LET us spare a thought for Euan Blair. In the middle of the crossfire about his parents' hypocrisy and double standards, the poor kid is - at the moment - in an absolutely no win situation.

He's been in it since somebody let slip that he'd been offered a place at Trinity College, Oxford. That immediately sparked a debate about Oxbridge entrance, privacy and privilege, which meant that we were all unlikely to forget that Euan had been offered a place.

And that means he probably has to get straight As in his A-levels. Whatever you think about falling exam standards ( and let's not go down that road for a moment), getting three As is still no easy achievement.

Knowing you have to get them piles the pressure on even the brightest and most level-headed 18-year-old. Doing it in the full view of journalists and critics isn't going to make it easier. Even if Euan were to get into a university as good as Bristol or Durham, we would all know it would be a second choice.

And heaven help him if he completely messed up and had to go through Clearing. Unlike any ordinary sixth former who'd made a pig's ear of his exams - and it happens even to the brightest - he would not be able to pretend that actually, all along, he'd had a burning ambition to go to the University of Blogtown on two Es and a cub scout badge in firelighting. We would know better.

Just as he's getting over his post GCSE escapades, he'd be branded forever as an Oxbridge failure.

So you can see, can't you, why he or his mum or dad thought it wouldn't hurt to have a bit of extra tuition. Just to be on the safe side...

And now that's public knowledge too.

If Euan fails now he's doubly damned - the best of state and private education, civil servants helping with his homework and he STILL can't hack it.

And if he does well and gets in, well, with all that background, it's only what we would expect. No glory there then.

The lad is on a hiding to nothing. Let's just hope he's already disillusioned enough with the Press to ignore it all, shrug his shoulders and just get on with having a decent summer holiday.

Because the chances are that he will get into Oxford. And when all the fuss has died down and we will barely remember Tony Blair, let alone his son, Euan will have the benefit of an Oxford education - and the last laugh on us all.

THE good news is that irritating beep of the mobile phone ring tone could soon be over. New technology means we shall soon be able to get polyphonic ring tomes - ie more than one irritating little squawk at a time.

I speak as a seriously sad case. Not only does my phone have a Harry Potter cover (a gift from my sons) but it also has an Archers ring tone (a choice made of my own free will).

Still, instead of the basic squeaky dum dee dum dee dum dee dum, I look forward soon to having the full orchestrated version.

At least it's not likely to get confused with anyone else's.

Critics of the abortion pill RU486 claim that it is likely to make abortions too easy, especially for teenagers and will encourage a rise in careless unwanted pregnancies.

Unlikely.

In a surgical abortion, a girl can close her mind to what is happening to her. It is all over in a matter of minutes. It could never have happened. Easy to block it out.

But a medical abortion has a built-in 48-hour delay for a start - all that time for waiting and thinking and mind changing - and then produces what is, in effect, a very early labour with all the mess and emotion that that entails. Hard to close your mind - or your memory - to that one.

After going through that, the chances of a young girl wanting to go through it again I guess would be minimal. She'll make sure her friends know too.

The critics might yet be confounded.

While we can destroy life in a moment, we can create it too - although not quite as easily.

Fertility clinics can attempt the impossible and often succeed. They manipulate the very act of creation. Science has reached so far that we can almost play God.

And then someone takes the wrong dish or the wrong test tube and the whole thing is scuppered.

The case of the black twins born to a white mother will probably come down to simple error. The sort of mistake that proves, however clever we are, however much we have pushed the boundaries of knowledge, we are still human.

And who knows - maybe human error is a built-in design fault, devised by God to stop us getting too big for our boots.

DAVID Beckham turned up at young Damian Hurley's christening sporting pink nail varnish.

What a mistake. Surely everyone knows it's blue for a boy?

Published: 10/07/2002