God oh god oh god save us from the writers’ rooms! Every Saturday for the past two years the Guardian has been running a picture of a writer’s study, everyone from Very Serious People like John Banville to midmarket fluffer-uppers like Lisa Appignessi and all points in between. If the object was to make us more interested in these people’s work, they had got it very very wrong, for after half-a-dozen or so of them, you notice one thing — they are all the frikkin same.

Every British writer’s room involves:

  1. A set of white painted bookcases
  2. A white or sometimes raw wood desk, with open laptop and piles of papers
  3. A hi-end hi-tech black grey office chair with twenty different knobs
  4. A view of a garden, usually through French windows.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself

The effect suggests less the boundless imagination of worlds unknown, than a dull set of middle-class professionals thumping stuff out for the Borders market.

There’s a few exceptions, some of which are cheating — such as bizarro chef Heston Blumenthal’s gadget-filled kitchen — the most interesting being Scottish novelist AL Kennedy’s room which had no desk, no shelves, a weird vaguely fetishy ergonomic wotsit sofa and blood-red walls. But by and large the series gives visual form to Irish novelist Colm Toibin’s recent confession that the thrill of writing had long since died for him and that he only keeps on because he now earns interesting amounts of money.

You probably need a decoration of more severity than the order of the brown nose for Alan Howe, a News Ltd hack who couldn’t cut it at the highest executive levels and has now been pensioned off with a useless column.

Noting that a copy of Peter Costello’s memoirs (original rrp: $54.99) was available on the five buck table in a suburban bookstore, Howe has a brilliant solution for why this would be the case — that no-one has the slightest interest in him anymore? No, sorry, it’s that “the last chapter has not yet been written” in Costello’s life. He will return to lead the Liberals to victory.

This is the deep delusional fantasy of the Right, making it possible to believe that their total rejection everywhere (WA, rule proving exception) is merely due to their pathetic leadership. Dream on. Costello’s career is deader than Mick Molloy’s talent. The Labor voters that Howard tempted across have always hated this Melbourne spiv, a man made out of processed chicken meat. If the Libs re-elected him to the leadership, they would shrink to 25 seats. They’ll faff around for years until they admit that their only hope of salvation lies with a left-liberal, Cameronesque, candidate. Petro Georgiou is the only Liberal figure who could give Rudd a run for his money.

Details of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s expenses brouhaha keep on erm coming. This is a woman who has assailed advocates of the decriminalisation of s-x work as being friends of people traffickers, and supporting an industry in which women are treated like “commodities”, shipped in to the UK in trucks. The title of one of her husband’s cable viewing choices? Raw Meat 3. Clearly the poor bastard hates her, hates working for her, and just wanted to get caught. The sofa session itself was mere pretext. Oh and the cost of the sofa, to the taxpayer? £704 ($A1800).

The self-advertised global opinion product Mark Steyn has for weeks (actually years) been running a line on how Obama is trying to turn the US into Europe and how awful Europe is. One attack has been the old idea that social democracies generate a passivity in people, including police — for which Steyn quoted as evidence a house fire in Yorkshire in which police had prevented passers-by from trying to save trapped occupants, because of “health and safety” concerns. Never in America.

Um, until last week, when American police waited an hour outside the scene of the Binghampton massacre, until “the shooting had stopped” — which, if that’s going to be operational protocol, makes the having of a police force pretty pointless. Anyone can not get shot.

Steyn acknowledged this on the national review blog (he didn’t have much choice) but he couldn’t bring himself to make the obvious conclusion — that the US, where this grizzled 40-something has to present his ID at a bar to get a drink, is as governed and choked by risk-aversion as any western society.