of Commons the rules are quite clear. It is before the courts and it is sub judice and I can’t discuss it. But ….the gentleman is asking…he can go to the court and find out the grounds for appeal. There is nothing to stop him doing that.”

From memory, I think he also suggested that while the media could discuss the case, such debate was not allowed in the Commons because of “subjudicy”.

This is a fascinating and unorthodox point of view that overturns everything I thought I knew about law. As far as I’m aware, MPs can talk about whatever they like in the Commons. They have the legal priviledge to do so. Even if the High Court case was under way, I’d be surprised if the judge would have the power to stop MPs discussing the case outside trial, which is the very definition of subjudicy.

The big question is, who are the lawyers advising Mr Martin? They certainly have a interesting take on law, both in terms of the appeal and in terms of parliamentary privilege. I wonder how much they will cost the taxpayer?

UPDATE: Well, it appears there are sub judice conventions that parliament abides by. The practices are detailed here. I’m not sure whether it applies to the appeal against the ruling by the freedom of information tribunal. But it explains the speakers argument. Can you tell that I am turning a bit red?

Lots of follow-up in the other papers today after the FT’s story on Thursday about the House of Lords being replaced by a “senate” with half the number of occupants. Here is the background article.

Not sure about the idea of “senators”, which is either very old-fashioned (think ancient Rome) or a bit futuristic (think Star Wars, below).

The transfer from the current system to the new one will be intensely complicated.

One of the big unresolved issues  is what to do with the 26 bishops. They sit in the Lords because the Church is/was a major landowner in the UK rather than because of their spiritual influence over Parliament.

But to remove them all would provoke accusations from some quarters - not necessarily from the bishops themselves - that some kind of “disestablishment” is taking place.

Cutting their numbers to a small rump is the current plan. Even that would spark further questions though, such as: why is only the Church of England represented in cosmopolitan UK?

I suspect this one won’t go away for a while.

A consultation paper on a new driving test is being drawn up by the Department for Transport and we’re expecting to see it within a fortnight.

So far, the government is tight-lipped about what might be in it.

But motoring groups have a few ideas about what could be there:

Apparently Ruth Kelly, transport secretary, is concerned about youngsters who have good driving skills (ie they are pretty handy with the brakes and gear stick) but lack the necessary maturity. Options proposed by Brake, the road safety group, include curfews for new drivers and/or limits on how many passengers they can take.

Not sure this is where the department is heading but there could be something similar.

One motoring group tells me that there’s a current “Pass Plus” system where new drivers take lessons on driving at night and on Motorways. One idea is to incorporate bits of this into the driving test to toughen it up.

Nice bit of point-scoring at PMQ’s when David Cameron revealed the favourite book of David Muir, new Number 10 strategist, is: “The Unstoppable Power Of Leaderless Organisations”.

The full name of the book appears to be

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Hardcover)  

By the sound of it, the book’s lessons seem hard to reconcile with Gordon Brown’s “Stalinist” tendencies to control everything himself.

Here is the review by Amazon.co.uk.

“His work provides an understanding of the amazing force that links some of today’s most successful companies. If you cut off a spider’s leg, it’s crippled; if you cut off it’s head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish’s leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.

“Some organisations are just as decentralised as starfish, with no control centre or grand strategy. Think of craigslist and the original Napster, run totally by their own customers. Or Alcoholics Anonymous, which has thrived for decades as a loose network of small groups. Or even al Qaeda, which is so hard to destroy because its cells function independently.

“The Starfish and the Spider”, based on groundbreaking research into decentralised organisations, proves that this type of leadership is primed to change the world. Major companies like eBay, IBM, Sun, and GE are starting to decentralise, with great results. Decentralisation isn’t easy for people who are used to the classic chain of commence organisation. But as readers will learn through this book’s fascinating stories - ranging from the music business to geopolitics - it can be a very dangerous trend to ignore.

News that Gordon Brown is axeing the Learning & Skills Councils (known until 2001 as TECs, training and enterprise councils).

This would chime with his claim, back when Labour was in opposition, that the party would reverse the growth of quangos in the UK.

“Non-elected government organisations, QUANGOs, now spend £50 billion of our money, one fifth of all public expenditure,” he said in a speech on January 12, 1995.

“They spend more of our money than the whole of elected local government. Quango is often government in secret, government free from full public scrutiny and sometimes audit. Government too often free from the most basic declarations of personal interests.”

As usual, the action didn’t quite match up to the rhetoric.

A recent report by the New Local Government Network showed that such groups have flourished under New Labour. New ones have also sprung up, not least the Regional Development Agencies.

The NLGN report suggested that quangos now supervise spending worth £123bn a year, about 21 per cent of the total. That compares with just 15 per cent for local authorities.

Furthermore, the organisations are dominated by people from London and the South-east.

Incidentally, I was listening to Blur’s “The Great Escape” at the weekend and stumbled upon “Mr Robinson and his Quango“, a song I hadn’t heard for ages.

Any thoughts on other politically-titled songs? These are the only ones I can think of.

Electioneering (Radiohead)

World Leader Pretend (REM)

Politician (Cream) 

Revolution (Beatles, Jamiroquia, Butthole Surfers, Spacemen 3, etc etc)

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to London tomorrow is a good excuse to look at how our British speaker compares on the expenses front. With all the fuss made over Michael Martin’s air miles and taxis, you would be forgiven for thinking his office is more spendthrift. The truth is that he is downright cheap.

Ms Pelosi spent about $3m in the first nine months of last year as US Speaker. This included about $16,000 on flowers — a nine-month floral bonanza that cost about double the sum Mr Martin’s wife spent on taxis over almost four years.

Another highlights from Ms Pelosi’s office records is a $2,400 bill for a makeup artist to prepare the speaker for her swearing in ceremony. (She later agreed to pay for this out of her own money.)

Now there’s bound to be some argument over what is included in the US expenses total (I don’t think Ms Pelosi lives in a grace and favour residence, for example). And the sums are of course irrelevant if any of the claims prove to be improper. But it is clear that Ms Pelosi’s costs are a different order of magnitude.

Indeed this holds for all US elected representatives. The US “representational allowance” averages about $1.4m, compared to an average of £135,000 claimed by MPs.

Yet, in spite of this gap, there is much less fuss about US congressional expenses. Some MPs will argue it is all down to aggressive British hacks. More shrewd observers will note that the American politicians declare almost everything they spend (in what is nicknamed the “bitch book” because it allows congressional staffers to compare their salaries). Perhaps openness is the answer?