A Londoner's Diary

We live in times of the utmost peril. I feel so strongly about it that I have written a book about it. I used to earn my living in the war zones and had always hoped for redundancy a brave new world in which disputes were no longer settled by armed force.

What I had no idea of, when I accidentally fell into politics in 1997, was that with the New Labour government we were entering a period of full employment for war reporters.

Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq we live in a time of expeditionary wars. On career grounds alone, I should have stayed where I was.

What troubles me in such times is that our news agenda, both printed and broadcast, is dominated not by war but by football and even then not by what happens on the field but off it. You can make the argument, perhaps, that football is war waged by other means it channels national aggression into harmless rivalries.

(Although there was an actual football war, between El Salvador and Honduras, after Salvadoran supporters were set on by Hondurans in their capital, Tegucigalpa, in 1969.

You have to be as old as I am to remember that one. It took the might of the US to sort If there is a lesson from recent scandals, allegations and whispering campaigns against footballers it is surely this that there can be smoke without fire.

Accused players are as entitled as anyone else to a presumption of innocence. But our Premiership stars have to be aware that they are role models for the young. They will be emulated and imitated. That's a heavy responsibility. We want to admire them. But the admiration has to be earned.

it out.) Who now remembers the case of Sally Clark? I do, because I used to be her MP. She was the Wilmslow solicitor wrongly convicted and imprisoned in November 1999 for the murder of her two infants, Christopher and Harry.

She spent more than three years in jail.

She was released in January this year, after microbiology reports were unearthed showing that her children had died of natural causes. It was a scandalous miscarriage of justice.

On Sally's behalf, I made a complaint in December 2000 to the General Medical Council against two of the specialists on whose evidence she was convicted. The GMC exists, among other things, to reassure the public of the competence of doctors. Just as much as patients, they have an interest in seeing that complaints against them are fairly and expeditiously handled. Yet my complaint against the pathologist in the Sally Clark case, Dr Alan Williams, is still in the preliminary screening phase after nearly three years. Public trust is as vital in medicine as in politics. The GMC must get its act together.

It is hard on my high street, like many others, to avoid the charity muggers and clipboard artists brandishing questionnaires.

I was accosted by one of these recently. The questioning was political.

What was my view of Ken Livingstone? 'I think his big idea, the congestion charge, has worked, although it's been really tough on some retail businesses.' Steven Norris? 'A really nice bloke, and he knows his stuff on transport issues.' And Simon Hughes? 'Another good guy.

Would make an excellent mayor.' The poll was commissioned by one of the parties' mayoral campaigns. My views were not sufficiently adversarial to be of the slightest use. But that's what's wrong with party politics, which constantly trades in the negative.

Its modes of speech are the snarl and the sneer. Its currency is slanders, slights and slurs. The book I have written argues for a gentler model of democracy.

One of the most gifted journalists I know is Henry Kelly. He reported the troubles in Belfast in the late Sixties and early Seventies for the Irish Times. His later career took on a Woganesque trajectory as game-show host, celebrity and presenter for Classic FM who abruptly made him redundant this summer. Big mistake. The station's disc jockeys, except for Henry, have succeeded in turning inanity into an art form. They will follow some sublime passage of music with a daft remark like 'Great stuff there from Tchaikovsky!' I felt that Henry's talents were wasted at the microphone. 'Why don't you go back to a real job?' I asked him once. 'And why don't you?' he answered. (I was an MP at the time.) Like many Londoners, I am an incomer.

The city has grown on me. I am almost as fond of it now as my native Suffolk.

There is only one part of it to which I shall never be reconciled the wailing wall which is the ticket office of Golders Green Underground station.

This summer I discovered the perfect antidote St Kilda, a remote archipelago of rocks, stack and islands 50 miles west of the Outer Hebrides.

It is hard to reach and admirably protected by the National Trust for Scotland. Its only permanent inhabitants are the wild sheep and hundreds of thousands of sea birds. It offers a unique brand of serenity as the furthest place in the country from the Northern Line.

Through Gates of Fire: A Journey into World Disorder (Weidenfeld Nicolson, 16.99)

(c)2003. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.