The boudoir of George II's mistress is getting a Heritage makeover after 230 years. It's a long time to wait, Camilla

So much speculation has flown over the outcome of the Great Telly Debate, it's amazing to think that the ground rules haven't yet been decided. A frenzy of cross-party speculation is currently under way about who should take part, who should stand where, who should introduce it (Jonathan Dimbleby is the ITV choice, and his big brother David the BBC's nominee), who should speak first and for how long ... The key players in this battle of quasi- Ruritanian protocol are Lord Holme for the Liberal Democrats (who must get his leader to the podium or die in the attempt), Michael (House of Cards) Dobbs for the Tories and, masterminding Mr Blair's rhetorical display, Lord Derry Irving, who, as former pupil-master to both Tony and Cherie Blair, is in, let us say, a strongish position to take over from Lord McKay in the Lord Chancellor's robes.

Connoisseurs of debate will think of the great clashes of yore. Those of a classical disposition will sigh over the gladiatorial exchanges of Demosthenes and Aeschines. Those of a scientific bent will think of Huxley vs Wilberforce when the great Darwinist and the pooh-poohing bishop scythed at each other over evolution and the Book of Genesis. Fans of a more modern debating style will chortle at the time when Mr Gyles Brandreth, later to become an MP, stood on his head at the Oxford Union despatch box, to prove ... well no one can remember what he was trying to prove, but I'm sure he managed it. And then there was the Lloyd Bentsen vs Dan Quayle debate and its most famous interchange. The question going around the lobby at present is: who will say it? Tony Blair, in yesterday's press conference about Labour's manifesto, banged on about "giving a sense of purpose and direction back to Britain after six years of weak national leadership", and made it clear that, when it comes to direction, he finds nothing wrong with what came before the "six years". So will it be Mr Major or Mr Blair who says to his opponent: "I knew Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher was a friend of mine. Senator - you're no Margaret Thatcher"?

The judge in the contempt-of-court case, Mr Justice Anura Cooray, clearly does not stand for any nonsense. One of the jurors whom he sent to prison for 30 days for wilfully refusing to reach a verdict claimed "It was a very complicated case," and "I just didn't understand it"; but the judge sent her to the slammer anyway. I've heard it said in legal quarters that ignorance is no defence; but I'd no idea that it was itself a criminal condition. There is, however, a darker tendency afoot here - the idea that a judge could bring the majesty of the law upon the heads of two innocent citizens because they failed to have an opinion.

It's a worrying precedent. I can see m'Lud's draconian ruling being followed by others. Nervous media commentators will be led away, ashen-faced, from the Groucho Club for wilfully failing to have an opinion about The English Patient. (" `It's a very complicated plot,' confessed the defendant, pathetically. `I just didn't understand it' "). Paramilitary SWAT teams will round up pockets of floating voters in Essex, while an underground cabal of "Don't Knows" will meet guiltily by candlelight to exchange exquisitely balanced views on blood sports, housing and education and chant their accursed slogan, "Well, there's something to be said for both sides..." Small children who cannot decide if their favourite colour is blue or green will be handed into care (the so-called "turquoise option" will be deemed inadmissible). And all copies of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will be rounded up, so that the last sentence of each copy ("Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent") can be ritually excised.

You think I exaggerate? I don't think so, as the children tend to say. You can find evidence everywhere that somebody somewhere will label it a transgression and try and attack for it. Over in Kabul, the seriously fundamentalist Taliban militia - who last autumn banned women from being educated or employed, banned games and basically outlawed fun of any kind - are at it again. This time it's beards. Not only must you have one, it must be kept as long as possible, like the prophet Mohammed's. The military authorities have just fired 84 civil servants for trimming their facial hair. They've even invented a bogus-sounding rule-of-thumb for deciding how long a beard should be. A Mr Muazin, of the worryingly- named Department for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, explains: "The beard must be long enough to come out of a clenched fist held at the base of the chin". Anyone whose whiskers fail to protrude beyond the fist will be kicked off the payroll. I expect it'll be penises next.

And before you get too Western-complacent about casual cruelties inflicted beyond reason, consider the fate of poor Francois-Jean Le Fefebvre, the French martyr whose statue is shortly to adorn the middle of Paris. Francois- Jean met an unusually horrible end - his tongue was torn out, his hand chopped off, his head removed and the rest of him burnt. That should have taught his fellow blasphemers a lesson; but since his only crimes were "failing to remove his hat to a procession of Capuchin friars", mutilating a crucifix and hanging out with "a group of young people". Can we assume that it's a damned un-British thing? We like to think that any rude boy on our streets in 1766, from Bermondsey to Berwick-on-Tweed, could have been guilty of such things without being decapitated, de-tongued and unhanded. But then one thinks of Fielding's hero Tom Jones (who was arraigned for murder for picking flowers on a Sunday), one thinks of Michael Howard and Mr Justice Cooray and one is not so sure.

While we're in the 18th century, I see that English Heritage is tarting up the boudoir of one of the most celebrated of royal mistresses. It's at Marble Hill House, the Twickenham villa erected in the 1750s by Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk, with a little present of pounds 11,500 given her by King George II; apparently it was the going rate for services to the monarchical groin. Her ladyship commissioned from court designers all manner of gorgeous silk wall-hangings and damask drapes to adorn her chamber, where she lay, doubtless arrayed in attitudes of abandonment, on a four- poster (king-size, obviously) bed with - though I add this detail reluctantly - five mirrors. The result was so seductive that even the great Alexander Pope used to abandon his vitriolic satires of an afternoon to show his friends round Henrietta's new gaff. Now the Heritage people are restoring it to its former glory. They're borrowing a bed, "typical of the period", from the Victoria & Albert Museum, spending a cool pounds 30,000 on re-upholstering it and in festooning the walls with silks.

It all sounds delightful. But should royal mistresses have to wait until 230 years after their death to get their living quarters done up? I think we might take Henrietta's house as a benchmark and offer all future royal mistresses a few grand's worth of soft furnishings while they're still alive, provided they can produce documentary evidence of their time as court horizontale. Mrs Parker Bowles, I suspect, is not the kind of woman to turn her nose up at pounds 30,000-worth of festoon curtains, a new Slumberland mattress and a few spectacular swags...