The Word on the Street: Diplomacy Telegraph-style, Whelan's World, Graham Norton's dog

Christina Lamb, diplomatic editor of The Sunday Telegraph, will be unamused by an article in Saudi Arabia's English-language daily. According to Arab News, Miss Lamb asked one of the paper's top writers, John R Bradley, to collaborate on a piece about Britons in Saudi Arabia. Mr Bradley says that he demanded that his byline be removed from the eventual piece in The Sunday Telegraph on Saudi Arabia, and refused to accept any money. It was, he said, "dirty money". Among his many moans, he says that Lamb wrote that compounds in Saudi Arabia had become "prisons". Bradley claimed that they were "happy". The rest of his complaints are a lot less polite.

¿ Charlie Whelan, former Treasury spin-doctor turned pundit wherever there's a column or radio slot to be filled, argues in his column in PR Week that the press should leave the Blairs alone on their holiday. The trouble started, he says, when they took a "freebie" in Tuscany from Geoffrey Robinson MP. Whelan reveals that he, too, has enjoyed hospitality from the New Statesman proprietor. "But then," he says, "I'm not an elected public servant."

¿ Regular viewers of V Graham Norton on Channel 4 will have noticed that Norton no longer uses the huge doggy phone for his mischievous calls. The Radio Times has explained why. The dog is dead. Its head fell off when Norton shook him particularly vigorously. The channel's props department has no idea where to find a new one, because the original was sent in by a fan.

¿ The radio presenter and jazz star Humphrey Lyttleton knows the perils of being a critic. Speaking at the BBC Jazz Awards, he recalled that when a song called "Love Me Do" came out, he wrote a review advising the songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, to leave the country.