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Sadly Bob, a lot of the views you assign to the far-right are increasingly becoming mainstream Conservative thought, and it will get worse as the malignant presence of Lynton Crosby continues to spread like a virus through the body politic.

The amount of coverage a former politician gets should tie-in with how big they became on the political scene and how much of an impact they made. Therefore if a former senior minister deserves a certain amount of coverage, a former ex Prime Minister should get even more so. Exceptions to this are people like John Major - he basically retired from politics after the 1997 disaster when the Tories were obliterated at that election. If just having been a minister in a Government many years ago justifies you endlessly appearing on Question Time and on TV news programmes to talk about everything happening in politics both domestically and internationally, for ever more, then every ex minster from the last few decades would be all over the TV on a weekly basis. They aren't and haven't been. Tony Benn has a huge ego and was/is much more prolific than is deserved.

I would like to see her do good. I just hope she doesn't make it harder for the Police to go after people they think might be about to commit a crime. If that happens then innocent people are in danger, and that can't be right.

I would say that by their own actions over the years, the Met has done more than enough to make it harder to police the streets. They clearly dont any help from Doreen in that respect.

Well, one of the reasons that neither Harold Wilson nor Margaret Thatcher were on television much after they left office is that both were suffering from the early stages of dementia. Indeed, it is believed that Wilson recognised the signs while still in office; hence his retirement at 60.

Although he was well enough to present television programmes for a relatively little while before the dementia took hold.

I suppose one of the reasons Tony Benn was on TV so much was that he gave good value. Just a pedantic point: "he was also due to inherit a family title which he renounced". He did inherit the viscountcy of Stansgate but was only able to renounce it after a change in the law (also used by Lord Home when he became PM in 1963 as Sir Alec Douglas-Home), by which time he had had to leave the Commons.

Finally, can anyone explain why so many Forumites think it is correct to add an apostrophe when pluralising words? For example, 1970's; Prime Minister's; 1980's; mid-90's it should be 1970s, Prime Ministers, 1980s and mid-90s.

andy at handiwork wrote:

> Would you rather she said nothing for the next few years? Then
> all you would do is complain that she does nothing for her
> daily attendance allowance. It seems that as far as some on
> here are concerned the woman cant win either way.

She doesn't have to attend nor claim her daily allowance.

From a piece by the historian Dominic Sandbrook on why Germany's car industry is so much better than ours:

"In Britain, by contrast, car factories in the Sixties and Seventies became battlegrounds, where militant, posturing shop stewards and arrogant, complacent managers fought out an overt class war.

"Meanwhile, while Germany's car-makers were proudly independent, Britain's remaining manufacturers were shoe-horned in 1968 into one gigantic state-sponsored leviathan, British Leyland.

"The man responsible was Labour's Tony Benn, who claimed it would turn the industry around. In fact, Benn's half-baked creation was one of the biggest disasters in our industrial history."

I noticed "Dominic Sandbrook" has the documentary out on bbc 2 about german cars. Didn't realise his political views though,interesting. Happened to turn on bbc late last night and there looked an interesting doc then i saw whos viewpoint it was ,well known right wing toff journalist called AN Wilson. The tories are getting their foothold everywhere these days.

Of course we have Portillo and his great railway journeys,the daily diet of benefit claimant bashing ""saints and scroungers""...former leader of young tories Nick Robinson political editor of bbc....i think its the new tory town network. Sorry gone off on a complete tangent here.

Never knew this about Nick Robinson..makes the Tories even more ridiculous when drone on about the BBC being left wing in their political coverage.