Everyone's nightmare: when Tony Blair and friends drop by for a photo-op

Ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at a Prime Ministerial photo-opportunity? Andrew and Alison Brownlee used to wonder; now they know for sure. They run Calloo! Callay!, a cafe-and-creche facility designed to raise the spirits of shagged-out parents in Altrincham, Cheshire - and, apparently, the morale of drooping heads of state in Downing Street. For it was to their cafe that Tony and Cherie Blair made their way last week. It was a one-hour visit that hit the Brownlees like an Oklahoma twister.

"One of the local councillors visited the cafe and presumably liked it because she came back with lots of New Labour men in black suits to check us out," said Andrew. Operation Jabberwocky was on. The suits warned the Brownlees not to tell anyone about the presidential visit, on pain of losing the gig to some other Cheshire eaterie. They also decided to close the cafe to the public, "... and two hours before the Blairs were due, the place was full of spin doctors with mobile phones, telling me where to move the furniture." Mr Brownlee, a vision of proprietorial efficiency in his new lime-green shirt, was instructed to hump tables, chairs and even the painted tree on which the management hang children's toys. Put that there. Move that over here. "They seemed to be battling with each other to establish who was in charge," said the put-upon Andrew. "It was like the scene in Alice in Wonderland, where the soldiers paint the palace roses red before the Queen arrives."

Shortly before the Blairs got there, someone mislaid the key to the staff locker. The security police whinnied like thoroughbreds. It was like the Louvre just after they discovered the Corot was missing. "Did they think we'd been stockpiling kalashnikovs in there?" wondered Alison. She and her husband had spent the morning cleaning the cafe from top to bottom, and had finally thrown the last bits of junk into the cupboard under the stairs which doubles as the manager's office.

The children grew tired of waiting. "So where is he then," demanded Imogen, three, "this Prime Mister?" Right on cue, the Blairs walked in, at the centre of a mobile phalanx of suits, a hydra-headed, twenty-legged triffid. Blair looked around the spotless room. Was there a place he could go to be briefed and miked up? How about that room over there? To Alison's horror, he disappeared into the junk-crammed cupboard, to be groomed and primped amid the debris of toys and cutlery.

A battered PM reappeared. "Hi," he said. "Any chance of a cup of tea?" It was the cue for an explosion of activity. A dozen New Labour men scrambled for the bar. When even went behind the bar to help boil the water. Mr Blair's modest request was repeated several times at increasing volume, like clerks of the court summoning witnesses. At least one man urgently confided the words, "PM has ordered one tea" into his Nokia 500. The bemused barman surveyed the supplicating hands. "Right then," he said, "I make that eleven teas so far ..." No, they corrected him. Just the one.

The Blairs were there because the cafe is a nice, bright family place in a nice, busy market street in Altrincham where the nice local Trafford council is a former Conservative stronghold that went staunchly Labour a while back, and thus represents, by synechdoche, the whole nation a year ago. A pity nobody seemed to notice that the town itself - the constituency of Altrincham and Sale West - has a Conservative MP, Graham Brady, and is one of few places that didn't swing to Labour at the last election. But the event passed off happily, the cafe was on a dozen front pages next day, and life returned to normal. Rather quickly, as a matter of fact. As the PM departed with press pack, photographers, spin doctors and autograph hunters in tow, and the proprietors surveyed the silent, suddenly-deserted cafe, a customer walked in.

"Is there anything going on here?" he asked. Andrew looked at his expectant face - the face of an ordinary man, wondering if he too could be touched, just briefly, by the Hand of History - and said, "Sorry. The Prime Minister's just left." "No", said the customer, "I mean, are you serving lunch yet?"

It's the final game of the football season on Saturday and I'm concerned about the Curse of the Credit Sequence on BBC's Match of the Day. Every Saturday night, the programme starts with a succession of images featuring the finest feet in the kingdom doing their stuff. But almost all the footballers pictured have been rabbit-punched by Fate at some point in the season: Roy Keane of Manchester United was injured last September and hasn't played since; Robbie Fowler, the Liverpool striker, hurt his leg in March and won't be in the English World Cup team, any more than will Les Ferdinand of Spurs; Chelsea's Franco Zola is injured and will probably not make the Italian world squad; and Alan Shearer, while only an Act of God could keep him out of the England team, may yet be charged with bringing the game into disrepute by kicking Neil Lennon of Leicester City in the face a couple of weeks ago. Not quite a band of heroes, is it? The only one unscathed by the MOTD curse is David Seaman, the saintly Arsenal and England goalkeeper - though his flirtation with Hugo Boss suits and dark glasses last week made him look more like a retired Sicilian enforcer than the saviour of his nation.

It is with great reluctance that I reproduce this picture of a naked woman in these hallowed pages. But, as the lady herself explains, there's nothing trashy or vulgar about it. It is Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, freelance polemicist and all-round Bit of a Handful, who appears undraped on the cover [below left] of her new book Bitch in order to show (she says) "that women should have it both ways - they should be able to flaunt their sexuality and be taken seriously". Ms Wurtzel clearly longs to be taken as a more slinky version of Camille Paglia. Her book is subtitled "In Praise of Difficult Women" and complains about the treatment visited by patriarchal customs etc upon badly-behaved dames from Delilah to Diana.

In two weeks' time, you'll see Ms Wurtzel spreadeagled across every organ in the UK, dilating upon power, sex, intelligence and male hatred with all the fluency you expect from a Manhattan opportunist with a $500,000 advance. A shame then that the most urgent question being asked by her fellow New York intellectuals is: does she actually possess nipples? The fact that they seem to have been airbrushed out of the cover picture (voices complain) doesn't say much for her brave stand for sexual honesty. But the question is calculatedly reductive. Some literary types are treating Ms Wurtzel's impassioned 424-page diatribe with disrespect. James Woolcot, the acidulous Vanity Fair critic, when asked his opinion, said: "She should just have called it What I Think About Stuff. ... Not much chance of a follow- up, Bastard: In Praise of Horrible Men, I'm afraid.