How wonderful. I have been attacked in the Guardian.

I buy the Guardian as I find it useful professionally - within two minutes of looking at it there's always something there to annoy me. But somehow I missed this treat on Saturday:

A literary critic writes: Last week you listed someone called Stephen Pollard as an admirer of Donald Rumsfeld. Please tell us more.

Smallweed replies with a smirk designed to suggest a benign intention: Gladly. This Pollard, once research director of the Fabian Society and regarded (at least by himself) as one of the originators of New Labour, is a professional rantsmith or spewer out of abrasive opinions who's been having much recent success in the broadsheets. My monitoring service spotted an average of 5.75 rants a month in the Times, Independent and Daily and Sunday Telegraph between April and the end of July, but Steve bumped that up to a mighty 10 (four in the Times, four in the Independent and two in the Sunday Telegraph) in August. His subjects over the full five months have included: Self-haters who want the west to fail (Times, April 1); If Syria isn't next on America's hit list, it certainly should be (Telegraph, April 15); I know that Rummy's my hero (Times, April 16); Nauseating hypocrisy from the axis of weasels (Times May 9, the weasels being opponents of the war in Iraq); Juice-bar lefties kick the poor and sick out of the NHS (Times, June 4); Opponents of military trials are friends of al-Qaida (Times, July 14) - and so on. I expect you've got the message by now. Other targets fearlessly skewered by pop-up Pollard include people who go to the Proms - noisy, fidgety, intolerant (sic) and smelly; people who complain about the new directory enquiries system; the spate of summer festivals (a waste of the public's money); and David Hockney (Steve's four-year-old nephew can do better than that). There is also, I'm told, a website.

An arboriculturist writes: This kind of sudden proliferation is always unhealthy. One gets the same problem with trees, but there, there's a simple solution. We pollard them.

Nice to see I'm getting on the Guardianistas' nerves (although it would of course be impolite of me to point out that, ranter as I may be, I used to write occasionally for their wretched paper). I do feel a bit guilty, though. Are my columns really that compelling that Smallweed has to study them in such depth? I hope he didn't miss the summer on my account.

Smallweed - it used to be David McKie; I'm not sure if it's still him - makes reference to something he wrote the previous week about me, so naturally I looked it up:

Even the present state of Iraq cannot wipe the smirk off the face of Donald Rumsfeld, who's been to inspect Baghdad and thinks things are getting better. We haven't seen so much of Rummy recently, have we? And that can't be due to the lack of news from Iraq. Now the US administration seems eager to come to terms with discredited outfits such as the UN or even lesser breeds such as the Old Europeans, who Rummy has repeatedly told us no longer matter. Even his UK cheerleaders - Mark Steyn (Daily and Sunday Telegraph), Michael Gove (Times) and Stephen Pollard (whoever will have him) - no longer enthuse. Could it be that, as they contemplate the now overpowering evidence that the Pentagon totally failed to prepare for what might happen after "mission accomplished", they are coming round to Smallweed's view that Rummy, though by common consent a clever fellow, is one of the world's great fools?

Well, just to put Mr Smallweed's mind at rest, I most certainly do still enthuse. And I do wish these Guardian chaps would do some basic research. No list of Rummy cheerleaders is complete without Matthew d'Ancona, whose column this week begins with the truism that

As so often, Donald Rumsfeld was right,

based on his opposition to a US dossier on bin Laden and the implications for the Britush dossier on Iraq,

and ends thus:

The resentment among many Labour backbenchers who voted with the Prime Minister in March because of his reassurances about intelligence is palpable (and is one of the reasons why, as we report today, the Government whips have told Mr Blair that he cannot win the vote on top-up fees). In the party's rank and file, the sense of betrayal grows daily: small wonder that Number 10 is quietly panicking about Labour's annual conference in two weeks.

None of these problems are insuperable for the Prime Minister; they were, however, avoidable. "Frankly, he should never have issued the wretched dossier or gone on about what the spies were saying," one MP close to Mr Blair said to me. "Tony always wants to be loved and to persuade every single person that's he right. He should have said less, and left well alone." That, of course, would have gone against the Blair grain. But it is true, nonetheless. It just goes to show what happens when you ignore the wisdom of Rumsfeld.

No truer words have ever been spoken. Ignore the wisdom of Rumsfeld at your peril.