Party calculations
Sir: David Steel's call for an end to Punch and Judy politics is, for his party, the tattered end of a false beginning! No Shavian nonsense about his campaign, whereby the protagonists, meaning for him the antagonists, obligingly put each other's cases! This bumptious little politician would prefer a weak-kneed consortium in the style of a Con-Lib-Lab pact to a democratically elected government, a pale hypothesis of parliamentary democracy as we know it. So much for modern Liberal ideas on the freedom of the individual.
Still, from the swivel-chair of his Battle Bus, he can reflect for certain that Mrs Thatcher's theocracy will soon be upon us, with its celestial promises of higher rewards for the rich-in-spirit and its soul-starved notions of poorer public services and philistine plans for drastically reducing public expenditure, and can thoughtfully bemoan, with the poet Blake (better than all your manifestos): 'their ways are fill'd with thorns: It is eternal winter there'.
John O'Riordan
79, The Mall, Southgate, London N14
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