Diary – 11 October 2008

Parliament is back and I can relax. A tiresome cliché holds that MPs have a three-month summer break. If only. I have spent more time canvassing, selling tombola tickets and doing politics than ever before. And then on the eve of the Commons returning there is pure political Wagner. Boris fires Blair! Mandy returns! Like Churchill returning to office in 1939 the signal goes out: ‘Peter is back!’ Russia invades and dismembers Georgia! George W. Bush nationalises more finance capital than Lenin! The USA adds an extra S to become the United Socialist States of America as its ambassador quits Mayfair to open an embassy in the heart of proletarian south London. Now the Commons is sitting we can take it easy after the political dramas of recent weeks.

In Poland, I speak at the Davos of the East — the Krynica conference in the Carpathians which pulls 1,500 business, political and media chieftains from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Georgia — the new Europe that is reclaiming history.