It is not about whether Mrs Duncan Smith worked 25 hours a week for her husband from her Buckinghamshire home.The move to oust her husband is no figment of the media's fevered imagination. (Surprise, surprise, Mr Brown penned an article for the paper two days later.) The media might also have looked more closely at the split in the Cabinet over David Blunkett's plans for identity cards.Having said that, the Tory story was real and it deserved its prominence. They are at odds over Europe and pensions, and there was a needless spat between their aides over tax after the Prime Minister committed the sin of giving an interview to The Times, which the Chancellor regards as his house journal. After an uncomfortable summer, ministers are enjoying a rare spell out of the limelight.One senior Whitehall official told me: "There are lots of turf wars going on in the Government, but you guys are missing them because you're obsessed with Tories."True, without the Betsygate affair, the media might have made much more of the widening divide between Mr Blair and Gordon Brown. True, the Government has had an undeservedly easy ride in the past seven days.A story from the Hutton Inquiry, confirming that Tony Blair chaired the decisive meeting that led to the unmasking of the government scientist David Kelly, was knocked off most front pages by the turmoil over whether the Tory leader had paid his wife too much when she worked as his secretary Which really matters more, you might well ask. I have spent most of the past week patrolling the corridors at Westminster in search of Tory MPs and ringing known dissidents who want to bring down Iain Duncan Smith. In a week when the Commons returned for a potentially difficult session for the Government, with revolts looming on foundation hospitals, university top-up fees and calls for a judicial inquiry into the Iraq war, my week was devoted almost exclusively to the febrile Conservative Party and its beleaguered leader.Now some people, Mr Duncan Smith included, would argue that I had got my priorities all wrong.

They speak of the paradox at the core of this pessimistic Polish pope. His heart reaches out to people, but his head fears that the consequences of such empathy might be to compromise Catholic identity. In the end history may judge that to have been a greater ailment than the physical afflictions which old age has heaped upon him in his final days.. (He has made more saints than all the previous popes put together to create contemporary models of holiness, but they have been chosen to fit his ideological world view - which is why the founder of Opus Dei is now one and Oscar Romero, the martyr of El Salvador, isn't.)Some put such contradictions down to the increasing conservatism of old age, or to fin de r?me opportunism among reactionary Vatican officials But the truth goes deeper. But he has suppressed theologians working on inter-faith dialogue. He has also annoyed Jews by supporting a Catholic convent at Auschwitz and beatifying Pius IX, the pope who kidnapped a Jewish boy. He showed significant new openness in asking other Christian denominations how the papal ministry could be exercised in ways more acceptable to them, but then cold-shouldered or disciplined Catholics who took up the invitation and wrote on the subject.There have been great gestures towards other faiths.

He has been particularly keen on rapprochement with the Orthodox; he went to Athens and issued an unprecedented apology for 1,200 years of bad relations - but then ruined the effect by insisting that they cannot be called a "sister church" since Rome has to be the mother. John Paul has not just refused to ordain women but has banned them from even discussing the idea. Nor has he elevated women to non-priestly jobs; there is no female head, for example, of a Vatican department.In the wider world the Pope has been a strong supporter of democracy in Eastern Europe, but is less keen on it in the West, where he brands it majoritarianism. And though he speaks fiercely against the impact of massive global injustice on the poor he has, under pressure from the Catholic right, approved the deregulation of financial markets. Moreover those who have tried through Liberation Theology to do in Latin America what Solidarity did in Poland have been investigated and suppressed, their seminaries closed and their sympathetic bishops replaced by ultra-right conservatives. (The appointment of such bishops has slowly swept the entire Catholic world.) There has been support from Rome for dictators like Augusto Pinochet, and the only nation in the world to recognise the military regime that seized power from the democratically elected president (and former priest) Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 1991 was the Vatican.Inconsistencies have been there too in matters ecumenical.