London Owe Berlusconi

The culture secretary Tessa Jowell may be wishing her husband had never met Silvio Berlusconi but Tony Blair’s assiduous courting of the Italian prime minister on behalf of the London 2012 Olympic bid will have done little to dissuade her from associating with the media and finance mogul.

Early in the Olympic campaign Italy’s five IOC members were identified as crucial to London’s chances of success, primarily because Mario Pescante, Berlusconi’s sports minister, is the influential president of the Association of European Olympic Committees, a body comprising about half the IOC electorate. Jowell, the sports minister Richard Caborn and the bid leaders Lord Coe and Keith Mills met Pescante on numerous occasions, but the most telling contribution came from the British prime minister.

Insiders in London say Blair spoke to Berlusconi specifically about the London bid at least twice in the run-up to the final vote, and strategists were told the Italian PM "fully appreciated" the importance of the bid to his friend.

The IOC’s final ballot is secret but it is hard to imagine London achieving its four-vote margin of victory without Italian support.

Roeder bent on Benton

Graeme Souness was fond of blaming Newcastle United’s rash of injuries on the fibre-and-sand surface of the Tyneside club’s training ground in Benton, but the caretaker manager Glenn Roeder has no similar qualms about the facility. Five months after Souness moved first-team training to the Newcastle academy, then run by Roeder, training and press conferences have been relocated back to Benton. Tellingly Roeder has repeatedly said he is not prepared to rush players back from injury, in contrast to the less cautious Souness.

Clarke joke hits the nail

Charles Clarke invoked the motto of the 2006 World Cup, "A time to make friends", several times during yesterday’s launch of Home Office anti-hooligan measures, but although the Norwich City-supporting home secretary is doubtless welcome among his new chums in Germany he may be less warmly greeted on his next trip to France. Highlighting declining arrest figures since the 1998 World Cup, Clarke said the number of English supporters detained at that tournament was "estimated at 800 or 900, because they got to 200 and then stopped. The French can’t count that well". Clarke was joking, but privately key police and Home Office figures believe that over-reaction by French police in 1998 and the Belgian authorities two years later were largely responsible for significant outbreaks of disorder.

Full steam for Bavaria

British Transport Police are to provide 29 of the 44 British officers who will be on World Cup duty in Germany this summer and the jobs are proving extremely popular. Officials at the new football policing unit have been overwhelmed by applications from officers keen to swap the Great Western main line for Bavaria. Meanwhile Stephen Thomas, the respected British police commander in Germany, has a background in traffic policing. He will doubtless enjoy traveling on the unrestricted German autobahns, having been prosecuted for speeding at more than 100mph while he was responsible for traffic policing in Manchester.

Happier birthday, Sepp

The rapprochement between Richard Caborn and Sepp Blatter seems to be complete after the sports minister recorded a happy birthday video message to mark the Fifa president’s 70th birthday today. The pair fell out spectacularly last year when Blatter, pictured left, threatened to pull out of discussions about the European football review, only to change his mind after a frank exchange of views with Caborn. Fifa apparatchiks have pulled out all the stops to celebrate Blatter’s big day, not least adorning the cover of the latest edition of Fifa magazine with the great man’s photograph.