It's the classic children's lament: "Everybody else has got one." So it's quite droll that the reaction to Philip Pullman's refusal to register with the new Vetting and Barring Scheme is similar.

It's a weird old society indeed when the huge stories that are hardest to break are the ones that everybody knows are true anyway. First, it was the bankers.

The Government has this week launched another bunch of tinkering education reforms. In the main, they suffer from the same problem as every reform of anything that this Government, from now on, will ever announce.

I can't help it. School nativities, passion plays, I still think that theatrical renditions of the life of Christ are wonderful and precious aspects of folk culture, with valuable and affirmative things to teach our children.

Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP who warned weeks ago that the Telegraph's expenses investigation was putting MPs under so much pressure that she feared that some might kill themselves, has now reported that her patio furniture has been vandalised. She says she knows it was a deliberate response to her position as an MP because she received a blog comment that she didn't post, which read: "Nice patio Nadine, or was."

That long-running debate about whether the BNP should be given "the oxygen of publicity" seems finally to have resolved itself. Days after the group won two seats in the European Parliament, James W von Brunn, a US friend and supporter of the BNP, shot dead security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns at Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum. Tragic for Johns, but a winner for anti-fascism.

It just gets worse and worse, doesn't it? First, they show little comprehension as to why their tax-dodging, publicly funded property speculation is despicable. Then, they mount another formidable display of inward-looking opportunism, by using the chaos unleashed by the expenses crisis to dazzle us with an every-man-for-himself extravaganza of shameless self-importance, as MPs rush to shore up their waning careers.

Susan Boyle is by no means the first famous entertainer to beat a retreat to the Priory. But she has certainly moved from discovery to exhaustion with exceptional alacrity. Poor lady. It was all too much for her.

No one seems fond of Danielle Lloyd. The glamour model was considered the really nasty one in the 2007 Celebrity Big Brother that saw Jade Goody branded a racist bully. She let slip in an interview that she'd been dating Teddy Sheringham before he'd appeared on the panel that judged her Miss Great Britain, and was stripped of her title.