Now, embattled at 10 Downing Street by the most dismal poll ratings for any prime minister in recent memory and embittered sniping from the “Blairite” wing of the governing Labour Party, Brown is fighting for his political life.

Two weeks ago, in a vote widely seen as a referendum on Brown’s national leadership, a maverick Conservative with a flop-top haircut, Boris Johnson, romped to an iconic victory in London’s mayoral election over the hitherto popular Labour incumbent, Ken Livingstone.

The London result followed a winter of discontent for the Brown government.

The Guardian revealed last month that more than 400 foreign children vulnerable to exploitation in prostitution, the drugs trade and domestic servitude went missing from care around major British ports and airports between 2004 and 2007. But the government has rebuffed calls for a system of professional guardians to look after every suspected victim of child trafficking - a crime the United Nations has described as “a modern-day slave trade”.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, which is investigating human trafficking, said he was “shocked by the number of children going missing”. He added that a system of guardians to look after every child now looked “very attractive”.

Remember the usual big talk that the consumer is the King? If Africans were indeed the consumers of bad roads, don’t you think they will exercise the might of a king to get everything fixed? For some reason, the African consumer believes the producer, the retail shop owner, the politician is the king.

How many times have you been in a public service vehicle that speeds, driver smokes and plays loud music and you simply kept your complaints deep in your heart?

For those who drive, some gaping pot-hole pops up on the highway, no signage to warn you of such an eventuality (because perhaps city council team wants to prove they are at work and have scraped the tarmac off the road!); you simply curse and drive away.

But this is a fashion page, and that, I’m afraid, is where it gets tricky. Because while fair-trade fashion is not a complete oxymoron, it is not exactly a natural marriage either. However, hot on the heels of National Fair-Trade Fortnight in February and Cornwall’s Unilateral Fair-Trade Epoch some time soon (I made that up, but it’s actually quite a good idea), the Fairtrade mark has just celebrated World Fair Trade Day. Passed you by? Me, too. So it is only right that we inform ourselves as to what fair trade is before we next visit the shops.

According to the BBC, the study was done with 1,341 people from 9 different cities across Europe. A third of the men, and 23 % of the women — who were all between the ages of 16 and 35 — said they drank to improve their chances of having sex. The researchers concluded that the fun-loving youngsters were “strategically” binge drinking or taking drugs to improve their sex lives.

But then Mr Brown is no Silvio Berlusconi, playboy and man of ostentatious political gestures.

The Italian prime minister, long known for his fondness for pretty women, has named former topless model and beauty queen Mara Carfagna as equal opportunities minister in his new cabinet.

Miss Carfagna, 33, turned to politics after a career on TV following her sixth-place finish in the 1997 Miss Italy contest.

She has also posed topless and semi-naked for photoshoots but has always underlined her family values and stressed none of the pictures were “erotic”.

Mr Berlusconi, 71, named her as one of four women ministers in his cabinet, which was officially installed yesterday.

The others are Stefania Prestigiacomo (environment), Maria Stella Gelmini (education) and Giorgia Meloni (youth).

At an awards dinner last year Mr Berlusconi told Miss Carfagna, who is single, that if he wasn’t married he would “gladly marry” her.

On Independence Day, this Thursday, thousands of Israeli Arabs will gather in their former villages to protest what they have come to call the nakba, or catastrophe, meaning Israel’s birth. For most Israelis, Jewish identity is central to the state, the reason they are proud to live here, the link they feel with history. But Israeli Arabs, including the most successfully integrated ones, say a new identity must be found for the country’s long-term survival.

“I am not a Jew,” protested Eman Kassem-Sleiman, a prominent Arab radio journalist with impeccable Hebrew whose children attend a predominantly Jewish school in Jerusalem. “How can I belong to a Jewish state? If they define this as a Jewish state, they deny that I am here.

The city was often called the Paris of the East, but before Lynn Pan’s brilliant book, “Shanghai Style - Art and Design Between the Wars,” the literal meaning of the phrase must have escaped many.

In this elegant narrative, Pan shows how the aesthetics of a China emerging from centuries of classical constraint, and the revolutionary ideas of early 20th century Western art and design, merged in the hot pot of Shanghai.

The story is told with the help of liberal illustration, even if many of the pictures are printed too small to enjoy to the full.

Shanghai’s foreign concessions, run by British, French and American residents, soon became home to Chinese, Russian, Japanese and others. Segregation collapsed and colonial distinctions blurred.

“All you could smell was death,” Hosking recalled, sitting snugly in a 600-year-old pub in her rainy home town, which has been transformed by her epiphany two years ago on Midway Atoll.

The beach on Midway, 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu, was covered with thousands of dead albatrosses rotting in the tropical sun. In their split-open bellies, the BBC wildlife film producer said, she saw the plastic that had killed them: cigarette lighters, pens, toys, pill bottles, knives and forks, golf balls and toothbrushes.