My adult education course on tetrapod evolution started this week. While I think it went ok, I hope I didn't overwhelm my students: the idea for the first teaching session was to quickly run through Palaeozoic and Mesozoic tetrapod history, looking at the major clades, so we dashed through tetrapod origins, lepospondyls, temnospondyls, the living amphibian groups, anthracosaurs, amniote origins, Palaeozoic synapsids, the turtle origins controversy, and diapsid diversity. It will be interesting to see how things progress. The next session covers Mesozoic marine reptiles (excluding plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs). Meanwhile, I have yet again been tinkering with that big review article on British dinosaurs (now at the final stages of the publication process), and Mike P. Taylor and I have been putting the finishing touches to a paper describing a new sauropod. Other areas of recent interest have been the 'necks for sex' hypothesis, Nick Longrich's paper on 'leg-wings' in Archaeopteryx, and gigantic feral cats. More on those subjects in future. Moving on, here at last is that text on domestic dog origins.

Most zoologists 'know' that the domestic dog is a domesticated wolf (or, more likely, a number of independently domesticated wolf populations) and so well known is this view that some scientists question the recognition of Canis familiaris as a species separate from C. lupus. This is the 'mainstream' view eloquently discussed in several good books on dogs and on domestication, including Olsen's Origins of the Domestic Dog: the Fossil Record (1985), Clutton-Brook's A Natural History of Domesticated Animals (1999), and Coppinger & Coppinger's Dogs: a Startling New Understanding of Canine Origins, Behavior and Evolution (2001). But here's the news. The 'domestic wolf' model is actually not as firmly established as you might think, possibly wrong, and in fact arguably inferior to an alternative model of domestic dog evolution championed by a minority of canid specialists.

Many papers published on the subject of domestic dog origins state flatly that 'the derivation of domestic dogs from the wolf is well established on behavioural and morphological grounds', without actually saying in detail what these behavioural and morphological grounds are. It's certainly true that domestic dogs and wolves are morphologically and genetically similar, but they're actually also notably different, and while they share behavioural traits, they also differ profoundly in some important respects.

My primary inspiration on all of this has been Janice Koler-Matznick, founder of the New Guinea Singing Dog Conservation Society. Besides publishing important papers on singers (and I won't be discussing those here: perhaps another time), her experience with them has caused her to re-evaluate theories about domestic dog origins and on domestication. Arguably her most important publication on this subject is Koler-Matznick (2002: free pdf here), which you should see for a good review.

I remain open-minded on the issue of both the phylogenetic affinities of domestic dogs, and on how domestication occurred, and frankly it's such a huge area that it's easy to become baffled by the literature. In an effort to keep things as simple as possible I've tried to restrict the discussion here to a consideration of one of the central issues: are domestic dogs really part of the species Canis lupus? Let me apologise now if there are areas that I've screwed up or misinterpreted, and apologies also to Jan for 'borrowing' her ideas so heavily.

Are domestic dogs really wolves? Some very obvious things to consider

As a rough rule of thumb, the domesticated forms of wild mammal species (1) revert back to wild-type after being feral for a few generations, and (2) readily interbreed with their wild ancestors. If domestic dogs are wolves, then the many populations of feral dogs that live world-wide should theoretically have reverted back to being wolf-like in appearance and behaviour. But they haven't. Instead, domestic dogs always end up looking like pariah dogs - the relatively small (11-16 kg), socially flexible semi-domesticated and feral dogs of the Old World tropics. Dingos and the unusual New Guinea singing dog are part of the pariah dog complex, though the singing dog is so odd in behavioural, molecular and morphological features that it might warrant specific status (Koler-Matznick et al. 2001, 2003).

Archaeological data shows that pariah dogs have a stable history, with dog skulls from 4000 year old deposits in Thailand being essentially identical to the modern dingo-like pariah dogs of the area. Until relatively recently, domestic dogs must have been free-ranging and hence would have had ample opportunity to interbreed with wolves. While this has certainly happened on many occasions (modern wolf/dog hybrids are known from North America, Italy, as well as from archaeological samples*), what is surprising is that it hasn't happened more often. This isn't the case in other domesticated mammals, where interbreeding with wild ancestors is widespread.

* Some coyote populations have also been shown to include genetic data from domestic dogs (Adams et al. 2003).

In Europe, wolves remain only as endangered, fragmented populations vastly outnumbered by domestic dogs, and there has long been concern that wolves will be genetically swamped through interbreeding with dogs. Actually, there is no good evidence for this, and in a recent study of Italian wolves Verardi et al. (2006) found the two to have distinct gene pools, that hybridization had occurred only very rarely, and that introgressive hybridization between the two is so limited that it doesn't pose a threat to the genetic integrity of the wolf. Wolves and domestic dogs are in fact staying distinct. This applies globally as well as locally: despite continuous, near-global sympatry between domestic dogs and wolves, hybridization has hardly occurred and only one mtDNA type is shared. On this basis Koler-Matznick (2002) argued that domestic dogs and wolves satisfy the biological species concept and shouldn't be regarded as conspecific.

While (to my knowledge) no-one doubts the idea that domestic dogs and wolves are close relatives, firm evidence showing that domestic dogs are nested within the species Canis lupus is lacking. Attempts to genetically link domestic dogs to living wolf populations failed to find a match, making the hypothetical wolf ancestor of the domestic dog a mystery. Morell (1997) wrote of the University of California's Robert Wayne, a leading researcher in this area, that 'Although he sampled as many wolves as possible, it may be that the ancestral wolf population is now extinct' (p. 1647). Of interest here is that the wolf most often cited as a potential domestic dog ancestor, the Indian peninsular wolf C. l. pallipes, has recently been shown to represent a radically unique, divergent lineage that is quite distinct from other wolves, and from domestic dogs (Jhala & Sharma 2004).

The implication from these lines of evidence is that domestic dogs descend from an ancestral pariah-like form which was quite different from wolves and that, while domestic dogs and wolves are closely related, they are distinct. Domestic dogs seem to have an independent history of descent and do not simply merge into wolves when the opportunity arises.

Wolves are behaviorally ill-suited for domestication

According to the conventional theory of dog domestication, wolves were domesticated either to function as big game hunters, or as guards. But here there are problems. If wolves really were domesticated prior to about 10,000 years ago (more on this date below), the earliest domestic dogs would have been living alongside people that were using clubs, spears and other such tools to subdue large prey, and therefore hunting via stealth and ambush. This poses a problem for the idea that people domesticated dogs to assist in large game hunting, as the chasing behaviour instinctive to wolves would presumably hinder human hunting efforts. Even in dingos we find that they've apparently always been preventing from participating in aboriginal kangaroo hunts because their chasing behaviour made the hunts a failure*. People would also have to pretty much fight with wolves in order to get any game animals back off them, given that wolves are highly food-possessive.

* I know that some hunting humans are outstanding long-distance runners that pursue wounded prey over km, and might theoretically benefit from canid assistance, but there is no evidence that this hunting strategy was widespread among ancient people. So far as we know it is limited to southern Africa (correct me if you know otherwise).

The possible use of wolves as guards is also problematical, given that wild canids function poorly in this role. Rather than defend a location, they will clear off when danger threatens, even if that location is their own den (including offspring). Sure, wolves might make some useful alerting noise if intruders were to come around, but other canids and other animals do this equally well.

While they can be tamed, wolves are actually very difficult to train. This probably results from their social system: only the dominant pair in the pack reproduces, and consequently there is an imperative to employ aggression to move up the pack hierarchy. These points don't make wolves seem like ideal animals for domestication. Indeed, the fact that domestic dogs don't form hierarchical packs makes them decidedly unwolf-like and it has been argued that the flexible social structure and high tolerance of domestic dogs to gregariousness suggests derivation from a canid that didn't have a wolf-like hierarchical pack (Koler-Matznick 2002) [adjacent image depicts a dingo].

It is becoming increasingly recognized that dogs are remarkable among mammals in exhibiting human-like social skills and communicative behaviour (Hare et al. 2002). More so even than chimpanzees, dogs can reliably interpret human acoustic and visual cues (e.g., pointing or nodding), they have an inherent understanding of human perception, and they can even use human-like gestures, such as pointing. The presence of these social skills in domestic dogs might suggest that humans and wolves developed a communicative bond early on, and that this facilitated or initiated domestication. However, wolves have been studied in this context and have been found to lack the social skills and communicative behaviour that characterizes domestic dogs, so the social skills of domestic dogs presumably arose during domestication. This is supported by the fact that the domesticated foxes bred by Dmitry Belyaev and his team match domestic dogs in their ability to recognise human visual cues (I don't want to discuss Belyaev's fascinating experiment here as it would involve adding too many words: see Trut 1999).

Might wolves have domesticated themselves?

In view of these problems and others, those workers supporting the wolf hypothesis have argued that wolves domesticated themselves: by scavenging around camps and villages they became human commensals and eventually evolved into pariah dogs. As a relatively large (20-55 kg) predator it is difficult to imagine that wolves might have integrated into human society in this way. Notably, those carnivoran species that have become human commensals are all generalized omnivores smaller than most wolves: raccoons Procyon lotor, Red foxes Vulpes vulpes, Golden jackals Canis aureus and coyotes C. latrans.

Furthermore, it has been argued that the human camps hypothesized as the earliest places frequented by hypothetical commensal wolves would not have produced the waste that a large predator would require in order to make that fundamental niche shift. It is also worth noting that wolves were almost certainly a very real danger to prehistoric people and that they would have been regarded as enemies, not as potential friends.

Given that domestic dogs were apparently domesticated multiple times in various places, it is difficult to accept that so many wolf populations became amenable to domestication when these problems exist.

Morphologically, are domestic dogs really wolf-like?

It has long been recognised that domestic dogs differ from wolves in a number of detailed skull characters. Compared to wolves, domestic dogs are smaller and have proportionally smaller teeth, a wider palate, broader braincase and higher frontals, and smaller, less rounded auditory bullae. Mostly these differences have been explained as the result of either reduced selection under domestication (Björnerfeldt et al. 2006), or artificial selection for neotenous characters. There are however a few features present in domestic dogs (and not in wolves) that can't be easily explained this way, such as the difference in the shape of the mandibular coronoid process.

While these characters might result from reduced selection under domestication, or artificial selection for neotenous characters, it's interesting that many of them recall the conditions seen in non-wolf canids, such as jackals and dholes. Indeed some authors have concluded that domestic dogs are less like wolves than they are like these other wild canids (Manwell & Baker 1983, Wayne 1986, Koler-Matznick 2002). In fact we don't know that the apparent neotenic features of domestic dogs result from artificial selection, given that neoteny can arise via other means, and it should at least be considered that the unwolf-like characters present in domestic dogs indicate derivation from a non-wolf ancestor.

A fairly logical assumption that one might make, were the 'domestic wolf' model valid, is that the most primitive domestic dogs (viz, those that had been exposed to the least amount of artificial selection) would be the most wolf-like of them all. This would apply both to fossils, and to the most primitive living breeds. As hinted at above however, archaeological specimens show that old dogs are pretty much the same as modern pariah dogs - there isn't a series of specimens morphologically intermediate between wolves and domestic dogs - while the most primitive living domestic dogs, the dingos and New Guinea singing dogs for example, are not wolf-like but quite distinct from them behaviourally, socially and morphologically.

Domestic dogs: ancient and genetically distinct

If domestic dogs are wolves, you would expect the two to be very close genetically, certainly closer than universally recognised non-domesticated carnivoran taxa. Surprisingly for the dogs-are-wolves model, this is not true. In fact domestic dogs and wolves are (based on allozyme electrophoresis) further apart genetically than are leopards and jaguars, and (based on DNA hybridization) further apart than some bear species (Wayne et al. 1991).

A major analysis of mitochondrial DNA in domestic dogs worldwide (sampling 67 breeds as well as wolves from 27 localities) found most domestic dogs to belong to a 'divergent monophyletic clade* sharing no sequences with wolves', but with some domestic dog clades including some wolf haplotypes, apparently resulting from recent hybridization (Vilà et al. 1997). These authors concluded from mitochondrial and nuclear genes that domestic dogs were ancient, and that they had repeatedly interbred with wolves at various times and places throughout their history. This could be consistent with a derivation of domestic dogs from wolves, but equally it could merely show that hybridization has occurred at various times and places and it may be uninformative as regards ancestry. Indeed we know that several wolf-like domestic dog breeds (e.g., Saarloos wolfhound, Czech wolfhound, American tundra shepherd, American timber shepherd) were produced by deliberate crossing with wolves.

* The term 'monophyletic clade' is redundant given that a clade, by definition, is monophyletic. Included especially for Mike P. Taylor :)

The hardest bit of this story to accept is just how ancient these authors propose domestic dogs to be: the answer is more than 100,000 years old. Well, we modern members of Homo sapiens are meant to be about that old (give or take 50,000 years), so if that date is accurate, we must have started domesticating dogs as soon as we got out of Africa. Archaeological evidence for domestic dogs extends back to 14,000 years (based on a jaw from Germany) and other studies have suggested an origin at about 15,000 years ago (Savolainen et al. 2002). Less securely identified alleged domestic dogs from Russia are perhaps 17,000 years old, but there are no remains approaching 100,000 years in age.

While there are good reasons for thinking that the domestication of dogs probably extends beyond 15,000 years ago (perhaps to, say, 40,000 years or so), the lack of domestic dog prototypes in the archaeological and fossil record has been a problem. Some supporters of the 'domestic wolf' model have argued that we haven't discovered wolf-dog intermediates because, prior to about 15,000 years ago, domestic dogs were morphologically indistinguishable from wolves. Unfortunately that is totally incompatible with the idea that wolves became domesticated after adopting a jackal-like commensal niche, as strong reduction in size is a requirement for the latter theory.

What might be a domestic dog prototype is known from strata extending back to 200,000-500,000 years however, and this is the extinct Chinese canid named C. l. variabilis Pei, 1934. Though classified as a small wolf, this form resembles domestic dogs in small size, detailed mandible shape and other features. Intriguingly, it appears to have been common and morphologically distinct for tens of thousands of years over a wide geographical area, despite sympatry with 'normal' C. lupus (Olsen 1985, Koler-Matznick 2002). Olsen has noted (pers. comm. cited in Koler-Matznick 2002) that the referral of C. l. variabilis to C. lupus was never satisfactory, and given the features mentioned here it is conceivable that this dog-like form was not really a wolf, but either a separate species ancestral to the domestic dog, or an early representative of C. familiaris.

If domestic dogs aren't wolves, what are they?

All of this begs the question: if domestic dogs aren't wolves, what are they? The answer seems to be that Canis familiaris is a distinct species with its own independent history. Prior to domestication, it presumably existed as a relatively small, generalized canid that voluntarily adopted the commensal pariah niche still occupied by many dog populations today. This is supported by the morphological and molecular distinctiveness of domestic dogs, by the anatomy and behaviour of primitive domestic dog breeds, and by the archaeological and fossil record.

If this is true then the truly wild ancestors of modern domestic dogs are extinct. True, there are wild pariah-type dogs in various places around the world (there are wild populations of New Guinea singing dogs and dingos, for example), but they've been introduced by people. However, the lack of the original wild form in a species that has become domesticated or at least semi-domesticated is not unprecedented nor unusual: Dromedaries Camelus dromedarius, for example, only exist in the wild today in feral form, and are otherwise entirely domesticated, and the wild ancestors of modern domestic horses and cattle are entirely extinct. In fact the eradication of the wild ancestors of a domestic form is thought by some to one of the key historical events that occurs during the domestication process (Dobney & Larson 2006).

The theory that domestic dogs descend, not from wolves, but from a wild Canis familiaris remains unpopular and overlooked, and even today relatively few zoologists are aware of the literature on this 'alternative' view of domestic dog origins. As mentioned earlier, my primary inspiration in this area has been Janice Koler-Matznick and her papers, and I have only scratched the surface in terms of the information she has provided. I've also avoided discussion of many other fascinating areas involved with this debate, such as Belyaev's farm-fox experiment and the morphological and physiological changes observed in his domesticated foxes, theories on the domestication and/or transportation of grey foxes, South American foxes and other species, the diversity of the different domestic dog clades, controversies over the origin of pre-contact American dogs such as the Xoloitzcuintli, and David Paxton's theory that the incorporation of dogs into human society resulted in morphological changes in humans.

It's a lot to think about.

PS - you might have noticed that the font size and font type varies in the text above. I have NO idea why this is and have done all that I can to correct it (I've spent an hour trying to iron things out by messing with the html).

Refs - -

Adams, J. R., Leonard, J. A. & Waits, L. P. 2003. Widespread occurrence of a domestic dog mitochondrial DNA haplotype in southeastern US coyotes. Molecular Ecology 12, 541-546.

Björnerfeldt, S., Webster, M. T. & Vilà, C. 2006. Relaxation of selective constraint on dog mitochondrial DNA following domestication. Genome Research 16, 990-994.

Dobney, K. & Larson, G. 2006. Genetics and animal domestication: new windows on an elusive process. Journal of Zoology 269, 261-271.

Hare, B., Brown, M., Williamson, C. & Tomasello, M. 2002. The domestication of social cognition in dogs. Science 298, 1634-1636.

Jhala, Y. & Sharma, D. K. 2004. The ancient wolves of India. International Wolf Summer 2004, 15-16.

Koler-Matznick, J. 2002. The origin of the dog revisited. Anthrozoös 15, 98-118.

- ., Brisbin, I. L., Feinstein, M. & Bulmer, S. 2003. An updated description of the New Guinea singing dog (Canis hallstromi, Troughton 1957). Journal of Zoology 261, 109-118.

- ., Brisbin, I. L. & McIntyre, J. K. 2001. The New Guinea singing dog: a living primitive dog. In Crockford, S. J. (ed). Dogs Through Time: An Archaeological Perspective. BAR International Series 889. Archaeopress (Oxford), pp. 239-247.

Manwell, C. & Baker, C. M. A. 1983. Origin of the dog: from wolf or wild Canis familiaris? Speculations in Science and Technology 6, 213-224.

Morell, V. 1997. The origin of dogs: running with the wolves. Science 276, 1647-1648.

Olsen, S. J. 1985. Origins of the Domestic Dog: The Fossil Record. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Savolainen, P., Zhang, Y.-p., Luo, J., Lundeberg, J. & Leitner, T. 2002. Genetic evidence for an east Asian origin of domestic dogs. Science 298, 1610-1613.

Trut, L. N. 1999. Early canid domestication: the farm-fox experiment. American Scientist 87, 160-169.

Verardi, A., Lucchini, V. & Randi, E. 2006. Detecting introgressive hybridization between free-ranging domestic dogs and wild wolves (Canis lupus) by admixture linkage disequalibrum analysis. Molecular Ecology 15, 2845-2855.

Vilà, C., Savolainen, P., Maldonado, J. E., Amorim, I. R., Rice, J. E., Honeycutt, R. L., Crandall, K. A., Lundeberg, J. & Wayne, R. K. 1997. Multiple and ancient origins of the domestic dog. Science 276, 1687-1689.

Wayne, R. K. 1986. Cranial morphology of domestic and wild canids: the influence of development on morphological change. Journal of Morphology 187, 301-319.

- ., Van Valkenburgh, B. & O'Brien, S. J. 1991. Molecular distance and divergence times in carnivores and primates. Molecular & Biological Evolution 8, 297-319.

The couple were on foot with an escort 300 metres from their camp at the time. Richard's Camp is described as an upmarket encampment on the edge of a forest in an area known for elephant and other wildlife. It is around 106 miles south-west of the capital, Nairobi.

Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board, said he understood a herd of elephants had been startled by something and charged the couple, killing Mr Smith and knocking over the guide.

"No one knows what startled the elephants but the guide was doing everything right," he said. "They were downwind and thought they were at a safe distance. Elephants have very poor eyesight so this was not an attack. It was a tragic accident."

It remained unclear last night whether the animal had indeed been startled or whether it was a "rogue" member of the herd that had struck without any apparent reason.

A Kenya Wildlife Service spokeswoman, Connie Maina, said that efforts would be made to track the animal to determine what had happened. Ms Maina said it was possible that the elephant had been startled. "It is very unusual ... but accidents can happen," she said. "It is very unfortunate. They say it was one elephant - I'm trying to find out whether it was a lone bull."

She added that the KWS would monitor elephants in the area to determine if there was a rogue animal at large. "We will try to monitor to see if we can get any leads, if it is a rogue elephant it may do this again. But we don't have any information on whether it is or not."

She added that the incident had shocked wardens in the reserve. "Everyone is feeling it," she said. "It is terrible. They were on honeymoon. The wife saw what happened. I am told the wife is OK but is shaken up."

A spokesman for Reuters said: "It is a very tragic situation, we are sending our condolences to the family. We are trying to help them practically as best we can."

A Foreign Office spokeswoman confirmed Mr Smith's identity and said that consular assistance was being offered to the family. It is thought that Mr Smith's body had been flown from a nearby landing strip to Nairobi. It is understood that other family members were flying out to be with Mrs Smith.

Although humans are occasionally killed by elephants, it normally occurs where tourists encroach on to land used by them. The group including the honeymoon couple were thought to have taken all sensible precautions. When tourists are taken on walks through the bush, they are accompanied by rangers armed with rifles.

In 2000, another Briton was trampled to death by an elephant in the Masai Mara reserve, when he ventured out of a secure compound to take a photograph of it.

Fragments of plesiosaur have been found elsewhere, including in England, Russia, and Argentina, but researcher Joern Harald Hurum said the partially fossilized Svalbard find appeared to be the first whole example.

"We are quite sure it is complete," he said by telephone about the partially buried fossils. "We have the head, and can see about six meters (20 feet) of vertebrae before it disappears into the ground."

Hurum said the voracious plesiosaurs were like the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the oceans, "expect its head is much bigger. About 2 meters (6.5 feet) long, compared to about 1.6 meters (5.25 feet) for Tyrannosaurus Rex."

The University's Natural History Museum said the reptile was "as long as a bus, with teeth larger than cucumbers ... in a head that could swallow an adult human whole."

Hurum said his team plans return to Svalbard, 300 miles north of Norway's mainland, to continue excavations next year.

Twenty-seven other marine reptiles were also found during a two-week expedition: 21 long-necked plesiosaurs, sea reptiles similar to drawings of the Loch Ness monster, and six ichthyosaurs, reptiles that looked and had fins like fish.

"If we learn how to do this with animal eggs, we should be able to have more success with human eggs, and I'd much rather know that if we were going to ask women to donate eggs that we were very likely to get stem cells as a result," said Chris Shaw, at the Institute of Psychiatry.

"We know this is a huge challenge after Dr Hwang in South Korea failed to get stem cells despite having 2,000 human eggs."

Teams in London, Edinburgh and Newcastle are to submit application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority this month, requesting licences to create embryos that will be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit or cow.

The HFEA is encouraging the applications after legal advice. The embryos will be allowed to grow for only 14 days, at which point they will be cells smaller than a pinhead.

Our troops are risking their lives in our names. Won't it harm their morale to think we're deploring their actions? Cameron obviously fears being cast by the Government as a traitor who'd let down "our boys".

Then there's America. The U.S. is our ally. We are said to enjoy a "special relationship" - not that special, as it happens; a news story yesterday said the U.S. intelligence classification NOFORN, meaning "not to be shown to foreigners", also applies to us.

Be that as it may, Cameron is anxious to support America, although he promises he won't be frightened of telling the Yanks what he thinks. He'll supply the candid advice of a friend.

When he was writing speeches for the previous Tory leader, Michael Howard, the Tory position was different.

Although Howard had supported the Iraq invasion, he spoke out against the botched aftermath - to the annoyance of Bush administration officials.

Presumably, Cameron agreed with Howard. Now he toes the line, taking care not to anger Washington. Why so?

The former Tory foreign secretary Peter Carrington, who had the honour to resign after failing to anticipate the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, says the Iraq War has diminished our standing in the world: "I can't understand why the Conservative Party didn't say "Don't do it". Blair got it wrong, and it's been catastrophic."

How curious it is. In America, the Democratic Party - their Left, if you like - supported Republican George Bush's pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

Here, the Conservative Party - our Right, so to speak - backs Labour premier Tony Blair's support of Bush.

In both countries, the ruling party has gathered what Lenin called "useful idiots" - in revolutionary Russia the liberals who became apologists for communist extremism after buying into the Marxist fairy tale of a just society.

Today's "useful idiots" buy into Bush's "war on terror", believing he's saving mankind from Islamic domination.

And blanking from their minds the possibility that his opportunistic reaction to 9/11 - using it as an excuse to invade Iraq - has persuaded young Muslims that he intends to dominate their nations.

Historian Tony Judt, excoriating Bush's "useful idiots" in a recent London Review of Books article, recalls the story of two French communists who quarrelled over Joe Stalin.

One, Pierre Courtade, had supported the tyrant's murderous activities; the other, Edgar Morin, deplored them.

Courtade told Morin: "You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong."

So it is with David Cameron and the Tories. They think they're right to be wrong about Iraq because of other considerations - the need to keep in with America, anxiety about being branded unpatriotic by the Government, and the difficulty of admitting they made a bad decision which, for reasons of appearance, they've now got to maintain.

In this respect, Cameron's worse than Blair. The Prime Minister's motives for joining Bush in Iraq might have been ignoble - history is sure to flush out the true reason - but he's careful always to say he respects those who disagree with him. He doesn't query their loyalty or patriotism.

Only one party has spoken for those who dissent on Iraq: the Liberal Democrats.

Their idea of being members of a "loyal" Opposition - expressing the doubts and misgivings most voters feel about Iraq - is less dubious than David Cameron's phony pledges to be a candid friend of the U.S. A little real candour from him this week would be appreciated.

Useful idiots can also be seen as useless idiots.

Sting in the tale

Popular historian Andrew Roberts says he was once saved from being attacked by a shoal of "giant" jellyfish off Miramar, in the south of France.

Apparently, his holiday pal, David Cameron, then 29, dived into the sea and threw him a pair of goggles so he could see to swim his way around his poisonous tormentors.

"I would probably have been hospitalised - it would certainly have ruined my holiday," says Roberts, a diehard Tory.

Might this be part of the ongoing Tory campaign to bracket Cameron with the young JFK, who was cast into the shark-infested Pacific during World War II when the motor torpedo boat he commanded, PT109, collided in the night with a Japanese destroyer and sank, drowning two of his men and injuring three others?

Well-connected Kennedy got a medal for heroism and that was later emphasised in his presidential campaign. An inquiry ultimately held him responsible for the incident but by then no one cared.

As for Roberts, he says he was stung once and it hurt for two days. We're not told how the jellyfish fared.

We've been here before

Shadow chancellor George Osborne says he and his political soulmate David Cameron can't be compared to Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Why not?

Osborne claims he was happy for Cameron to go for the leadership. Unlike Blair and Brown, there was no restaurant deal in which Cameron promised to stand aside for Osborne after he'd been Prime Minister for a decent period.

But I keep reading that Osborne is cleverer and has more depth than Cameron. The same was said about Brown. That Cameron is a New Tory while Osborne would like to be a traditional tax-cutting one.

The truth is few politicians enter the fray content to be number two. Especially not those who set their sights on becoming Chancellor. We may be sure Cameron and Osborne won't remain lovely-dovey for long if they get into power.

Even if their personal relations remain amicable, we may be sure their pals - ie those who want jobs from them - will poison the well.

Suddenly, the mask slips from nice-guy Clinton

Did you see the American TV interview with former President Bill Clinton, who is lionised these days by celebrity-loving business creeps and politicians wishing to pick up tips on how best to deceive those who trust them?

Fangs bared, he snarled at mild-mannered Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace for daring to suggest he had been lax in pursuing Osama Bin Laden, spitting: "I got closer to killing Bin Laden than anyone else."

His face tight with anger, he raged at Wallace for smirking during his intemperate outburst.

What could have tipped everyone's friend Bill over the edge?

His ambitious wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, is positioning herself to run for the presidential candidacy of the Democratic Party in 2008.

She is honing her oh-so-carefully-calibrated criticism of the Bush administration's "war on terror". You can see the problem.

An opponent inquiring publicly: "Why didn't your husband deal with Bin Laden before 9/11 after being warned he was planning a terrorist outrage?"

Americans know he was absorbed in trying to avoid the consequences of sharing a cigar lubriciously with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Hence his great fury when confronted by the smirking Wallace.

Only on one previous occasion have we seen a furious Clinton on TV. That was when he was asked if he had slept with Miss Lewinsky and lied: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."