Monday morning, on the Baltic Air 137 to Riga. I finish a taut John Grisham thriller, dip into Kilcullen’s brilliant thesis on counter insurgency, The Accidental Guerrilla, then ponder my editor’s benevolent but searching comments yesterday on the book which I have written with Ed Young on British foreign secretaries. Nearly three hours well spent.Riga looks handsome in the evening sun, lilac and chestnuts a week behind London.

Though the moral fabric of Parliament is in tatters, its architecture remains an inspiration. Stephen Bayley celebrates Pugin’s crazy, magnificent clock towerBoing. That most familiar sound is now 150 years old. Because I am fortunate enough to live near Westminster, I often hear it during solitary moments at night in the bathroom. But, like the rest of the world, I know it even better from radio. At home or abroad, its sombre, magnificent melancholy is both reassuring and — somehow — a little bit disturbing, as time passing always is.

Rod Liddle says that Sarah Teather, the righteous young Lib Dem MP who refused to claim for a second home, proves that it wasn’t mandatory for MPs to fleece usThe worst case of expenses fraud I ever encountered as a journalist came when I worked for the BBC and a foreign correspondent claimed a few hundred quid for a lawnmower. This created a bit of a scandal and the chap was quite speedily sacked. Claiming for a lawnmower was considered not really on at the best of times, but especially so when you lived in a third-floor apartment.