Short, sharp sound-bite snaps at Britannia

It is a useful convention that when the Government has a big piece of legislation planned, it issues something called a White Paper, setting out what it intends to do. By reverse logic you would have thought that when it hasn't, it doesn't.

So when the clever Scots lawyer Malcom Rifkind - Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs - rose in the House of Commons to make a statement about his White Paper, entitled Free Trade And Foreign Policy - A Global Vision, wild horses would not have dragged me away from a Chamber in which History was about to be made. For when the words "Global Vision" are on the front of a White Paper, the link has surely been made between great thoughts and great deeds - deeds against which the Labours of Hercules would seem puny and insignificant. And they said this government had run out of steam!

Here is what Mr Rifkind said. I have filtered out the cliches and unnecessary pieces of political persiflage, leaving the distilled essence and most determinative passages from his statement.

"Madam Speaker. The Government's objectives are wide-ranging [including] progress in implementing existing commitments, completing ongoing negotiations and initiating a further substantial liberalising work programme, and then a final poosh [Rifkindian for "push"] forward to achieve the target of global free trade by 2020. The Government is clear that free-market policies are best. Political developments over the last decade have created new opportunities. Throughout the world security and stability are an essential prerequisite for markets to function smoothly. Britain is an Atlantic as well as a European nation. We are determined to open up new opportunities. The Government has the vision to set this bold policy objective. It is our 20-20 vision of the world."

Having unleashed this torrent of fresh, exciting new ideas on the House, Mr Rifkind could be forgiven for getting all shirty when his opposite number, Robin Cook, suggested that the White Paper wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. "A farrago of nonsense", was how Mr Rifkind described Cookie's intervention, and one which indicated the "difference between sound-bite and strategy". The difference being (as far as I can see), that one is short and meaningless, and the other is interminable and meaningless.

Earlier, Deputy Prime Minister's questions had brought together three of the most emblematic men in the Government. Captain Charisma, Hezza himself, facing trouble over charges of wanting to suborn the civil service; Planet-brain David Willetts, Paymaster General, was due up before some investigation, accused of committee tampering whilst a whip; and Roger Freeman, who - with his slicked-back hair, pin-stripe suit, utterly bland appearance and way with platitudes - is a police artist's impression of a politician.

Heseltine's outraged innocence was masterful. Having initiated the idea of civil servants undertaking work on behalf of the Conservative Party, it was he, himself, who (with a little assistance from Sir Robin Butler) had stopped it! Willetts blushed and fumbled through his answers, his mind (engagingly) elsewhere. Mr Freeman slipped and slid between his questioners, with an aplomb that would have done credit to a figure skater.

It was, however, Labour's Tony Banks (who increasingly resembles the ex-dancer and celebrity Lionel Blair both physically and in terms of his act) who summed up the mood. "There are 12 unexploded bombs in my constituency. ["Hear, hear" roared his colleague Paul Flynn, for no reason that I could discern.] And it's most unpleasant to think that you might be living over one of them." Amen, said Messrs Heseltine and Willetts.