George, meet my good friend Cliff

We learn from the London Times website that Tony Blair will be taking a vacation from all those pesky WMD questions in Barbados. And that he'll be staying at the home of Sir Cliff Richard. Who?, our millions of American readers ask. Well, he's one of those people that your trendy British friends won't be mentioning in conversation anytime soon.

It's a favourite occupation of the lazy British or American journalist with an expense account to do a sneering story about aging French rocker Johnny Hallyday, who (a) hasn't ever really gotten over Elvis and (b) has never really made it big outside France. Johnny is never out of the news in France, most recently for having played a birthday concert for Bernadette Chirac, wife of Number 3 in SPECTRE (he has Osama on one side and Kim Jong-Il at the other at the big meetings). But anyway, the tone of the UK/US stories is always something along the lines of: guy still doing late 50s rock, now in his 50s himself, loved at home but almost unknown abroad, those silly French.

Well then, step forward Cliff Richard -- who matches this profile in most respects, with an additional overlay of now being a born-again Christian and having that reflected in many anti-septic albums of recent years. The British adulation only grows. If you're planning on driving yourself into insanity, we recommend this album, but any of the later ones should do the trick. And finally, it occurs to us that maybe Cliff could finally get that big break in the US. Someone whose cultural references never really moved beyond the 1950s, and now a born again Christian: if it's good enough for Tony, then surely it's good enough for Tony's best pal Dubya. DC to Barbados is a shorter flight than DC to Crawford. It's all too easy to visualise.