Why Saddam would feel at home in Hello!

For once in this war, our newspapers have spoken with the same voice. Saddam's taste in palaces is universally considered lamentable. From the Times ("part Alhambra, part Barratt home") to the Mirror ("decadent opulence"), from the Sun ("garish") to the Mail ("obscene"), war correspondents have united in merciless judgment on the dictator's interior design, apparently stunned, as they had not been by his hundreds of self-glorifying murals and equestrian statues, by Saddam's more private fondness for gilt, mirrors and marble, his love of entwined Ss and Hs, his perfectly dreadful, lottery-winner's gold taps. If only, you gather, he had spent his stolen oil money on something simpler, less wicked-looking - Philippe Starck? Conran, even? - how different might his place in history have been.

Shuddering squaddies evidently endorsed their verdict. "It really is an eye-opener," observed one Royal Marine. "This is what he spent his money on." Another condemned "the sheer degree of utter waste".

It seems a fair bet then, that neither combatant is a member of the National Trust. For those familiar with the ostentation peculiar to the British stately, some of Saddam's decor will have looked positively plain. Why, they may wonder, did he go for those beigey marble walls in the Basra palace when he could have draped them in, say, a lovely rich watered silk, to show up a mahogany case of gorgeous 18th-century porcelain, or some French inlaid cabinets, or a couple of marble and gold credenzas? Wouldn't a spot of scarlet damask on the chairs have looked a shade more imperial, when reflected in the mirrors, than the neutral executive stuff on which the American sergeant lolled with a fag? No accounting for taste.

But there is no need to join the NT to see where Saddam found all his best ideas, from swank architraves to chandeliers to pattern, pattern, pattern. They do it brilliantly at Buckingham Palace. And if Hello! readers turn to page four of the current issue they will find a feature on the gilded, fretted, plushy interiors of Highclere Castle, in which most aspects of Saddam style receive a ringing endorsement from "the ancestral home of the Herbert family". Similar furnishings can also be bought readymade, from Harrods.

Although he is in other respects a man of singular wickedness, Saddam's notions of the sort of homes befitting a homicidal thieving dictator appear to have been entirely conventional. Like everyone from the Roman emperors to the Marcoses and Ceaucescus and, more recently, our very own lord chancellor, he apparently believed "he could not perform his sacred function in the eyes of his subjects without the pampered splendour which surrounded his existence in the capital" (as Jerome Carcopino described the Caesars' dutifully conspicuous consumption).

In this country, the belief that high office should find both its reward and reflection in palatial splendour persists with the offer of mansions such as Chequers and Dorneywood to our political leaders, who generally show every sign of appreciating the gesture. So much so, in Robin Cook's case, that he could hardly bear to quit Carlton Gardens for Dollis Hill.

And so much so, in Derry Irvine's, that one can readily imagine British squaddies wandering around his continually refurbished apartments, tutting at the custom-built toilet and marvelling at the kind of vulgar beast who could live in such swaggering fashion at the expense of the comparative beggars outside his palace gates.

In for a nude shock

Britain's formidable army of nudists, or "naturists" as they style themselves these days, is agitating against the government's new sexual offences bill, in particular the section concerned with indecent exposure.

Yesterday Mick Ayers, a Unison official who is also chairman of the Central Council of British Naturism, told MPs that the sexual offences bill in its current form might also restrict the activities of wholesome, guaranteed non-pervert nudists of the type generally seen strutting up and down British beaches just as nature intended - save for their beanie hats, socks and stout sandals. "There is a need," Ayers explained, "to differentiate between a very moral and proper way of life which is a family activity, and those who do such things for sexual gratification".

The fears of Ayers and his fellow enthusiasts have not, it appears, been allayed by calming letters from the leading government textile (as clothes-wearers are known in nudist circles) Hillary Benn and prominent silk, Lord Charles Falconer of Thoroton. Both ministers insist that the bill "criminalises cases of exposure causing alarm or distress. Not naturists, or streakers".

Actually, if I were a naturist I would not be reassured either. For however wholesome we ought to find the sight of men like Ayers naked as the day he was born, though somewhat larger, there will always be some who are genuinely alarmed and distressed by the prospect of unclothed strangers on public beaches, even those who wonder what, other than seedy exhibitionism, might motivate those who wish to display themselves in this way.

Of course, it is good to know from Ayers' organisation that "Nudity in sun clubs is not sexually stimulating". Even so, an advertisement on the same website, for the French nudist colony, Cap D'Agde ("there are many shops where the girls can buy lingerie not normally available in the boutiques at home") cannot but remind some of us of a passage in Michel Houellebecq's novel, Atomised, in which the priapic anti-hero, Bruno, describes the easygoing, orgiastic welcome the resort offers to its predominantly northern European clientele: "Though it boasted three shopping centres, a mini-golf course and bicycle rental, the primary attractions for holidaymakers at the Cap d'Agde colony were sex and sunbathing".

While one readily accepts that the average British nudist is more likely to resemble Unison's Mick than Houellebecq's Bruno, there is, alas, when one meets one in a public place, no way of distinguishing the noble savage from the leering satyr who enjoys being in a place where "voyeurism is tactily condoned".

So unless some instant guarantee of nudist propriety, other than emasculation, presents itself, it seems likely that Lord Charles may indeed distinguish himself, not before time, as the hammer of nudists, with a law requiring that they pursue their hobby out of sight. Either that, or they must be very, very brave, and put on their swimsuits.

Charles gets sheepish

Lady Helen Windsor is no longer the face of Bulgari, a jewellery company. It appears Bulgari no longer thinks it worthwhile paying her £1m a year to show its wares at parties. Or perhaps Fay Weldon's novel, The Bulgari Connection, did the job better.

Whatever the reason, this split, like those between Isabella Rossellini and Liz Hurley, respective former faces of Lancome and Estee Lauder, provides another reminder to those who aspire to such work, that it should not be considered a long-term career option.

Unless, that is, you are clever enough, like the Prince of Wales, to pair your promotional efforts with a product, such as mutton, that can only ever benefit from the association. Indeed, the only possible objection to the prince assuming his new, voluntary role as the Face of Mutton is that it deprives so many of our more mature princesses and models of a job they could truly grow into.

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