Editor-At-Large: Hot air, posh food and why the greening of Dave is a bit rich

It's easy to be environmentally aware in Britain, if you're middle class. From eating organic to driving "green" cars to remodelling your home using ecologically sound principles, saving the planet is just that bit easier if you're wealthy enough to live in a posh area like Notting Hill Gate. One famous local resident is the Tory leader David Cameron. In a matter of days Mr Cameron has suddenly turned a most impressive shade of green.

He's got a leading environmentalist, Zac Goldsmith, whose dad was millionaire Sir James Goldsmith, on board. He's signed up everyone's favourite media mogul Bob Geldof as a consultant to a new Tory group investigating ways of combating global poverty. Then Mr Cameron announced that he'd employed the architectural practice of Michaelis Boyd to redesign his new house in Notting Hill Gate so that it will incorporate "green" heating, and use solar panels to convert light into electricity. There's talk of a wind turbine on the roof and a "water harvesting" system to recycle bathwater for the washing machine. All very laudable, but not for citizens who can't afford architect's fees of £10,000 or those solar panels at £1,000 a pop.

Michaelis received praise for the design of his own house, which is partially underground, off Ladbroke Grove. Indeed, the company's website shows job after job completed within the small area of Notting Hill, from the Electric Cinema to the 192 Restaurant and plenty of desirable homes in nearby Chepstow Villas, Colville Terrace, Elgin Crescent and Palace Gardens Terrace. You can't even think of living in this area without £1.5m to plonk down. There are plenty of homeless people in London who would be grateful for any kind of housing, whether their loos flushed with recycled bathwater or not: single parents, public-sector workers, the elderly on the basic state pension, who have not been rewarded enough under New Labour to contemplate redesigning homes to benefit the environment.

And choosing eco-friendly homes goes with buying organic food. For the have-nots, eating food that's not been dosed with additives and sprayed to within an inch of its life, isn't a viable option. Recent figures show a rise in the purchase of organic products, but to the over- forties and the middle classes - shopping like this might be politically correct, but it costs around 35 per cent more. Tomorrow, Barkers department store, just down the road from the Camerons in Kensington High Street, will close and reopen as a huge branch of the organic food chain Fresh & Wild. The company boss Stephen Goldberg said that the Barkers site had been chosen because the locals "had well-travelled, well-educated, discriminating palates". What he means is that they're rich.

It is about time that Gordon Brown and John Prescott woke up to the fact that, for all their bleating on about Labour's green credentials, there is very little evidence that the Government has the will to make environmentally sound living available to all. Mr Prescott, as I have pointed out, is virtually an environmental rapist, granting planning permission over and over again to lavish building projects that intrude into the green belt.

All over Britain, school playing fields and other open spaces are being turned over to the developers, at the same time as the Government is moaning about lack of sport in schools and general obesity. In November, the urban task force set up by Mr Prescott condemned his plans to demolish perfectly restorable Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses in inner-city areas of Salford and Liverpool. Now there are plans to remove green-belt status from 55 acres of the Cotswolds so Bath University can expand, although brownfield sites are available.

Mr Prescott has also approved the destruction of 1,200 acres of green belt known as Newcastle Great Park, for construction of executive homes and a business centre. Since Labour came to power, it has overseen a 60 per cent increase in building in the green belt all over the country. The bulk of the new homes are not for local people, or affordable housing, but luxury executive homes for the middle classes built by private developers.

Farewell to my first lady of Fleet Street

Sandy Fawkes, who has just died, was an extraordinary character - once you'd experienced the wrong side of her tongue, you never forgot her. She was my first boss in Fleet Street when I arrived at the Daily Mail aged 21 in 1969. Sandy wore a red fox coat which exactly matched her hair, and had graduated from working as a fashion illustrator to fashion editor. She soon introduced me to every pub and drinking club between the office and Soho, and Fridays saw a ritual which started in El Vino, progressed to the French pub in Dean Street, with lunch at Wheelers around the corner (sometimes joined by the equally fearsome Francis Bacon) and then an afternoon of bitchery in the legendary Colony Room club, presided over by another grande dame, Muriel Belcher. After four years of hanging out with Sandy, my liver could take no more, and I saw less and less of her. I wouldn't have survived otherwise. Sandy had been found in a basket in the Grand Union Canal - and throughout her life she was a one-off, worth more than the sneering obituary that The Daily Telegraph saw fit to print, in which her trials and tribulations were used as comedic filler. She gave me the confidence to be myself.

Lippy Britain: From the top down, we've all been Pollarded

A survey has found that huge prejudice still exists about regional accents, and that businessmen trust an American accent, and Europeans and Asians who speak English as their second language, more than they do those with a Welsh accent, anyone from the West Country or Liverpool. In fact, the language spoken in England these days is hardly English at all. From the GR8 world of textspeak to the catchphrases of Vicky "Yeah but no but yeah but no" Pollard, we have managed to come up with ways of communicating with each other that visitors must find incomprehensible.

And don't just blame the young. In spite of the Plain English Campaign, our own government is gifted when it comes to using meaningless expressions, starting with "initiative", and closely followed by "perspective". Other words that mean nothing are "crisis" and "related". Once you were related to your auntie, now you are related to a pay structure or an income. Instead of money, you get "incentives" or "rewards".

In fact we're living through an era when nothing any politician says can be taken at face value. Tomorrow night, a new TV series on BBC 2, 'Balderdash and Piffle', looks at the history of words, starting with the letter P, from Polaris to pear-shaped. Soon, more than a dictionary is going to be needed to unravel what our political and business leaders are talking about in contemporary Britain.

With bullshit phrases such as "fast track", "at the end of the day", "out of the loop" and, worst of all, "24/7" used every day, I think we can safely say English is dead.