I was hoping that I would be able to avoid writing about the now scandalous R700 000 "Gravy Plane" holiday trip to the United Arab Emirates, taken recently by our highly regarded Deputy President, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, her husband, the wife of a Cabinet minister and several of Ms Mlambo-Ngcuka’s own and her secretary’s children.

The trouble with writing anything about Cape Town is that a lengthy qualifying preamble is usually required, for the place is a vast cobweb of purple fiction and banal squalor that too easily seduces those who arrive there looking for meaning, or a samoosa, or meaning in a samoosa.

Of all the African leaders celebrating the successful negotiation of their new-look union’s toughest diplomatic hurdle, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe was the most joyful.This is hardly surprising, since his peers in the 53-nation African Union have once again let him off the hook.

The story of the British diplomats caught using a transceiver hidden inside a rock in Moscow as their dead-letter drop would not, in itself, make a novel. What we know is only the tip of the iceberg; the novel is the rest of the iceberg. Who were the diplomats collecting information from?