As if it weren’t enough that Big Brother has gone from being a summer ‘reality’ show to a fully blown twice-yearly expose of Britain’s racism shame (accusations flying over who said ‘poppadom’ and who didn’t, etc), the translation of hit US show America’s Got Talent into Britain’s Got Talent has ended in a riot of accusations over the filthy background of its contestants.

On Saturday, the Sun revealed that Richard Bates, a George Formby impressionist, who had claimed to have withdrawn from the show after injuring himself in an accident with his electric organ, was in fact on the sex offenders register. On Sunday, the show’s drag queen act, The Kit Kat Dolls, were thrown out as it was revealed that three of them were selling sex: ‘The group were on course to win the show until lead singer Vanilla Lush offered an undercover reporter a sex session for £1,000. Two other members, Alekssandra and Toni, are also said to offer sex for cash.’ In the end, six-year-old Charlotte Church-a-like Connie Talbot was pipped to the title (and the hundred grand first prize) by Welsh opera singer Paul Potts.

Meanwhile, former girl group singer Kerry Katona, a past winner of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, who not three months ago was on the front cover of OK! magazine proclaiming ‘I won’t let the social take my kids’, has been accused of snorting cocaine whilst four months pregnant by her ‘friend’ and ‘housekeeper’. Big Brother veteran, Jade Goody, fresh from calling Shilpa Shetty ‘poppadom’, is to be done for driving offences, and another Celebrity Big Brother inmate, TV host Michael Barrymore, has been questioned again on the suspicious death of a man in his swimming pool during a party in 2001. And let us not even go into what the News of the Screws has to say about Prince Harry. It’s pretty clear: America may have talent – but Britain’s got ‘perverts’. 

If they would only classify digging up dirt on TV stars as an Olympic sport, we’d have a screed of golds to unite the nation come 2012…

If you are a senior politician and want to launch yourself, like a golden blizzard, on an unwitting public, it seems there is but one solution: you must join the ranks of the Mag Hags, and give an interview to a wimmin’s magazine.

The number of Mag Hags sitting in parliament has blossomed in recent years - PR gurus appear to think that magazines are a mainline into the veins of woman, and interviews within said mag are female-scag.

So this time last year, we had Gordon Brown chatting to New Woman, revealing that the Arctic Monkeys blasting out of the stereo ‘really wakes you up in the morning’, that what he wears to bed is a matter between him ‘and the bed sheets’ and that he is of ‘Team Jolie’ when it comes to Brad Pitt’s love life (Jennifer Aniston must have been sobbing into her pillow about that one). By referring to the contents of his iPod, Gordon unleashed a powerful new barometer in assessing the values of Mag Hag politicos. In the deputy leadership contest there seems little else to distinguish the candidates bar their stated list of musical preferences (see To Be or Not to Be John Prescott, by Emily Hill).

Not to be out-done by New Labour’s ‘with-it’ credentials, David Cameron gave an interview to Cosmopolitan in which he admitted that he once bought a fur hat, but was not sure if it was real fur; that he had no ambition to become a Cosmo centrefold; that he had never examined himself for testicular cancer; that he helped his wife with childcare and that during the 80s, the threat of Aids ‘scared the life’ out of him.

Such interviews are not entirely the preserve of the girl’s glossies. In this month’s issue of GQ, Tory MP and all-round media tart Boris Johnson has gone down the slightly idiosyncratic route of being interviewed by former tabloid editor (and fellow media tart) Piers Morgan. But, in the interview, he just about manages to repeat all the same old guff he might have been expected to give out on Woman’s Hour. Talking about his weight, his alleged affairs, and rehearsing some of his standard, dithery ‘Boris-isms’ (on Liverpool, on the Classics, on drugs) he manages to throw in a little talking point right at the end - by claiming to fancy Cherie Blair.

Over at Glamour, Piers Morgan’s main squeeze, Celia Walden, interviews Gordon Brown’s opposite number, Tory George Osborne. (What a small world this is.) The article is billed as a ‘lunch date’, during which they ate ‘Portuguese custard tarts’, and the headline is ‘The House of Commons isn’t very sexy!’ Osborne reveals a working knowledge of The West Wing, claims that someone has ‘set up a site for me on MySpace’, reveals what he has on his iPod (of course, of course) and that Posh Spice is ‘Top Wag’. He also claims that he would ‘think twice’ about moving into 11 Downing Street, ‘because it’s a gated community. You are living in a bubble, never meeting real people and being surrounded by people with machine guns and so on.’ As if on cue, five questions down the line, just as he is getting down to the nitty-gritty on bands like Scissor Sisters and The Killers, Walden notes: ‘a woman walks past, leans in to our table and shouts at Osborne: “Though you’d come and slum it? See how poor people live, did you? That must be fun for you!”’ Suddenly, those gated communities probably started to look a lot better. As so often in a politicians’ life, when you ‘meet real people’, their views tend to disappoint.

It is when asked about women that Osbourne really comes into his own, however:

‘I kinda like them’, he says. ‘We need more women in politics. When you sit down in a meeting to discuss education or health care, often there just aren’t enough female voices there and it ends up a very male conversation.’ Mmm. Is he not equally worried about the lack of ‘female voices’ when he discusses foreign policy or the economy? Perhaps he should set up a working group on knitting to involve us in our natural territory and get results on the male:female ratio?

It’s all a far cry from the interviews conducted with that most famous mag hag of all, Maggie Thatcher, who used her interviews with wimmin’s magazines to make immortal statements about how there is ‘no such thing as society’. There’s nothing wrong with speaking to your public in a popular magazine but just recently it’s farmed new depths in patronising the sisterhood.

Norwich cathedral, it seems, is not a good place to be a pigeon.

According to a report in The Times (London), last week a bird was spotted trapped in the rafters of the cathedral’s refectory. The cathedral quickly notified a sniper and ‘a pigeon was shot dead in full view of diners’.

A member of the public reported the incident and a furore has ensued. Animal rights campaigners have called the incident a ‘crime against wildlife’ - a line repeated by John Davison, a spokesman for Pigeon Campaigns Group UK, who said: ‘we are absolutely disgusted that a place of worship such as Norwich Cathedral could be responsible for such a heinous crime against our wildlife.’ The Times suggests sensitive visitors (drawn by the thought of the 1000 roof bosses carved into the Cathedral’s stone ceiling), ‘should probably avoid the 900-year old building until its pest control measures have been dragged out of the Dark Ages’.

Despite the inevitable public enquiry, Norwich does not seem likely to revoke its zero tolerance views on airborne vermin. The city has 2,500 pigeons. Over the past two years, concerns have been raised about the growth in numbers and families have been told they could face action if Norwich City Council catches them feeding birds.

But in the event of bird flu pandemic, I know where I want to be - sitting under Jesus, right next to the rifleman, second pew from the left.

For most of Britain, Downing Street’s e-petitions website was an e-stunt for ee-jits. One petition demanded free travel for mice, another called on the government to standardise umbrella sizes. The PM Tony Blair was exhorted to recognise sadomasochism as ‘a sane sexual practice’, bring back The A-Team (‘we love it when a petition comes together’), and to replace police sirens with the Benny Hill theme tune. There was an outbreak of petition mania as 1.8million signatures accrued to a petition against road pricing and 127,000 to a demand that inheritance tax be abolished - policy has been reformed in favour of neither….

But the howls of derision - and the fact that when the government asks the public what they think, it turns out to be ‘wrong’ (in some people’s view) - haven’t put David Cameron off trumpeting this e-facility as the way forward. According to a report in the Daily Mail, the Conservative leader believes that, if he assumes power, public email petitions should be used to trigger debates in Parliament: ‘If enough people signed an online petition, MPs should discuss and vote on the issue in the Commons to connect parliament to the MySpace generation.’

‘Parliament is supposed to be the watchdog of the constitution’, Mr. Cameron explained. ‘It’s become more of a poodle under Blair. We need to give it real teeth again.’ The e-petition system would be unleashed in conjunction with a new scheme to free up the civil service from Downing Street meddling. This last step, Cameron claimed, would be a ‘glorious revolution’ for democracy: ‘This report would mean an end to the remote control by Downing Street. It would mean the Prime Minister being grilled more by MPs.’

If, by reducing government into pop petition, Cameron plans to become our pop idol, its time we popped his bubble. E-petitions are a patronising nonsense, providing not a new e-democracy, but a no-democracy. Yes, we should have more influence on what our politicians do - but no, that will not come about by treating the electorate like overgrown MySpacers whose job is to click a button on a computer every now and then. The faddish promise of government by e-petition is unlikely to secure Cameron many votes at the next e-lection.

Last year, my nose sandwiched into the armpit of a Turkish builder, a secretary’s briefcase pinioned between my thighs, a shopper’s elbow growing through my hair and a businessman nestled in the small of my back, I used to get stuck regularly in tunnels on London’s Central Line in 42 degrees of heat. We’d stand there, our flesh wedged into each other in our tincan of human sweat, with no fresh air, and our eyes would leech desperation. No one grumbled in the carriage. It was expected.

If anything sums up the culture of low horizons in the UK, it is the state of the London Underground. While we fantasise about an efficient and modern service, commuters and controllers have just learned to suffer the outdated mess. This week, London Underground announced that stuffy tube trains will carry blocks of ice, that can melt under the seats and keep us cool in tunnels. London Underground has spent £150 million on its Cooling the Tube programme and this ‘new technology’ is the best that they have come up with. A ‘trial’ carriage will be built next year and if successful the scheme will be rolled out across the Piccadilly line, because the system will only work for trains trapped underground for short bursts of 20 minutes. Imagine!

Mark Gilbey of London Underground explained: ‘We will make the trains a little cooler with the technology, but we aren’t promising the big chill… it’s pretty groundbreaking.’ He explained that ‘significant’ heat improvements will be made over the next five years.

Wow. It’s like splitting the atom all over again. As a technology, it ranks up there with foisting bottles of water on train passengers and hoping they don’t faint. There may be technical difficulties in cooling down a Victorian system, but the long, slow dragging of feet suggests that those in charge think we should just put up with it or just avoid the problem by walking.

Commuters aren’t lemonade - in the long hot summer to come, ice isn’t going to help - especially if it’s only going to be with us in five years time.