John McCain

, the Republican candidate for president in 2008, has a
lot to answer for. By choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, he
elevated a governor whom no one outside Alaslca had heard of into
a national figure on the American scene. And now it appears that her sense of her own importance
knows no bounds. The most recent example is her expenses demands for a trip to talk to students at
California State University. Six pages of a contract, found in a dustbin, reveal these demands, which
include first-class flights or a private aircraft which "must be a Lear 60 or larger", three deluxe hotel
rooms, the provision of a "laptop computer and printer (fully stocked with paper! and high-speed
internet" and - no detail being too small for her attention - two bottles of still water, unopened, with
bendy straws beside them. These requirements, as Alexander Chancellor says in The Guardian, ate
not normal. "They are the demands of a person with a huge sense of her own entitlement."

How ridiculous that a woman who won over the party faithful by pretending to be a no-nonsense
"hockey mom" on the side of ordinary, hard-working Americans should behave like this - while
getting up to $100,000 for a single speech and being greeted everywhere with fawning adulation by
Republican activists. Sarah Palin has become a diva, as spoilt and pampered as Mariah Carey or
Oprah Winfrey. Our battered MPs. enduring brickbats everywhere they go for _
their exoenses claims, must wonder how on earth she oeisawav with it.