A day of rest and reflection...

Recommended viewing: Forget the foot and mouth dossiers, Gordon. Only the man with the pony tail and deadly hands can save you.

Sunday August 5th: Today has been a day to sit back and take stock of the week's events for both of our pugilists.

Gordon is having to bide his time while science does it's job, for the moment. Several newspapers have pounced on the story linking the foot and mouth outbreak to a lab in Pirbright, three miles away from the contaminated famland. Surrey does it again. The News Of The World darkly murmurs something about "sabotage or human error". Either way, it won't matter to the sixty cows who have now joined Shambo the bull in the big pasture in the sky.

The Mail on Sunday went with the haunting headline "Bolt guns echoed through the fields", and describes "the shots that thudded through the summer sky", making the whole affair sound like a lost scene from the Vietnamese rice paddies in Apocalypse Now. According to MoS, the Surrey based Institute for Animal Health has form with this type of catastrophe, having inadvertedly unleashed a dose of it back in the Fifties. I guarantee they already have their pull-out page for the boycott of foreign goods designed. All they've got to do is push the button...

"Gordon faces his third crisis in just six weeks" nestles at the bottom of Page 6, confirming what I believed already. Blair is in cahoots with Haitian witch doctors. Being that he's living it up in Sir Cliff's pad in Barbados right now, it's just a short trip to Port Au Prince for all his juju needs. I can see him now, jabbing needles into a little effigy while Cherie drains chicken blood into a bowl and Devil Woman plays softly in the background. Gordon may have to re-enact Steven Seagal's epic orgy of Caribbean stereotypes, Marked For Death, in order to be free of the curse. Blair will star as Screwface. And Diet Blair as his twin.

The Sunday Times has been particularly kind to both men today. Gordon gets a full page as David Smith, Alan Schofield and Robert Winnett consider the wisdom of a snap election. They've got the stats nerds on the case and predict that the bounce makes an autumn election 20% more likely. "Brown," Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University says, "is benefitting from the fact that he is not Blair." There is also a photoshopped image of Gordon bucking down Cameron shaped targets.

They did Prince the courtesy of a profile - complete with a tastefully sketched portrait. They went everywhere with it from June 7th, 1958 up until this week. They had the ghostwritten hits (including the Bangles Manic Monday, under the nom-de-plume of Christopher), the comparisons to Lennon, Hendrix and Presley, the list of girlfriends and the revisiting of Tipper Gore's outrage upon hearing lyrics detailing Darling Nikki's hotel lobby based activities.

So, last night we had the first support act of the tour in Nikka Costa. Personally I don't know that much about her. The only song of hers I can remember Like A Feather. In the video Ms. Costa looked like a sexy refugee from The Land Where Disco Still Reigns Supreme. She is also Frank Sinatra's god-daughter, apparently. Anyway, she was in The Purple One's corner, for the evening and turned the place out, by all accounts, before going on to jam with Prince at the aftershow party. The headliner and warm-up combined forces to make a super brass section. I was under the impression that Prince would have just chosen artists who were in the country at the time to support him. As far as I'm aware Ms. Costa wasn't billed for anything in the UK, which I guess means that he's summoning people from wherever they are in the world to join him. Hold tight, London. This could get interesting.

Once again, back is the incurable...

(Life)stylin' on you: Carole Caplin

Saturday August 4 th: Wow - it doesn't rain, it pours (and then floods). It looks like Gordon is getting everything Blair had to deal with in a decade in the space of a month. Terrorism, world poverty and having to be in the same room as George Bush for hours at a time.

PM'ing ain't easy.

And now he's got deal with an outbreak of foot and mouth, not far from where these words are being written, in fact. The Telegraph, The Times and The Sun all featured doom laden headlines while The Independent was all sweetness and light, declaring that summer had finally started. Stiff upper lip or first edition? You decide. The Sun told of how Gordon had cut short his holiday in Dorset to return to the capital for crisis talks. Does this mean that The Daily Mail will start another boycott of foreign goods because those bloody stuck up foreigners won't take our diseased meat? The cheek of it! We saved them in World War 2 and introduced them the slow burning joys of test cricket, and this is how they repay us??

According to George Pascoe-Watson, Gordon held a video conference with an organisation named Cobra last night. I don't think it's the G.I Joe Cobra, but I'll google it. Just to be on the safe side. At any rate - it looks like Gordon may have to juggle his public spending figures to compensate farmers who are going to end up being put out of business. He loves numbers so much I'd wager he keeps a calculator under his pillow. That equation is nothing to him. He'll balance that, sitting in bed while asking the missus how her day was and watching the Eastenders repeat on BBC3. That's like David Beckham taking free kicks. It's what he does. It cost £8 billion after the last outbreak in 2001 to cover the losses. No more swimming in the Bank of England vault like Scrooge McDuck for that man.

What else is there left? Hmmmmm. Petrol shortage? What he really needs is a front bencher to switch in public. The 'PRESCOTT SMASH!' incident ranks high in my list of favourite political moments. The egg throwing farmer thought that the two Jags had changed John P. Never that.

You can take the boy out of Hull....

I remember seeing it repeated in slow motion on TV. The scene was mind-numbingly surreal to watch. As the offending farm produce hit its target, John had a flashback to the taxi rank outside Lexington Avenue Nightclub on Ferensway and before he knew it he'd cocked back his right hand and punched a member of the voting public.

Other trials could come in the shape of a mysterious lifestyle guru (and former member of a music/ mime/dance pop group), who holds his wife under some sort of creepy thrall. That could be good. Preferably one with a mysterious cad for a boyfriend. If they invite you round for dinner, you can get an Indian Head Massage, property advice and food all under one roof. Beat that, Tesco!

Also, having one of his children found slumped in Leicester Square by police would also help.

He appears to be handling it in his stride. I went into Guildford earlier and there weren't any army checkpoints or mountains of burning carcases in the fields, so we're not quite at DefCow 5 (that's copyrighted, by the way). Yet.

Prince has had a fairly quiet day in the papers for someone who has made the lives of approximately 60,000 people a little brighter through music in the space of four days. I did read someone moaning on a forum that he didn't turn up at the aftershow party.

His website, http://www.3121.com/, said that they had horns and singers out in the crowd as they opened the show with Down By The Riverside. Nice. Other highlights included Controversy and an extended version of Let's Go Crazy. So far, so good it would seem. Team Prince is definitely up for the challenge - "We got 19 beautiful nights 2 go," the website says. "And clearly London is in love!"

The Daily Mirror reports that Simon Webbe, former member of boyband Blue and seemingly down to earth celebrity, got a little carried away on opening night and wound up flaunting his manicure, complete with nail varnish in the AOL box. Thought you could take a little walk on the wild side for the evening and that no-one would care? Forgot about the 3AM girls, didn't you?