Monday Mr Maude ecstatic about the polls. Says it’s the most significant narrowing he has seen in all his years of being miserable about the possibility of the Tories ever winning again. ‘Only four points ahead! We’re doomed! DOOMED I tell you!’ All the way to the Panic Room he was shouting: ‘Consigned to the
Andrew Motion’s tenure as Poet Laureate is about to end, and the search for a successor has begun. It is accompanied with the usual tidal wave of claptrap about this not being ‘the sort of job which any real poet would want’ and the importance of not involving public opinion in the choice. What is
It is one of the oddities of politics that a Labour government can sometimes get away with announcing policies which, had they come from the mouth of a Conservative minister, would have provoked howls of anger. So it is with welfare reform. Whenever Mrs Thatcher’s government proposed to make benefit claimants actually do something for
Silence over Mumbai Sir: If Britain is still a safe haven for Lashkar-e-Taiba and Deobandi sympathisers (‘The global force behind Mumbai’s agony in our midst’, 6 December), this must place a big question mark on the government’s policy of dealing with home-grown terrorism. The current policy seems to rest on two assumptions: namely that home-grown
