For this was an event in which the old world of European kings and queens were making way for a citizen of the new world. The man the old world was celebrating was Brazil’s President Lula de Silva.

The bibs and tuckers around the hall – and it was crammed with businessmen, lawyers, bankers and the rest – gave all the impression of supplicants at the great man’s table.

Lula – bearded and younger looking than his 64 years. Charismatic with a real twinkle in his eye, he cut a forceful and persuasive dash as he picked up the Chatham House Prize – a kind of micro Nobel Peace Prize awarded by the UK diplomatic think tank.

His speech majored on climate change and clean energy, but it also made the plea for the world’s 10th largest economy to have its rightful place at the world’s top table – a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

It was a good speech – talked of Brazil’s renewal depending upon the renewal of Latin America itself. Talked too of Brazil’s strength flowing not from its massive new deep sea oil deposits, but from its sustainable energy supplies from sugar cane and its new found determination to sustain the Amazon rain forest at all cost (a campaign likely to prove one of the few tangible outcomes from the Copenhagen climate change summit).

As he delivered his speech I noticed the missing little finger from his left hand – lost in an industrial accident in 1960.

Lula’s life is an extraordinary story from peanut seller and shoes shine boy who grew up in great poverty, to the leader of the huge Metal Workers’ Union and thence in 2002 to the democratically elected president of a country that had basked in its unfair share of corruption and military dictatorship.

Brazil, for all its inequality and development challenges, is a power house of a nation that has come of age. Its thrusting growth is an opportunity for British business. But the headsets listening to the English translation of Lula’s Portuguese spoke volumes of Britain’s lack of readiness to engage.

We shall be hearing much more of Brazil on Channel 4 News in the weeks to come. Can’t yet tell you why, but you won’t be disappointed.

But yesterday’s news day was no ordinary day. The conviction of 23 CIA operatives by the still independent judiciary in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy was a remarkable first.

The CIA staff who included the Milan station chief (What is a secondary European city doing with a CIA station chief at all?) marked a major step in the struggle to bring to justice those responsible for the rendition and torture of suspects in the aftermath of 9/11.

The case involved the seizure of a Muslim cleric on the streets of Milan and his rendition to a ‘third country’ for interrogation, where he claims he was tortured.

None of the convicted CIA people is ever likely to serve the five years in jail to which they have been sentenced (the station chief got eight years).

But the case itself must be bringing closer the day when the political leaders of the time, particularly in Europe and America, will be questioned and perhaps themselves brought before the International Court in the Haig.

My Paris informant identified fears of such investigations against Tony Blair as another ingredient in President Sarkozi’s ‘deceleration’ of support for Mr Blair’s candidacy for the Presidency of Europe.

This brings me to the presence of a 22-seater Gulfstream jet at Birmingham Airport on October 2nd. N478GS was identified there last month by plane spotters.

This is a plane that, according to a report in the Guardian (November 1st) has previously been seen at Bagram military air base in Afghanistan, Shannon in Ireland, Prestwick in Scotland, and Stuttgart in Germany. There have been persistent allegations that the jet has been used for the ‘movement’ of prisoners.

Can we be assured that rendition is not still being practised? The MOD says of the Birmingham incident that the plane’s visit had nothing to do with ‘past allegations’.

They say it was engaged in ‘routine military liaison between allies’.

Isn’t that exactly what the rendition of suspects for torture in third countries could have been described as?

The FT today reports Goldman Sachs only posted one day’s trading loss in the past quarter – the quarter before saw two such days.

On 35 of the 65 days of trading in the last quarter the company made over $100 profits a day. Goldmans’ profit in the last quarter totalled $6 billion.

The surge in stock market trading is credited to the vast amounts of public money being injected into the world economy by governments trying to get bank credit flowing again. But as I reported on Monday, Lord Myners, the City Minister states that 70 per cent of all trading involves the holding of trades for nano seconds.

I commend today’s FT article.

But today’s Kim Howells is not the same as yesterday’s.

It would not be enough that he had been a Foreign Office minister. It is enough that he remains the chairman of the rubber-stamping Commons intelligence committee, so that today’s Kim Howells making a call for an exit strategy from Afghanistan, even before the appalling slaughter of five British soldiers by one of their Afghan colleagues, Mr Howells had made his call.

The question tonight is whether this signals the opening up of a schism in the Labour party over the war? It has been there all along but it has not been expressed in these terms.

The opening of Kim Howells’s mouth has inaugurated a new season, and we shall have to see who comes out to perform.

Yes a pre-fluoride, baby bulge babe I need my teeth fixed. Fillings, like buses, seem to take an age to materialise and suddenly appear all at once.

I had two to see to this week. My NHS dentist has retired since my last consultation – can I find another? Not a chance. So what do I do?

I go to the nearest dental entity I can find, and satisfactory it is – until I pay the bill: £250 for two fillings! AND he informs me I need two more doing – indeed he’s done much more.

My new dentist, lovely man that he is, is a man with a plan. To be truthful, a plan of straightening fillings, strengthening, and, forget five gold rings, FOUR gold caps.

Total price not unadjacent to more than several thousand pounds. I’m going for a total head transplant – cheaper.

But seriously, “free at the point of delivery’, what has happened to NHS dentistry? Has this vital division of our beloved NHS been allow very privately to go private?

Have you ever met a poor dentist? Is my dental experience a London affair? Is there a thriving NHS practice in Barrow-in Furness? Do pigs fly? Is the Pope a Catholic? Bring me my NHS dentist and my arrows of desire! My bow of burnished gold is very soon going to be my very expensively secured row of gold caps.

You think the ties are bright? Wait till you see the teeth!

It is even behaving like a nationalised bank, at last. No bonuses to anyone beyond the branch staff. And we are treating it like a state bank. We are insuring it – completely – and we are giving it tens of billions of pounds more of our money.

The 21st century is achieving something that a century of socialist endeavour across the world never achieved. Is it a good thing? God only knows.

And what of Lloyds? We seem to be easing the apron strings. But are we getting any of our billions back? Well, we ARE getting £2.1bn for insuring the thing for the past six months.

But all the rest? God only knows. God is going to be busy in these coming days and years. It is still far from certain that, if the banks crash again, we shall be able to save either bank.

All this against a backdrop in which a government minister has admitted that the current financial market is back to the worst of its worst behaviour – “deal churning”, or holding shares for a nanosecond before trading them again and again and again.

Lord Myners, the City minister, tells us in a BBC interview on File on 4 that a staggering 70 per cent of all share dealing is currently undertaken by these massive computer dealing systems that enable a trader to hold a trade for a nanosecond before selling.

It is a wholly unproductive activity and it is a part of what sank the world’s financial system a year – yes, just a year – ago. We have learned nothing. It is one reason why we should be very wary indeed of the current stock market boom and the current theoretical world recovery.

I must go and get some cash out.

Let’s face it. If we were to categorise risk, then undoubtedly alcohol would be a class A drug and so would tobacco. They both kill on an absolutely spectacular scale.

The reality is that 50 years of attempting to deal with the drugs disaster have been a complete and utter failure. Nothing has staunched the growth of criminality, imprisonment, loss of life, devastation of lives, and enrichment of criminals.

Far more lives are devastated by the criminalisation of drugs than by the drugs themselves. Many of those in Britain’s jails are either on drugs or in jail because of handling drugs in some way.

The illegal drugs industry in America alone is worth many hundreds of billions of dollars. The political compromise across the world generates skulduggery at every level of society.

Dealing with drugs requires new courage and a completely new approach. I speak as somebody who’s intersected with a day centre working with young people, many of whom are either on drugs or on the fringes of drugs. I’ve been involved there for 40 years.

He may never become prime minister, but Alan Johnson’s great gift to personkind might be to re-engage Professor Nutt and join with him in calling a halt to a completely bankrupt method of handling the drugs disaster.

Having taken two long-haul flights in the last two days, I’ve been able to talk to a few of them, and the atmosphere is mixed.

A few are angry about the changes, others told me they accepted change must come. Still others are leaving the job altogether.

On my flight this morning it was principally women who were leaving. One had three more flights to go; another was on her very last flight. They had each done more than a dozen years in the job. One will become a primary school teacher.

It is still a remarkably good airline. And, of course, the best-kept secret is that despite its appalling launch, Terminal 5 is now one of the best airport facilities anywhere in the world.

The city lived up to its windiness – it made for a spectacularly sunny Halloween with an icy wind billowing in off what amounts to the largest freshwater pond in the world. But whatever we were doing it was impossible to escape the festivities.

Checking into the hotel, the clock behind reception was smothered in cobwebs, the men and women on duty, wore green make up and sported wigs to their waists.

Getting into the elevator, we were joined at intervals by people with horns, fangs, and at times bodies that appeared to represent vast inflated whoopie cushions. So far as I could divine, there wasn’t a child in the 26-floor building.

The entire pumpkin production of Illinois seemed to have descended on Chicago, together with straw bails that appeared to have been dropped by helicopter down the central reservation of Michigan Avenue. But above all, it was the wholesale dressing up – be there or be square, and some were.

I saw a number of cardboard boxes walking down the street, even a wooden box that blew over, crossing at an intersection. The planks fell into the street revealing the unfortunate inmate who fled in pyjamas, carrying bits of timber under his arm.

A mass desire to dress up, to become absurd, seemed to seize the place. The Feast of All Souls? All Saints Eve? Forget it – this is America’s day, all fools day, and it gets bigger every year, more commercialised (many of the ritzier costumes I saw had been professionally constructed and sold) and more infectious (witness its growth in at home in Blighty).

The net result is that the stranger going about his work in normal clothing feels undressed, almost naked and horribly sober. Did I say horribly? That’s quite enough horror for one weekend!

So troubled has Mr Blair’s ‘non-candidacy’ for the Presidency of the EU become that both Gordon Brown and David Miliband were forced to break cover yesterday and, risking further domestic controversy, make a very public case for Mr Blair taking over the new lead role in Europe.

But the socialist group in Europe rejected their pleas, and without so prominent a bloc, Blair’s hopes are all but dead.

You read it here first – it was Snowblog that learned first of Mr Sarkozy’s rapid cooling on the matter.

The personal relationship between Nicolas and Tony remains strong, but Sarkozy is too wily a politician to have failed to spot the tide running against Blair, and with Germany’s Angela Merkel less than lukewarm on the idea, he gave up on his plan to anoint Mr Blair.

Barring ‘a walking on water’ moment, the ‘Blair project’ in Brussels is sunk.

As I blogged last week, the French are now much more excited by the idea of ‘young David (Miliband) taking over the potential more powerful EU Foreign ‘High Representative’ role.