Monday

One of the more stressful things about the Conservative party conference is that there is almost too much fun to be had and it’s hard to know which event to attend. Should I queue for one of the many packed-out Jacob Rees-Mogg fringe gigs – he appeared at so many, there were rumours he had a body double – in the forlorn hope that he might shed some light on how he proposed to resolve the Northern Ireland border issue? Or just hang out at the Cayman Islands exhibition stand and wait for Brexiteers to hand out leaflets on the benefits of tax havens and the low-regulation economy that they had assured us they didn’t want? Then there were Chris Grayling – the idiot’s idiot – claiming the solution to Britain’s post-Brexit transport needs was to improve the slip roads in Thurrock and the charisma-free Jeremy Wright, the culture secretary, desperately trying to persuade everyone that he wasn’t a hologram and that he did really exist. None of the few dozen people in the 1,800-seat auditorium appeared convinced. The most bizarre contribution came from leadership hopeful Sajid Javid after it was pointed out to him that his father wouldn’t have been allowed into the country from Pakistan under the government’s new immigration proposals. How did that make him feel, asked the Guardian editor, Katharine Viner, who was chairing the event. “Extremely optimistic,” Javid replied. Who knew the home secretary hated his father quite that much?

Tuesday

New research published by academics from Exeter and Canterbury Christ Church Universities has found that many people overestimate the intelligence of their dogs. In cognitive tests, mutts fared no better than sheep, pigs, wolves and pigeons – and a lot worse than chimpanzees. The results leave me feeling rather conflicted, as I’ve never had particularly high expectations of my dog. Herbert Hound is clearly a bit brighter than my dad’s dog, the late, lamented Jeremiah (1967-79), who was the Chris Grayling of the canine world and could barely even recognise his own name. At least Herbert understands a few words, such as “din-dins”, “uppies”, “walkies”, “sit” and “stick”, but I’ve never been that bothered that he can’t fly a hundred miles to deliver a message or has failed to win a lucrative contract to promote PG Tips. More than his cognitive faculties, what I really admire in Herbie is his emotional intelligence, something he has in greater supply than many humans I have met. He appears to recognise when I am feeling anxious or depressed and instinctively seems to know when to offer a snuggle and when to just sit quietly next to me. But what really makes him special is that he is the only living being that is always pleased to see me. My wife and children are often totally underwhelmed when I walk through the door – I might get the odd shout of “Oh, hi” as I announce my return – and the cats ignore me, but Herbie will race from wherever he is in the house and hurl himself at me. Cheaper than therapy.

Wednesday

After Theresa May’s robo-dancing – the prime minister’s tireless work on behalf of artificial intelligence is her one gift to the nation – the two speeches that caused the biggest stir at the Tory party conference were those given by Boris Johnson, whose fringe event was intended to upstage everyone on the main stage, and Geoffrey Cox, the attorney general, whose pantomime channelling of Brian Blessed in Blackadder actually did upstage everyone on the main stage. However, in the process, both men also drew the world’s attention to the state of their finances, something they might now be regretting. On the day he made his speech, it was revealed that Johnson is getting £275,000 – aka £5,000 for each of his weekly columns that are dashed off at the last minute – from the Daily Telegraph to further his personal ambition to lead the Tory party and make the rest of the country worse off. Cox, whose bombastic speech was also on the joys of Brexit, is also no stranger to freelancing outside parliament as a QC. Not only did he once earn £800,000 in a single year, he also managed to forget to declare £400,000 on the register of members’ interests. Small change, presumably, except he did remember to claim 49p in expenses for a carton of milk. Brexit: brought to you by the people, for the people.

Thursday

In what could be seen as a huge boost for the Eurosceptic European Research Group’s Canada + model, the Centre for European Reform thinktank has revealed that Bear Grylls is looking for some leading Brexit enthusiasts and policy wonks to appear as contestants in his next series of The Island – only the island in question will be the UK and the format will be a little different from usual. Nigel Farage and Liam Fox will initially be helicoptered into a 30-mile lorry queue on the M20 outside Dover without any form of identification. There they will have to survive for three days by pissing into a bottle and drinking their urine. They will then have to try to make their way across the country undetected, living off roadkill, stealing ration cards and breaking into depots set up by the government’s new food supplies minister, David Rutley, and biting into tins of out-of-date baked beans with their bare teeth. If they make it to Scotland, they will then have to build Boris Johnson’s magnificent new bridge to Northern Ireland. From there they will head south to the Irish border where, under cover of night, they will have to avoid capture by crossing the heavily mined demilitarised zone until they reach the safety of the Republic of Ireland. The winner will get to switch the lights on at the opening of Theresa May’s austerity Festival of Britain. Assuming there’s still electricity.

Friday

The end of the cold war may have been a plus for world peace but it has also proved problematic for thriller writers. John Le Carré, one of the UK’s very best postwar writers, has never created another character as memorable as George Smiley. All the Smiley novels are masterpieces of nuance, betrayal and suspense. Len Deighton – one of the most under-rated of authors – never recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall. His nine-book Bernard Samson series, which started in 1983 with the publication of Berlin Game, was shaping up to be a landmark in spy fiction, but fell away in 1989 with the fall of the Soviet Union. It was as if Deighton’s world had also collapsed from under him and the last four books had a lost emptiness to them. Judging by recent events, it’s not just writers who lost their sense of purpose: it’s the spies too. Step forward the four Russians – aka the world’s most useless spies – who were sent to Holland to hack into the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). First they asked for receipts for their taxi rides – presumably the GRU is a bit tight on claims over €10 – then they used an open network that could be easily traced at an internet cafe. To round it off, one of the spies signed a document saying he worked at the computer hacking unit at the Russian military university. If Le Carré or Deighton had included any of this in their novels, their editors would have sent them back for rewrites.

Digested week digested: The Dancing Queen

‘It’s not easy dancing on the head of a pin, you know.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty Images



