In the Conservative manifesto, six pledges designated as ‘the simple longings of the British people’ appeared in facsimile handwriting: ‘more police, cleaner hospitals, lower taxes, school discipline, controlled immigration and accountability’. Details included an undertaking to match Labour spending on the NHS, schools, transport and foreign aid, while spending 1 per cent less in total
It is now clear that the most important event of the 2005 general election took place before campaigning formally started, when Downing Street aides travelled to Scotland to broker a deal between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown over the Easter weekend. The settlement was reached on the Chancellor’s terms, as Wednesday’s Labour election manifesto suggested.
The nurses and midwives at St Thomas’s Hospital this week faced a rewarding task: to bring Donald James Kennedy into the world. They could have been as slapdash as they had liked, even pulled the poor chap out by the ears — knowing full well that nothing would have prevented his father bounding down the
