Even In this age of colossal property prices, the size of the Blair family's housing debt is enough to make the eyes water. The Prime Minister and his wife owe almost £4million, part of it in a 95 per cent mortgage on a single property.
It is impossible to see how they can manage to be so deep in the red unless very special circumstances apply. Both are reasonably high earners by middleclass standards but they are not among the super-rich. Nor have they been lucky with their investments.

Their only success in the property market has been their humble constituency home in unfashionable Sedgefield, but this is worth about the same as a large cupboard in their London house, the price of which has dropped slightly since they bought it.

Unless they can obtain a tenant for that London house, about to fall vacant, mortgage payments will gobble up Mr Blair's entire annual salary in less than a year.

Most people would be close to despair. But the Blairs, apparently, are not. Plainly, there is something we do not know. Either the couple have access to other funds or they have managed to persuade their building society they can be very confident of a large future income.

Such an income could come only from a future book deal on the couple's memoirs, linked with newspaper serialisation rights and the likely earnings they could expect from the lecture circuit. Both will depend completely on Mr Blair retaining his current popularity in the USA.

The Prime Minister has put himself in a position where he cannot risk offending American public opinion, because to do so could leave him financially submerged.

It is very foolish of him to have got himself into this fix. He cannot conceivably be unaware of the debt, or of the need to pay it off. It is impossible to believe that this does not influence him and his wife in much that they do.

It is yet another sign that his Prime Ministership, which started amid such hopes and boasts of probity, is fast losing all moral authority.

Torture is always evil

Subjected To the simulated drowning known in the interrogation trade as waterboarding, hardened CIA agents begged for mercy after 30 seconds.

Most people would not need much more than 30 seconds to conclude that such a technique was wholly unacceptable, something that a civilised country could not possibly use. Its only real purpose, like that of all torture, is to terrify its victims into submission. Any 'confession' made under such treatment would be worthless. The victim would say anything to make it stop.

That, in fact, is why this country abandoned torture more than three centuries ago. But now a Foreign Office Minister, Ian Pearson, seems to be suggesting that waterboarding might be legal in some circumstances. Comically, Mr Pearson is responsible for Human Rights.

In a slippery attempt to avoid responsibility, the Minister's statement is now being blamed on the civil servant who drafted it. It is better news that we are promised 'clarification' of Mr Pearson's answer. What a pity that the simple truth that torture is always wrong should not have been clear in the first place.