The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.If that is the sort of society she wants to live in, the sooner she fucks off to Pyongyang the better.
A search is under way to try and recover a beaver which escaped from a farm and is now felling trees, a conservationist said today.
The six-stone animal managed to escape from Upcott Grange Farm in Lifton, Devon, and is now believed to be taking down trees 20 miles away on the banks of the River Tamar near Gunnislake, Cornwall.
I mentioned this story to my mother the other day. She said that her own mother, an East Anglian from good Dissenting stock, had always regarded "O Come All Ye Faithful" as a Catholic hymn and disliked it as a result."There is far more to this beloved song than meets the eye.
"Fideles is Faithful Catholic Jacobites. Bethlehem is a common Jacobite cipher for England, and Regem Angelorum is a well-known pun on Angelorum, angels, and Anglorum, English.
"The meaning of the Christmas carol is clear: 'Come and Behold Him, Born the King of Angels' really means, 'Come and Behold Him, Born the King of the English' - Bonnie Prince Charlie!" ...
The Jacobite meaning of the carol gradually faded with the cause.
"Adeste Fideles seems to have lost its Jacobite meanings not long after Wade's last published book in 1773," said Prof Zon
And little Sir John's in the nut-brown bowl,John Barleycorn Must Die exists in many versions: this one was brought to Traffic by their flautist Chris Wood after he heard it sung by Mike Waterson.
And he’s brandy in the glass;
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl,
Proved the strongest man at last.
The huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox,
Nor so loudly to blow his horn,
And the tinker he can’t mend kettle nor pots,
Without a little barleycorn.
Lord Bonkers remembers two outstanding figures who passed this Christmas:Pinter was, to my mind, the pre-eminent dramatist of his day, even if he was often poorly served by the productions that were mounted of his plays. I remember, in particular, attending an early staging of The Birthday Party: the long and regular pauses between lines made it all too clear that the cast had not troubled to learn their lines.
Eartha Kitt was Tremendous Fun and The Best Sort Of American Girl. One of my great regrets (particularly as I financed the thing) is that her tour in Pinter's The Caretaker - it was cleverly renamed The Carrretakerrr at my insistence - proved a limited success with the theatre-going public.
"The whole of A Christmas Carol is really an invocation of his childhood Christmases with his family before his father fell into debt and was sent to the debtors' prison.And what were those early Christmases like for Dickens?
"A Christmas Carol made Christmas respectable for the English bourgeoisie, who had come to regard it as somewhat antiquated."
Whether they tested this with a real elephant is not disclosed.A decade of unusually cold weather during his childhood may have influenced his description of Britons "scraping the snow from the pavements in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses" on Christmas morning despite the statistical probability of a grey winter day like any other.
Six of Dickens's first nine Christmases were white, including one in the winter of 1813-14 during which the ice on the River Thames was thick enough to bear the weight of an elephant
The Tories nowadays are very short of decent old buffers of the Willie Whitelaw kind, men with what used to be called bottom, possessed not necessarily of ferocious intellect but at least of a certain judgment, and the commonsense instinct that can spot a wrong 'un.The concept of "bottom" is the subject of a chapter in T. H. White's The Age of Scandal:
In the eighteenth century, but particularly under the Regency, a gentleman was expected to have "bottom". It was a word of composite meaning, which implied stability, and also what the twentieth century calls "guts". It meant being able to keep one's head in emergencies, and, in a financial sense, that one was backed by capital, instead of being an adventurer.
Bottom, in fact, was synonymous with courage, coolness, and solidity. The metaphor was derived from ships.
A year of Celebrations for the 900th anniversary of Southwell Minster has helped boost visitor numbers, with some 90,000 people visiting the cathedral over the past 10 months – which is 20,000 up on last year.Southwell?
Southwell is a small Nottinghamshire market town. It has many attractive Georgian houses and is dwarfed by the Minster. It also has strong Civil War connections: Charles I spent his last night of freedom at the Saracen’s Head Hotel.
Other distinguished figures such as Edward Cludd, who saved the Minster during the Civil War, Lord Byron and Cardinal Wolsey have lived in the town. It is also the ‘birthplace’ of the famous Bramley Apple.
declined to put a figure on the amount but said: 'It's not peanuts," reflecting the fact that Madoff demanded at least $1m from his wealthy clients and encouraged them to invest $10m or more.He also said Madoff:
"was obviously very wealthy but he didn't live high on the hog. I used to see him and we'd chat. he seemed like a very nice guy."This article gives an insight into Madoff's modus operandi. It also says Lord Jacobs is thought to have given the Liberals and Lib Dems more than £1m over the past 20 years.
But if Reagan burnished the anti-intellectual brand, Bush has now wrecked it. Sometime between the catastrophe in Iraq, the catastrophe in New Orleans and the catastrophe on Wall Street, Americans decided that people who didn’t know much about government weren’t likely to run it very well.
Back in 2000, when Bush stumbled and fumbled his way through interviews and debates, his approval ratings stayed high. When Sarah Palin did the same this year, however, her popularity sunk like a stone. In September and October, when John McCain couldn’t talk fluently about the financial crisis, his campaign crashed and burned.
Mark Lawson has a piece in the Guardian today pointing out, no doubt rightly, that the BBC has a far more chequered history than many of its modern critics like to pretend. It wasn't all high Reithian principles until a few years ago.The comedian Ronnie Barker, widely eulogised at the time of his death as an innocent family entertainer from whom uncouth youths of today such as Ross and Brand could learn, relied heavily on inventive but relentless sexual innuendo, especially during the spoof news bulletins on The Two Ronnies.
Morecambe and Wise were generally cleaner, with both Eric and Ernie routinely complaining in interviews about peers who resorted to "blue" jokes. But, even their representative sketch about the art world - "My aunt's got a Whistler," boasts Ernie - ends with Eric waggling his glasses and replying, "Now, there's a novelty."
You're a lucky man, Lionel, take my word for it.
Louis: How did you enjoy your honeymoon?
Sibella: Not at all.
Louis: Not at all?
Sibella: Not at all.
The newspapers have all carried respectful obituaries Conor Cruise O'Brien - the Daily Telegraph is a good example. The Guardian website, characteristically, has a piece attacking him for not sharing that paper's views. It is written by Roy Greenslade.Edmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction.More than that, Burke supported the American revolutionaries and was for many years the great political ally and intellectual support of the Whig leader Charles James Fox. They fell out after the French Revolution, which Burke condemned while Fox insouciantly looked forward to its spreading to Britain. That falling out took place, very publicly, during a Commons debate, and O'Brien description of the exchanges is memorable.
He was an advanced opponent of the slave trade, whose "Sketch of a Negro Code" was written in the early 1780s, and who before that had opposed the seating of American slaveholders at Westminster. His epic parliamentary campaign for the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the arraignment of the East India Company was the finest example in its day of a battle against pelf and perks and privilege.
It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.
The 18-month-old tabby was discovered in a village near Melton, almost 20 miles away from the Braunstone Town home she disappeared from more than a month ago.
This is it.The government needs to wake up to the importance of the pub … Whenever a pub is proposed to go to a different use, be closed or demolished, the local community needs to be consulted.
At the end of the day, who owns the pub? Legally it's the pub operating company or the landlord. But morally, surely, a community, a village owns a pub that's been there for hundreds of years.
Back in September I reported that Labour's Derek Draper was exploring plans for an online rapid rebuttal unit to kill off damaging stories circulating in the blogosphere.Tomorrow morning Derek Draper is convening a "New Media Breakfast" meeting with dozens of Labour bloggers and New Media types to hear from Blue State Digital how Labour can use the internet to win the next election. Blue State Digital are the people that did Obama's online stuff - rather well.Guido also claims to have the list of attenders. Among them is Sunny Hundal - the moving spirit of Liberal Conspiracy and one of the judges of this year's Lib Dem blog awards.
The Times has an article today to mark the centenary of the birth of the actress Celia Johnson. It is written by her daughter Kate Grimond.Nottingham's chief anti-social behaviour officer has been arrested over an incident of "violent disorder".
It's been a bad day for Northamptonshire football clubs.The Interpal website see things very differently.Kettering Town chairman Imraan Ladak is to return a business award given to him by Lloyds TSB after the bank terminated the banking facilities of the non-League club's shirt sponsors, Interpal, a charitable organisation who distribute aid in the Palestinian territories.
Interpal have been told they must find alternative banking in January after Lloyds reportedly instructed the Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB) to close the charity's account. Interpal have been given no explanation, although it is believed that their background – they are under investigation by the UK Charity Commission for "indirect" links to the Palestinian militant organisation Hamas – is at the root of the matter.
one may reasonably ask what the hell Interpal ... are doing sponsoring Kettering Town anyway; granted, Kettering town centre may look like the fucking Gaza strip...
One of the goals of the planners of the modern U.S. university system after the Second World War was to displace what they saw as an aristocracy that had become entrenched at elite schools; instead they promoted equal opportunity in order to build America through its best talent. The rising tide of student debt reinforces rather than dissolves the discriminations of class, counteracting the meritocracy.And:
Although it seems as if it crept up on us, student-loan indebtedness is not an accident but a policy. It is a bad policy, corrupting the goals of higher education. The world we inhabit is a good one if you are in the fortunate third without debt, but not nearly so good if you live under its weight. Student debt produces inequality and overtaxes our talent for short-term, private gain. As a policy, we can and should change it.
His explanation of his success is simple and humble – what else would you expect from Cable? "I think it's partly luck. I happen to have built up a fairly good reputation in economic matters at a time when this became the big issue of the day. Most of that time, people weren't very interested in economic policy, quite frankly.
"The other thing that has worked is that I did anticipate a lot of the problems we are now facing. I was involved in the campaign against the demutualisation of the building societies. Ten years later, we are seeing the effect.
"And I did, a lot, in Parliament, point out the instability of the banks. In 2003, I raised with Gordon Brown the issue around the very rapid growth of British household debt and the bubble in house prices. He swatted all this away at the time. In retrospect, this was the right thing to have said."
In other words, when other politicians were chasing issues where there were votes to be had, Vince Cable was quietly beavering away on a dull, difficult but vitally important subject, on which he has been proved right. He calls it "luck". Others might say that it was hard work and good judgement. It's a shame that there are not more people in Parliament like him.
A liberal believes in the raucous, unpredictable capacity of people to take decisions about their own lives. A Socialist believes in the ordered, controlled capacity of the state to take the right decisions about other peoples’ lives.
A liberal believes a progressive society is distinguished by aspiration, creativity and non conformity. A Socialist believes a progressive society is characterised by enlightened top-down Government.
Into two acres beside the Regent’s Canal are packed ponds, wetlands, woodland and open grassed areas. Within them you will find kingfishers, reed warblers, reed buntings, rare fungi and a teeming variety of insect life. Geese, mallards, coots and herons make regular visits, while the cutting of the grass is subcontracted to the park’s resident rabbits Coco, Patch and Merlin.
Of course, if Nick Clegg had not boasted about his sexual conquests to Morgan in the first place he would not now be ridiculed in this way.Swinson cites the response to Nick Clegg's performance during this week's prime minister's questions as an example. Clegg got up to ask about a single mother who came to his surgery as an example of lower-income groups facing criminal penalties for being unable to pay back money given to them mistakenly in tax credits. He probably wasn't thinking about the interview he gave to Piers Morgan nearly a year ago in which he admitted sleeping with about 30 women. MPs were.
He only managed to say: "This week a single mother came to my surgery in Sheffield…" before someone on the other benches shouted: "Thirty-one". MPs laughed for a good long time.
"I was appalled they started laughing and applauding," says Swinson. "I know he made those ill-judged comments a year ago, but you hear the phrase single mother and the first thing you think is sex? And then I thought – if this room wasn't 80 per cent male would it be the same reaction?"
No moving pictures this week, just some photographs and a recording by the most inexplicably unfulfilled talent of British pop music.
"Walking Back to Happiness" was cheesy, "Don't Treat Me Like a Child traded too obviously on her youth, but this is a very good record. And it was made when Shapiro was only 14.
More than that, Shapiro enjoyed phenomenal popularity early in her career. As Wikipedia tells it:
In 1961, at the age of fourteen, she had two number one hits in the UK: "You Don't Know" and "Walkin' Back to Happiness"; and, indeed, her first four single releases all went into the top three of the UK Singles Chart. Her mature voice made her an overnight sensation, as well as the youngest female chart topper in the UK ...
Before she was sixteen years old, Shapiro had been voted Britain's 'Top Female Singer', and when The Beatles had their first national tour in 1963, it was as her supporting act.
She also starred in the film It's Trad, Dad.
After that, though Shaprio is still performing today, it was all downhill. Yet listening to this record Shaprio was a better singer than many British women (Lulu, Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black) who enjoyed successful solo careers in the 1960s. So what went wrong?
The opening of an article on Shapiro's career gives some of the story:
British vocalist Helen Shapiro keenly remembers opening the pages of Melody Maker on a tour bus in February 1963 and being greeted by the headline: "Is Helen Shapiro a 'Has-Been' at 16?"
"I was still getting in the charts, but not necessarily the top five, or even the top ten," she wrote in her 1993 autobiography, Walking Back to Happiness. "I'd been a novelty at fourteen but I suffered from the Shirley Temple syndrome. I'd grown up. Suddenly I was beginning to look a little bit passe in spite of topping the bill."
A member of one of the opening bands leaned over her seat to assure her, "You don't want to be bothered with that rubbish. You're all right. You'll be going on for years."
John Lennon's words were comforting, but that moment was a milestone for her, "the beginning of change; not just for me but for a lot of solo singers."
So Shaprio was seen as a novelty act, which made it all the harder to adjust to the changes that were about to take place in the British music scene. But surely she had the talent to adjust to those changes?
The real problem seems to be that Shapiro's career was very badly managed. Lennon and McCartney wrote a song - "Misery" - for her, but the record company declined to release it as a single. And it also delayed releasing her version of "It's My Party" until Lesley Gore had already had a hit with it.
The truth is probably that Helen Shapiro found fame a couple of years too soon. If she had been a fresh face in 1964 she would surely have been an important part of the sixties scene. As it was, with that semi beehive hairdo, she even looked like a survivor from the 1950s.
And it is worth remembering just how young Shapiro was in the sixties. In an interview she remembers a schoolfriend from the 1950s:
Q - He was nine and the rest of us were ten. We went to the same school. We had this little group. None of us could really play the instruments. I played on a little plastic toy guitar, tuned to a ukulele. Marc had a sort of beaten up guitar and this other guy had a smashing, lovely guitar. In those days, to have a guitar, I'm talking 1956 or there abouts, was like a big deal. Not like now. We used to sing Elvis songs and a little bit of Buddy Holly. Yeah, we just kind of sang songs together.
Q - Did you ever perform anywhere?
A - A couple of times we went to a couple of local cafes and we said "Hey Mister, can we sing in your cafe?" And we did. Then they gave us a cup of tea each and kicked us out. We did play in the school once, during the summer break when some of the kids would still go to the school for meals, because their parents were working. It was a poor area. And we would go and play and sing for them.
Marc, in those days was called Mark Feld. He grew up to be Marc Bolan and did not find fame himself until the sixties were just about played out and psychedelia was descending into glam rock.
I've had the pleasure of hosting the Roundup on several occasions, and it is no exaggeration to say that never have nominations been so entirely dominated by one story as they are this week.
That story is the sad passing of Oliver Postgate.
When I first joined the House in 1985 I dutifully dressed up and was seated for three hours next to Lord Joe Kagan, the menacing friend of Lady Falkender who was jailed for tax evasion.
I later explained to a House official that I had spent some of my life trying to avoid jail and jailbirds and did not expect the Lords to bring me into such close contact. I haven't been to the Queen's Speech since.And:
I am reminded that a senior detective inspector from Maidenhead once explained to me: "You have to understand that the root of this country's law and order problem is that our police are a lot thicker than the villains."
The Private Members' Bills ballot for the 2008-9 session took place today, and the Lib Dems did well. Two of our MPs are in the top 5 and four are in the top 20.
Today and tomorrow I am running the press office at a conference held at the Congress Centre - part of the TUC headquarters in London.Another favourite Indian venue is the Top Curry Centre in Pimlico, which is popular with all politicians who live in the vicinity.
But it is more specifically a favourite of the Lib-Dems, including Lembit Opik - who holds an informal weekly curry night there with his party colleagues.
"The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind."
I was a little old for Bagpuss, but the Clangers, Pogles' Wood and, above all, Noggin the Nog were central to my childhood.may I be the first 1920s labour history nerd to point out that Oliver was the son of Raymond Postgate and Daisy Lansbury, both lifelong, active socialists, and therefore the grandson of George Lansbury. Which, of course, makes him the cousin of Angela Lansbury; he was born in the same year as her too. And the nephew of my personal hero Minnie Lansbury, although she died before Oliver was born.
And, like all GL's descendants, quite possibly also the descendant of a Tolpuddle Martyr. George's wife, Bessie Brine, was probably - although it has never been proved for sure - the granddaughter of Tolpuddle's James Brine.
To me, Postgate's programmes - and particulary that wise and weary voice - are redolent of a more civilised view of childhood. In 1960s children's television, the presenters were on your side, but they knew lots of interesting things about the world that you didn't and wanted to share them with you.
Today's television is too anxious to ingratiate itself with its young audience. The presenters hardly seem like adults at all. With their perfect eyes and teeth, they are more like monstrous 10-year-olds.
Finally, another memory.
Coincidentally, this is not the first time that allegations of financial impropriety have surrounded the occupant of...Mr Ross used 136 million of his 177 million shares as security against personal loans without telling anyone in the company.
He has admitted doing the same thing with shares of Big Yellow Group and National Express.
I had not heard of Len Duvall before today. He sounds like a ballroom champion whose attempt at Continental sophistication - by adopting “Duvall” - is undercut by his first name. Maybe he is one of the less popular judges on Strictly Come Dancing?
He turns out to be the leader of the Labour group on the Greater London Authority.
Pete's was the pie country, the rolling meadows of Middle England where foxes trot along the edges of ancient hedges before disappearing into rooky woods, and hilltops boast the spires of Norman churches, marking villages with names such as Branston and Stilton.All good stuff, except that Stilton is in Cambridgeshire (and used to be in Huntingdonshire when it was a county).
Ruaridh Nicoll journeys in search of the perfect pork pie and finds himself seduced by the olde worlde charms of... Leicestershirewith its achingly clever ellipsis has clearly never been north of Tring in his life.
Ministers rush to defend Speaker after MPs' public rebukejust confirms the view that Michael Martin was appointed as a Labour Speaker for a Labour house.
I am sorry to see Anthony Jacobs - head of the British School of Motoring to baked potato business empire - leave the Liberal Democrats, and not just because we shall miss his financial contributions.But then, as James Forsyth says on the Spectator Coffee House blog:His beef is that he wants Clegg to go further on tax, taking the lowest paid out of tax altogether but also reducing the rates for higher earners. The party is reluctant to raise employers national insurance by the required amount to pay for it, and relations have clearly broken down.
Considering that until Clegg’s leadership, the Lib Dems were to the left of Labour on tax it is puzzling that Jacobs was previously happy to donate money to the party. It seems most odds to leave the party just at the moment that the Lib Dems seem to be inching in his direction.Forsyth says that Jacobs has met senior figures in both the other parties, but suggests that his policy demands make it unlikely that he will join either of them.
The HSE report is on the internet.It is widely known that Top Gear parted company with Perry McCarthy, a former minor formula one driver, after he exposed himself, although not in the John Barrowman sense.
Ben Collins, a former NASCAR driver, was later revealed by the Health and Safety Executive as Top Gear's "high-performance driver" in a report into the Richard Hammond crash of 2006.
Now Digger has been reliably informed by F1 sources that Heikki Kovalainen, left, took up the role during a Top Gear testing at Renault's base.
According to Westminster colleagues, Ming's been using the recent furore surrounding OJ Simpson's new book, If I Did It, to wax lyrical about the time he delivered "The Juice" an unceremonious ass-whipping on the running track.
"According to Ming, back in 1967 he raced OJ in both the 100 metres and the 60-yard dash," I'm told. "Apparently, he absolutely destroyed him."
Parliament then passed a law that gave members control over the King's ministers. Charles I was furious and decided it was time to take action. On 4 January 1642, he arrived at Westminster with a great company of armed men to arrest Arthur Huggl… Hig..."Haselrig," you ignorant boy.
That will do, Tompkins. Sometimes I wonder about the headmaster’s choice of textbooks.Arthur Haselrig, John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles and William Strode who were all MPs whom he regarded as troublemakers. The five men managed to escape before the soldiers arrived.
When the king demanded to know where the Five Members were the Speaker, Michael Martin replied: "Help yourself, laddie. They are hiding in yon stationery cupboard." He then rolled on his back, waved his paws and asked: "Is there any chance of a peerage just now?"
Thanks to Crooked Timber.A highly respected literary and academic figure failed to attend a talk he was due to give for a literature festival, after getting confused over the date.
Professor of philosophy Anthony Grayling, of Birkbeck College, University of London, had arranged to speak about his latest book, The Choice of Hercules.
His talk was part of Richmond’s 17th annual literature festival.
The book reflects on the challenges of duty versus pleasure.
At least we are only worrying about our leader's Red Bull habit these days.That thrusting young Minger Nick Clegg should learn to swivel his head to spy who is sitting within earshot before shouting into a mobile phone about an aged Olympic sprinter off to a poor start.
While waiting on Bournemouth station for the London train, it was impossible for your columnist not to overhear the Lib Dems' home affairs chap itemising, between sips of Red Bull, his leader Sir Ming Campbell's political crimes. Ming the Mediocre, according to Clegg, is hesitant and disorganised, commits avoidable errors and lacks momentum but - this was the loyal bit - is capable of recovering.
Dave O'Connell, the Provisional I.R.A.'s political-military swing man, took Maria along as interpreter on an arms-buying trip to Europe. Their mission began as Irish low comedy and ended in fiasco. In Amsterdam their cover was blown, their planeload of Czech bazookas, rocket launchers and hand grenades was impounded, and Maria and Dave lammed out just ahead of the cops.
The tramway closed in 1966, but you can still see the space in front of the houses where it ran, and the odd crumbling shed. There is a dinner table game where you proffer a time in history you would like to visit. After Doctor Feelgood doing Route 66 at the Kursaal in Southend around 1972, I think the hour's journey on this railway amongst the cabbages and sugar beet comes a close second.
This may seem rather unfair when you consider everyone was happy for Martin McGuinness to be in charge of education in Northern Ireland for many years.A Croydon councillor has quit her cabinet post after admitting she had close ties with the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s.
A council spokesman said Conservative Maria Gatland confirmed that she is the author of To Take Arms: My Year with the Provisional IRA.
Mrs Gatland wrote the book under her maiden name, Maria McGuire.
When confronted with her past by a local schools activist, Mrs Gatland offered her resignation from cabinet.
The council spokesman said in addition to stepping down as cabinet member for children and young people, fellow councillors were urging Mrs Gatland to resign from the council.
As someone pointed out to me, the Sunday Mirror's exclusive about Nick Clegg slagging off his shadown cabinet colleagues whilst on a flight to Inverness is obviously true. No journalist would go to the trouble of making up a story about people most of his readers have never heard of.So - the report finds Haringey Council guilty - and then some. I have never seen such a damning and devastating criticism of an authority as this litany of failure - both systemic and personal, and at every level and more or less in every agency. But particularly singled out for special damnation - Haringey Council.And this has been the story here all along: the fact that Haringey Council is no good at protecting children. Those bloggers who thought the real villain here were David Cameron or the press, or thought that the whole affair was simply to ghastly to mention, mystify me.
It is this culture that is at the heart of the political debate over the death of Peter - to give Baby P his real name.As to the resignations of George Meehan and Liz Santry - it's a shame it took until they publicly had nowhere to go in the face of such extreme criticism before they finally acknowledged their responsibility.
And none of this sadly goes to the heart of the rotten culture in Haringey which is secretive, arrogant, rank-closing and abuses power. Lord knows I have been shouting this from rooftops for long enough. Now at least I have Ed Balls and the Government shouting the same thing with me!
Surely, all that does is make you worry about the judgement of headteachers in Haringey?A journalist who met her two years ago, shortly after she had taken up her current role, recalls her as appearing relaxed, confident and competent, with a clear understanding of the wider children's policy agenda ...
Shoesmith, 55, appears widely respected among her peers in Haringey: an open letter signed by 61 primary and secondary school headteachers in the north London borough last month called her an "outstanding public servant" who had in her previous role revitalised Haringey's once embarrassing and demoralised education service. It said: "Should the Child P case result in her loss from the borough, then our children and young people will lose one of their most effective, determined and committed champions."
