We actually saw a group of uniformed men in a Toyota Land Cruiser, who according to the general were just going to get water. But they jumped out of their vehicle further along the road, looted a hut, and burned it. It didn’t get better and it didn’t get worse, although the violence did seem to peak in December and January. In fact, we jokingly said we couldn’t find a ceasefire, and that if someone could tell us where it was we would monitor it.On the first day I was on the ground there had been an attack, and on the last day before I left, there had been an attack. There a few by the rebels, but the majority of those are on police positions for the purpose of gaining weapons and ammunition.One of the worst attacks witnessed by my team of eight observers was on the village of Labado in southern Darfur in December.

It is a one-sided conflict: according to what our teams saw, between 90 and 95 per cent of the attacks are by the government and their allied Arab militias who have driven more than a million people from their homes.The majority are attacks on civilian targets and villagers. In the six months I spent in Darfur as a “ceasefire observer”, I saw entire villages burned down with Sudanese locked inside their huts.
I saw villagers with their eyes or ears plucked out, or men who had bled to death after being castrated. I interviewed women who had been gang-raped while out collecting firewood.I saw evidence of summary executions. I walked through a field where it was impossible to move without stepping on human bones.The killings in Darfur, described by the UN last year as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, have been going on for two years now. While the big powers have been debating whether the war crimes being perpetrated in Sudan’s western region are genocide, and how to punish them, the massacres of the mainly black African population by the Arab militias have continued unabated.From the day of my arrival in September, to my departure last month, there was really no change in the situation on the ground. He himself has spent his entire post-pubescent life chasing audiences, whether as school actor, college singer, barrister or politician, and his envy of Oxford contemporaries who have made fortunes is well recorded.Somehow, for all the mixing with presidents and monarchs, for all the standing ovations in Congress, he has stayed the ing?e whose head is forever turned by proximity to the rich and celebrated. In a way, this is rather endearing, and since we live in a celebocracy, it adroitly captures the spirit of the age.And yet, and yet …

Why he insists in prolonging the agony here is increasingly mystifying, but those of us grappling with a mid-life crisis won’t be able to swallow very much more of this unwitting lionising of Tory Boy.. The miracle is that he doesn’t appear alongside Peter Kay, little Ronnie Corbett and Bernie Clifton’s comedy ostrich in the video for Is This The Way To Amarillo?Those known to the PM as “the sneerers” view all this as a calculated attempt to seduce the electorate by association with those who fill tabloid gossip columns and Hello! spreads, but I suspect this reverence for fame and wealth is one of the few genuine things about him. there is clearly something indigestible, even faintly tragic, about a man with no reverse gear who can spend eight years merrily ignoring all the evidence of medicine and common sense, and take eight minutes to cave in to a well-meaning young chap off the telly.There are tens of millions of dollars in lecture fees, endless top-of-the-bill slots on Letterman and Leno, and the adulation of a grateful hyperpower awaiting Tony Blair the minute he jacks it in.All he reveres and desires is there across the Atlantic, where he can be a superstar in his own right, and not a hanger-on. Only, you suspect, if they each had a popular TV show, £15m in the bank and at least one grandma known to them as Tiger.Mr Blair’s adoration of those twin modern deities, celebrity and liquid wealth, is, of course, nothing knew. Within months of taking power, he was smarming up to Noel Gallagher with quips about cocaine use at that hideous Cool Britannia bash, and ever since has proved himself the champion stage door Johnny of global statesmen.In recent weeks alone, he has posed with Bono and Vera Duckworth from Coronation Street, who seemed to recoil from his kiss, and taken time away from the cares of state to ring a departing radio DJ to wish him luck. Even if so, one wonders whether a team of the country’s most respected nutritionists, working round the clock and with a petition signed by ten million, would have brought the seeds of this lengthy project to such a swift and juicy fruition. For whether or not he chooses to serve it with a jus of vinegary moral outrage and a rich tapenade of concerned parenthood, Jamie Oliver’s culinary status is a red herring.

This startling epiphany is about the Prime Minister’s puppyish love for celebrity, and nothing else.Were Mr Oliver’s reputation as a cook even vaguely relevant to this volte-face, we would be obliged to dwell on the menu at his own restaurant, Fifteen, in Nathan Barley’s home patch of Hoxton. The Blairs themselves love eating at Fifteen, once formally denying that an enormous bill there had been graciously waived. If that denial can be believed (and it did come from the No 10 press office), one begins to see how having to halve the rental on their Bayswater house must have hurt, for a dinner at Fifteen would leave the family budget in trouble for a long time.A glance at the restaurant’s website reveals that the vegetarian tasting menu is £50 a head, while no ?a carte main course squeezes in under the £20 barrier. When criticised for a pricing policy which has struck restaurant critics as cheeky for a chef who is good but far from great, Mr Oliver explains that all profits go to charity (his own admirable one, which trains young people in deprived urban areas).Even so, while removing our hats to this ersatz Robin Hoodery, and without doubting his sincerity for a moment, it does seem mildly ironic to find a geezer who charges £10 for tomatoes on toast (“sunny winter tomatoes on bruschetta”, to be technical) and £24 for a small fillet of sea bass, lecturing the nation about the need to spend an extra few pence per child per lunch.The Prime Minister sees no contradiction, however, and declares that “we have been working on this for a long time”.