“Is that a rendition order in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”

By Alison Rowat in The Herald

Condoleezza Rice is expected to pop the question when she arrives in Britain for her visit to Jack Straw’s constituency. The world’s most powerful woman and most eligible bachelorette might come out with it at the airport. Or she could wait till they are in Blackburn itself. But when the moment is right the US secretary of state will look into the British foreign secretary’s eyes and utter the immortal words: “Is that a rendition order in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”

Expect a lot more of this as the love-in between Straw and Rice spreads across the weekend papers like an oil slick. When Straw visited her last October in her home town of Birmingham, Alabama, she took him to a football game and to a family dinner. He will escort her to what is billed as “a major industrial site” (Blackburn men know how to show a girl a good time), a school, and then on to Liverpool, home of Rice’s favourite band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Or it might have been The Beatles. Anyway, all will be revealed as Rice and Straw skip their way, hand in hand, through fields of swaying anti-war protesters.

So far, her visit to a mosque has been called off due to the threat of protests, and the host of a concert she is due to attend has pulled out. Faced with this level of discontent, any other pair would call the whole thing off and stay in London. Not these two. Not the Warrior Princess and the Straw Man.

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