During his tenure as our ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer recalls, "There was a minority of capable ministers who stood out like Masai warriors in a crowd of pygmies." This somewhat literal-minded example of diplomatic de haut en bas promises to be the most memorable line in his memoirs, and it certainly encapsulates the prevailing tone of extracts published this week. If these were representative, then it is not at all unusual for the towering figure of Meyer to advertise his claims to intellectual superiority over the politicians he is doomed - for his sins! - to serve, even as the nature of his own talents remains a tantalising mystery. So much so that some readers of his memoirs may conclude (in a variation on Piers Morgan's thoughts on Kate Garraway's marriage to Derek Draper), that if they'd known the bar was set so low, they would have had a go themselves.

But it should be some consolation to anyone hankering, too late, for a lifestyle like Meyer's that when not fulfilling Jonathan Powell's command to "get up the arse of the White House and stay there", the ambassador seems to have functioned, a good deal of the time, as a travel agent. One of his great themes is the sheer trouble and inconvenience of arranging complicated travel/entertainment itineraries for the emissaries of New Labour. Take the memorial service for 9/11 victims. It was, as you might imagine, "a logistical nightmare ... huge travelling press party ... torrential rain ... Manhattan ... traffic ... anxious ... back to the airport ... security search ... panicking". And don't get him started on the endless outings he's made to organise, when the timetable clearly states "at leisure".

It is commonplace, apparently, for British nonentities to demand face-to-face meetings with senior US figures, instead of leaving the complexities of social intercourse to Meyer. "Officials in London are attracted to dealing directly with their Washington counter-parts like moths to a flame," he says, appending the following warning for the unwary: "But this has its dangers." It seems that his unsophisticated clients were all too often outwitted, in a reversal of the old Henry James format, by suave Washingtonians whose complex idioms they literally failed to understand. Recalling the moment when George Bush praised Blair's cojones, for example, Meyer says, "I may have been the only member of the waiting British team who understood this meant balls."

The noise! The people! As if it weren't bad enough dealing with Prescott's malapropisms, Blair's tight trousers, and "poor Henry" McLeish, who "twitched and stuttered" through an audience with Bush organised by a too-indulgent Meyer, he must needs entertain, at his residence, a person from London called Levy. "I told Levy that, to be frank, the top echelon of the US administration was out of his reach."

Indeed, even the lower echelons, chez Meyer, were out of his reach. "By chance," Meyer recalls, "the record producer Mickie Most and his wife Chrissie were staying with us." Quite a different class of person, Meyer stresses. "Mickie had discovered some of the biggest pop acts ... The Animals, Herman's Hermits, Donovan, Hot Chocolate ...", he points out, while Levy had been a mere accountant: "There was no love lost between Mickie Most and Levy."

Meyer's final estrangement from Downing Street makes for sad reading, particularly when you consider that his personal tastes - with an intimate circle that includes the Duchess of York as well as luminaries of the music business - had the potential, probably unusual in an ambassador of this eminence, to bring him so close to the poptastic aristocracy of New Labour. When not conversing in Washingtonian, he even spoke the same language as his employers. Squeezed out of a dinner with Bush, he raged at Powell, "If this happens you will cut me off at the fucking knees for the rest of my fucking time in Washington. Is that what you want?" Harold Nicolson he ain't.

Irrespective of what Powell wanted, knee-wise, some sort of trimming along these lines would certainly have represented a saving. Indeed you can't help wondering, once Meyer had been thoroughly excluded, what difference it made to have him in Washington at all. If it was obvious, a century ago, that improved communications were making these grandees surplus to requirements, what is left for them today? Booking the cars, obviously. Running a tidy guest house. Party planning. And writing memoirs in the tone of a bitter, but once-trusted domestic, whose publication while their principal target is still in office only raises further questions about the utility and principles of the senior diplomat.

· Frogs, eh? Never wash, frightful appeasers, and now - haven't we warned them time and time again what poor hygiene in the multicultural department would lead to? - these dreadful riots. Not since Kelvin MacKenzie launched the "Hop Off you Frogs" and "Up Yours Delors" offensives has there been such ill-concealed jubilation over the misfortunes of our closest European neighbour. Sod Off Sarkozy! The only difference, on this occasion, is that the chauvinism emerging from the more genteel sections of the media is apt to take up more space, use longer words, and camouflage itself as a lament for the failures of the intolerant, smugly secular, racist, and fiscally incompetent French political class.

What a tragedy that these abject surrender monkey sons of surrender monkeys never took the opportunity to learn from this country's Anglo-Saxon model, with our fully assimilated minority communities, numerous prominent black and Asian politicians and the kind of harmoniously integrated schools, housing and employment opportunities that make us a model for the rest of Europe.

Has it been for nothing, some of these writers must be wondering, that they have spent summer after summer taking the multicultural message to this benighted country? Surely not. For where are the riots? Not, you will note, in the the gîtes, markets and charming ferme-auberges of the Dordogne, Lot and Garonne, where the British have concentrated their efforts, but in the banlieues, where you can't buy a derelict barn for love or money. Without the pioneering work of Peter Mayle, and his disciples, the whole thing could have been much, much worse.

· This week Catherine saw Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, "which reminded me that the time is long gone since I took ending-denial to be a mark of advanced aesthetic quality. On the contrary. On the plus side: no loud noises, or kissing ... and hardly any blood to speak of." Catherine read The Hound of the Baskervilles. "Someone had asked me how it ended."