Westminster Gleanings is becoming regrettably dislocated from a Westminster that is greyer and more anonymously foreign than in the years of the ‘grey man’ himself, John Major. His cabinet was full of colourful political heavyweights, and, agree or disagree with their policies, it is hard not to look back with nostalgia at a group of intellectually brilliant statesmen that included Douglas Hurd, Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Malcolm Rifkind; however poorly some of their more peripheral colleagues may have behaved. Amid the sleaze brickbats flung at the time and Major’s apparent loss of control, he remained a big enough man to be forgiven his lapse of taste in having an affaire with the gorgonic Edwina Currie.

Gordon Brown is a big man too but in a different mould. He squats atop a cabinet of Lilliputians, so flattened by his deadening weight that their individual gifts — and no one could doubt the intellectual abilities of the Milliband brothers for instance — are dissipated under his shadow. Perhaps it is all an age thing, my age, but our current crop of leading politicians fail to shine out from the mass and my awareness of individual politicians is further dulled by distaste for the shrill voices, poor speaking and sheer unattractiveness of many of those holding office, particularly, I hate to admit, the Labour women. There was a photographic article in one of the Sunday papers a week or so ago comparing our female ministers with their ultra-chic French counterparts. Really, our lot looked like toads.

I escaped the dreary post mortem on a dull but sensibly do-little Alistair Darling budget to meet Indian friends in Venice for the weekend at the end of an Indo/Italian media seminar in that most remarkable city. James, now Jan Morris, wrote of her long-term passion for the place in her book, Venice, but describes her first reaction to the city, when she was in charge of the British army-requisitioned Venetian motorboats at the end of World War II, in her anthology, Fifty Years of Europe, An Album: “Venice was a dream then, hushed and empty in the aftermath of war, still imbued with the melancholy that so captivated its Victorian visitors, and which bewitched me too.”

Venice is still a dream, albeit noisy and full, but on the balcony of my high-ceilinged and palatial bedroom in a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal, late at night when the crowds of workers have disappeared to their homes on the mainland and the tourists to their hotels, the exquisite melancholy of the place and a wistful sense of lost greatness still pervade the sombre air as the ancient buildings struggle to keep their footing in an ongoing battle against the sea.

Little time for melancholy though, on this visit, as we greedily absorbed the greatest treasures of the city. Memories of earlier visits and reactions to extraordinary works of art, culture and cuisine were enhanced by my friends’ well-informed appreciation and understanding of historical, architectural and artistic masterworks and their less blasé attitude to the familiar treasures on our European doorstep. When young, I used to stay with my grandmother who spent August in the old luxury of the Cipriani Hotel, isolated in its gardens on the island of Giudecca opposite the Piazza San Marco. By the time I was her occasional companion, her sightseeing took the form of a launch ride to Harry’s Bar for the ubiquitous Bellini cocktail and a brief shopping trip for sandals in Ferragamo before lying by the pool and endless bridge games with a crowd of British Venetian regulars. In those days the expatriate community in Venice included Oswald and Diana Moseley and their great friends Prince and Princess Clary. Prince Clary, who was born in 1887 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and remembered as a child meeting the Empress Elizabeth, was, at nearly ninety, one of the most charming and beautiful men I have ever met.

More sights, sounds and tastes connected me unexpectedly with past generations. A desk in my bedroom had belonged to Cecil Beaton, the photographer who chronicled international society from the early Twenties until his death in 1980. He photographed my grandmother and my mother on several occasions in changing eras. My grandmother, photographed on her fortieth birthday with flowing hair and youthful complexion, looked more like a Dionysian nymph than a mature woman, already a grandmother.

My mother at the same age is, on the other hand, pictured looking severe in her role as party vice-chairman at the Conservative central office, only her rescued mongrel dog on her knee reducing her executive dignity. Whether Beaton wrote his famous diaries at the desk, I have no idea, I always imagine him writing in bed. But when, as a close friend of both my maternal and paternal grandparents, he attended my wedding close to his home in Wiltshire the year before he died, he gave me as a convenient wedding present, the metal pencil case, picked up in passing from his desk, that now sits on mine. Cecil himself had a miserable first trip to Venice in 1926 when he proposed to infiltrate visiting high society. He wrote in his diary at the time: “I like publicity and its necessary to me and no one has taken any notice of me in Venice — treated me as dirt.”

Today, with little of the past elegance of Venetian inhabitants and visitors on show and the famous bars and teashops in the Piazza selling overpriced cocktails to profligate tourists, Beaton would not have been impressed by the lycra generation doing Venice even had he appreciated the importance of tourism to keep the city alive and afloat. It is only the hidden shops and restaurants and the markets known to habitués that retain a particular atmosphere of the place, although the tradition of craftsmanship of the city continues in sympathetic and skilled restorations of great works of art; the preservation of ancient skills such as the handloom silk weaving of the Bevilaqua family and the skills of the Murano glass blowers; and a continuance of the love for beauty that carries the visitor from the 12th century, through the High Renaissance, and, to my mind, the overblown frills of mannerism and the baroque, on to the glorious 20th century riches in the Guggenheim Museum. The present-day opening of the Palazzo Grassi and the ongoing development of the Punta della Dogana as exhibition sites for the contemporary collection of the French billionaire, Francois Pinault, can be celebrated as part of the generational artistic life of the city.

We attended a gala dinner in the Palazzo Grassi where, as with all food produced on a large scale, the Venetian specialities carried the merest echo of their unique regional quality. In our hosts’ home we ate the real thing; magnificent seafood risottos, just-in-season asparagus bought in the market that morning and rich dolce latte cheese with local salads dressed in lucent olive oil from the unnamed tins of carefully sourced small and secret farms in Umbria and Tuscany. In the market, too, were small bunches of bruscandoli, wild hop-shoots, described by the late food-writer Elizabeth David in one of her beautifully researched essays. In May, 1969, she visited the Locanda Cipriani, an offshoot of the hotel, on the island of Torcello in the Venice lagoon, and ate an “extraordinary and subtle risotto” of a vegetable named by her elegant neighbours, the Isotta Fraschinis, makers of the most elegant motor cars of the Twenties and Thirties, as wild asparagus. She later discovered they were hop-shoots and believed to be of therapeutic value. In a book published in 1583, Baldassare Pisanelli of Bologna wrote of “the best of all edible herbs” for “in truth the benefits they confer are most marvellous and immediate... the decoction of flowers and leaves clears bad smells and cures the itch. The syrup is miraculous in choleric fevers and the plague.” These do suggest a most remarkable vegetable but we ran out of time and out of appetite for that subtle risotto on this visit.

I left Venice sparkling in her past glories and early spring sunshine to return to newspapers full of events in Tibet and vilifying our five years involvement in Iraq. The newly published memoirs of Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, serialized in The Guardian, add to the public colour and fascination of the man whose greatest mistake was to take us there. Our current prime minister meanwhile remains dourly hidden behind the closed metaphorical doors of the Presbyterian mindset. Perhaps he should be dosed with some of those miraculous Venetian bruscandoli.