Poor Carlo, more skinned against

Move over Naomi Campbell, here comes the Grim Ripa. The supermodel - recently sacked as spokesperson by an animal welfare group for modelling fur after insisting she would rather "go naked" - is giving way to a former EU environment commissioner.

Carlo Ripa di Meana (who got his sobriquet from the British officials he was continually dragging through the European Court) appears apparently nude in bed with his wife, Marina, on anti-fur posters throughout Italy. A thought bubble above her head opines of other women: "Poor them, they buy furs because they don't have anybody who warms them up."

This may be unfamiliar territory for Carlo, who left Brussels to become Italy's environment minister and is now a Green Party MEP, but not for the flamboyant Marina. The 55-year-old grandmother seems to drop her clothes as regularly as the war-time cartoon heroine Jane - and, like her, has had her own comic strip, not to mention a telephone chat-line on her life and loves.

Last year, she posed naked in newspaper advertisements inviting readers to scratch away her bikini line to reveal "a surprise". (It turned out to be the Freephone number of an anti-fur campaign.) The year before, she got the French ambassador fired by appearing at a Bastille Day reception sans culottes to condemn nuclear testing.

None of this seems to bother the couple's five pugs, called, with appropriate environmental correctness, Plum, Tangerine, Onion, Pepper and Radish: two are in the poster produced by the ubiquitous Saatchi and Saatchi. But their actress daughter, Lucrezia, has, pleasingly if poisonously, done a Naomi and modelled fur coats. She has previously claimed her mother had "lots" of furs. "When she burned a fur in the street in a protest it was just an old one. The others were in a bank vault and still are there."

8 Nothing like this could, of course, happen here - and not just because the people our politicians are found with in bed so rarely turn out to be their wives. But the environment has continued to climb up the election agenda, such as it is with all the sex and sleaze.

On Thursday, the Conservatives launched a separate "green" manifesto. It is, admittedly, more remarkable for its existence than for its content: three-quarters of the paper it is printed on is recycled, and so is a much higher proportion of its pledges, which nearly all rehash previous government commitments. But this is the first time any political party has produced such a thing during an election campaign: the realisation seems to be dawning that, despite the old adage, there are votes in sewage after all.

Again unprecedentedly, the three main parties' environment chiefs turned up for a special debate on Tuesday, the first of its kind on any subject this election.

8 Nevertheless, something is happening which could have huge impacts on all our pockets. All three main parties, to differing extents, now back "green" taxes. The Conservatives have brought one in already, on dumping waste, and half-promised another on water pollution: Gordon Brown has endorsed them, in principle, for Labour: and the Liberal Democrats have worked out detailed proposals.

The rationale is seductive. At present, through income tax and national insurance, we tax jobs (which we need more of) at between 33 and 50 per cent, while the use of energy and other resources (which should be conserved) is often subsidised. Taxes on jobs have helped to increase labour productivity 20-fold, creating structural unemployment. Study after study shows that switching them to the use of energy could achieve similar efficiencies, sharply cut pollution, and create millions of jobs.

This could get governments off the hook of how to raise revenue while reducing income tax - and nearer to fulfilling the maxim of Colbert, Louis XIV's great finance minister: "The art of taxation consists of plucking the goose so as to get the most feathers with the least hissing."

8 There was cynicism, too, at the "green" debate where one participant announced that, after years in parliament, he had difficulty speaking while sitting down. "Funny that," murmured a voice at the back, "they don't seem to have any problem when lying."