The Chancellor has written enough material to keep them occupied for the entire plane journey. More from Steve Richards. Yesterday I was regretting that I had not been able to attend the recent World Toilet Summit in Belfast. It might have been my last chance to find out if is true that, as I read recently, there are no public toilets in Peru. If true, it is something that Peru has in common with Cambridge Circus in London, where, in the island in the middle of the road, there used to be a gleaming underground Gents lavatory.

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At first sight, there seems little to link these two products. Is it impossible to give us any flavour of this? Is it a question of enforced modesty? Or is it just the way the powerful speak to those of us so far down the hierarchy?simoncarr75 hotmail More from Simon Carr. The sprawling, bi-directional, five-dimensional multi-state sucks its administrators in and recasts them in its own image It becomes impossible to be concise. In the course of any answer the question gets lost, then the answer gets lost. This is one reason why Europe is disconnected from its citizens.

No one has the time to listen to all this.But one Frankie Howerd answer to Lindsay Hoyle's question about Chinese underwear ("I can promise you, you won't lose your pants while I am Trade Commissioner!") reminded us that Mr Mandelson has been a hero of free trade, facing down the forces of reaction all over Europe. "What does the European Commission see as the role of the market?" Mr Hood asked That's a state secret, obviously. "While the political strategy may be clear and unchanged, the delivery of that strategy may be ..." On and on.Perhaps Europe does this to people. Mr Mandelson said globalisation, China, India, dynamism, open, flexible, changing economic forces, social systems, regulations, benchmarks .. on and on it went. The more powerful they are the less they feel obliged to say, and the greater the time they feel able to take to say it. The Mandelsonian pause lasted about as long as that sentence before he said: "But answerable." He is not accountable to national parliaments but answerable to them, you see.Very well then: answers! It is, alas, difficult to retrieve anything said by the most powerful man in the Palace of Westminster.