Strange – in former times, budgetary announcements and the rest used to have to be kept secret until they were announced on the floor of the House of Commons. But today vast amounts of the Strategic Defence and the Public Spending Reviews are already out in the public domain.

In the past there have been Treasury resignations for such leaks. Not any more. So should the charade of Ministerial accountability to Parliament be ended? Are the “markets” now too sensitive to cope with the release of unexpected news on the floor of the House? Is the political system too antiquated to cope?

Spin is regarded by many as one of the curses that sank New Labour. Is the Coalition in danger of mimicking this process that so feeds and delights the UK media?

Were a Martian hack (him or her, again) confronted with a choice of lead story from either review this morning – even before either has been published, which would they choose? Would it be the UK’s incapacity to project air power to some far flung target for the next decade? Or is it the UK’s inability to house its own people at home? The former proposal is apparently not designed to remedy the latter.

So, what do we learn from today’s spin? There will be a decade long hiatus during which we shall immediately scrap an aircraft carrier that still has four years life in it and all the planes that can fly off it. We shall build two more, mothball or sell one, and have no planes to fly off either for 10 years. I’m no Defence expert, but it sounds odd to me.

We learn too that council houses for life are to end. Yet the council house itself has been on the wane for years ever since local authorities were encouraged to sell off their housing stock to their tenants. Although in making these changes there has been mention of freeing money to spend on house building, there has so far been neither spin nor leak as to how the current shortage of four million homes is to be addressed. Nor indeed has anyone reconciled how it is that we can build two near aircraft carriers, but have managed to build fewer houses that at anytime since 1924.

Is it “interesting times” that we live in, or just curious times?

I’m taken by Stuart Bell’s response, and indeed the others’, to my submarines piece from yesterday, including the idea the two captains rose through their turrets to exchange insurance details.

Stuart closes the torpedo compartment on me – the one marked with a “Ban the Bomb” label. But in their haste to brush over this incident the MoD’s defence has been much the same: “Don’t wory old chap, a nuclear explosion would have been impossible.”

But it isn’t simply the matter of that particular danger. Surely it is the fact that this, our celebrated “ultimate defence”, has been reduced to the realms of farce. Indeed, if what the MoD has disclosed reveals even half the truth, it is pretty bad.

Why won’t they let us see what is our sub, paid for with our taxes? Telephoto lenses to the fore in Faslane. But even they have failed to reveal what is being repaired of the ship.

If the MoD has nothing to hide in this ridiculous incident, they should show all – and TODAY!

We thought the collision of two satellites in outer space last week unlikely enough. Now we have the absurd spectacle of two submarines, one British, one French, so completely in their “Secret Squirreledness” that they’ve actually collided with each other.

So secret, indeed, was the collision that we’ve only heard about it nearly two weeks after the event. Each was nuclear powered and, more to the point, each was nuclear armed. Jolly funny.

Not so fast. There was, of course, no loss of life – but there well could have been. And it throws into sharp relief what Mr Obama has been telling us, that the availability and quantity of nuclear arms around the world remains a dangerous threat.

I’m writing this on the heels of a briefing on climate change from quasi-governmental sources which, frankly, scares me rigid. It would seem the world has very little time in which to gather round and execute a global endeavour to reverse what we are doing.

What is extraordinary is that the capacity to do so is hugely enhanced by the current breakdown in the old economic order. Yet is not the mindset here that we’ll get through it and then everything will be just the same as it ever was?

There is another strand, however, that recognises that if the upcoming London summit of the G20 nations can be galvanised into recognising it, it would be possible to use green technologies and opportunities to produce an economy which is both environmentally and monetarily sustainable.

The London summit feeds through to the Copenhagen summit in December. The funny thing is, London is seen as simply about the economic crisis, whilst it should be seen as embracing climate change as well. And Copenhagen is seen as climate change only, whilst it should be seen as part of the mechanism for rebooting the global economy.

Now, where did those subs come in? Oh, yes, they could have just detonated the lot of us. And then where would we be?