We need career detectives Sir: Your lead article (Trial and error, 29 February) rightly condemns Tom Watson for pressurising police into investigating the spurious allegations of Carl Beech. What should urgently be abandoned is the fast-tracking of police officers into senior positions, and the promotion of uniformed inspectors into detective ranks without them having the
Thirteen years ago, when John Reid became Home Secretary, he declared the ministry he presided over ‘not fit for purpose’. He was talking about border control but he might well have been referring to the department in general. When Theresa May became PM, things at the Home Office went from bad to worse. Her paranoid
Heathrow’s nine runways When was a third runway for Heathrow first proposed? Heathrow was always planned to have multiple runways. On 10 April 1946, before the airport was even open, the Minister for Civil Aviation, Lord Winster, announced that the then London Airport was to have nine runways. Six would be in a Star of
The unclued answers are all words inChambers, having their origin in Indonesia (clued by wordplay in the title). First prize Kailash Vernalls, Thame, OxonRunners-up Paul Davies, Reading, Berks; Mrs J. Smith, Beeston, Norfolk
The government has released its official action plan to deal with the coronavirus epidemic, warning people that ‘we are all susceptible to catching this disease’. During a press conference at Downing Street this morning, the Prime Minister told reporters that the government’s plan involved four phases: ‘contain, delay, research, mitigate’. Boris Johnson said: ‘Let me be absolutely clear
A cornerstone of any -functioning democracy is the separation of police and the courts on one hand, and government and parliament on the other. Where the latter are charged with making the law, they should never, ever be allowed to interfere with the enforcement of that law. Politicians have no power to tell the police
Home The government told Britons returning from 11 quarantined towns in northern Italy to isolate themselves, for fear of spreading Covid-19, the contagious coronavirus fever. Random testing began at 11 hospitals. Thirty British and two Irish passengers from the cruise ship Diamond Princess quarantined at Yokohama had been flown to Britain and sent for another
Devolved or decentralised? Sir: Paul Collier (‘Northern lights’, 22 February) conflates what devolution has come to mean, in UK terms, with decentralisation of authority. Thus it is adrift to imply that Edinburgh has benefited from a conscious decentralising of powers from central government. It was simply that Scotland as a whole got devolution and Edinburgh
What a hole The World Health Organisation added processed meats to its list of ‘known’ carcinogens. A few of the other things which have been claimed to be linked to cancer in the past fortnight: A hole built into the wall of a NatWest bank branch in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, became an unlikely tourist destination with
Each unclued light is a genus name of a TREE (i.e. ‘middle of the road’ = (s)TREE(t)). Cornus was also allowed at 2 Down.First prize John Honey, SurbitonRunners-up Ben Stephenson, London SW12; D. Page, Orpington
After the vote for Brexit, it was often said that our departure from the EU was most likely to harm the very people who voted for it: the industrial workers of the Midlands and North. Didn’t they know that a vote for Brexit would, in itself, lead to 500,000 more job losses? Couldn’t they see
Home The Budget, still scheduled for 11 March, had to be rewritten after Rishi Sunak was made Chancellor of the Exchequer when Sajid Javid resigned rather than agree to his special advisers being sacked and provision being pooled between No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street. Questions were asked about how far this was the
After the vote for Brexit, it was often said that our departure from the EU was most likely to harm the very people who voted for it: the industrial workers of the Midlands and North. Didn’t they know that a vote for Brexit would, in itself, lead to 500,000 more job losses? Couldn’t they see
Breeding controversy A Downing Street aide, believed to have been recruited as a result of Dominic Cummings’s advert for ‘weirdos and misfits’, resigned after it was revealed he had spoken favourably of eugenics in the past. Where did eugenics come from?— The term was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin.
ROTAVATOR (4A), NAURUAN (12), DEED (25), DEIFIED (36), MALAYALAM (39), REIFIER (4D), TERRET (15D), and REPAPER (18) are palindromes as is 2442, the NUMBER (3) of the PUZZLE (30), and its title. First prize Neil Mendoza, OxfordRunners-up Duncan Milroy, East Molesey, Surrey, Alison Latham, London EC1R
No defence Sir: Jon Stone (Letters, 15 February) recalls the horrors and miseries of being subjected to bombing from the air. How right he is to do so. The deliberate burning and crushing of civilians in their homes is a revolting and indefensible form of warfare. It is no surprise that Hitler used it. What
Boris Johnson’s top Brexit negotiator David Frost gave a major speech at ULB Brussels University on Monday evening where he set out the British government’s plans for a UK-EU trade deal. This is an edited transcript of his speech: Thank you much everyone for that very kind introduction. It is a really huge pleasure to
Home The Department of Health classified the novel coronavirus (named by the World Health Organization Covid-19) as a ‘serious and imminent threat’ to public health so that, under the 1984 Public Health (Control of Disease) Act, quarantine could be made compulsory. There were 93 British citizens in quarantine at Arrowe Park Hospital in the Wirral and 105
A green and poor land? Sir: Your editorial (8 February) is a timely warning about what the government’s headlong drive to carbon zero really means. We seem to be intent on wrecking our economy in order to further reduce our 1 per cent portion of the world’s greenhouse gases. But while we are scrapping our
The nature of the Johnson government is still not clear, but has become more so with the announcement this week that HS2 is to go ahead in its entirety. Until recently, it had seemed that the project would be, if not dropped altogether, cut back in order to rein in its ever-accelerating budget. This is