It is always fascinating to watch how, as Tory ministers sniff ways of saving money, they reach for policies that seem to run against the natural instincts of their party. For example, open-plan primary schools, allied to informal, child-centred education, became all the rage under the Tories in the early 1960s. This was because somebody in the bowels of the Treasury calculated that, as internal walls cost money and use up space, open-plan would make for cheaper, smaller buildings to accommodate a growing child population.
Again, in the 1980s, the Tories decided they agreed with liberals who had been saying for years that it was a bad thing to lock up the mentally ill in big, rambling Victorian institutions. This enabled ministers to shut mental hospitals, sell off the buildings and their extensive grounds, and invent something called "care in the community", a distant ancestor of the "big society".
Now Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, tells us that far too many people are being locked up in prison and we should stop building new ones, because the whole system is ridiculously expensive. To be fair, Clarke has always been a liberal on crime and punishment, but I doubt he would make such a clear statement on the subject without at least tacit agreement from the Prime Minister.
The trouble is that "liberal" policies often are not as cheap as Tories think they are going to be. Teachers needed to be trained for open-plan schools, community services needed beefing up to look after the mentally ill. If people are to be kept out of prison, much more has to be spent on probation services and drug rehabilitation. If reconviction rates are to fall, prison education also needs to improve beyond all recognition. Yet the country's biggest provider of prison education, Manchester College, has announced plans to cut 300 jobs.
Doctoring the truth
Poor Dr David Kelly seems to have joined the improbable company of John F Kennedy and Diana, Princess of Wales in the list of those who can never be laid to rest. The Daily Mail continues to insist that he did not commit suicide, as do several MPs, including Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat - now a parliamentary undersecretary at the Department for Transport - who has written a whole book on the subject.
Kelly's death, in common with the deaths of the president and the princess, requires an extraordinary cover-up involving ministers, their aides, the police, the intelligence services, various members of the medical profession and numerous others if it was anything other than suicide.
It also, I think, requires a murderer. Mohamed Al Fayed named the Duke of Edinburgh as the guilty man in the case of Diana, and the vice-president (and presidential successor) Lyndon B Johnson was in the frame for Kennedy's murder. But the "it wasn't suicide" squad is strangely coy about the identity of Kelly's assassin.
Presumably we are intended to deduce that Tony Blair was responsible, yet even I hesitate to accuse that discredited warmonger of such a dastardly act. There may be anomalies in the official version - though they don't strike me as more than could be accounted for by haste, human error and the general messiness of reality - but I am with Kelly's friend Tom Mangold who, as an investigative journalist, might be thought keen to unravel a conspiracy.
He argues that Kelly was distraught because his contacts with a BBC reporter, which he had denied to an MPs' committee, were about to be revealed, so he committed suicide. And that is all there is to it.
Goodbye, Mr Hics
The BBC's Panorama was right to highlight how, across the UK, the four general teaching councils have found only 18 teachers in ten years who were incompetent enough to be struck off. At one school I knew, it took four years to get rid of a teacher who was incapable most afternoons; I once met him drunk in charge of a geography exam. But he still, almost immediately, got a job at another school (which boasted of its high academic standards) just a few miles away. All the same, I suspect rank incompetence rarely survives for long in teaching. There's no hiding place; the children give you hell and every colleague and parent knows you're not up to it. Most incompetents leave to preserve their self-respect, without any need for formal procedures. If teaching is such a sinecure, why do at least a quarter of the newly qualified get out within three years?
Union blues
To judge by how often the courts rule they can't go ahead, strikes are more or less illegal already. But just to make sure, the Tories apparently want to introduce a new law requiring every strike to have the backing of at least 30 per cent of the total workforce, as well as a majority of those voting. Why not 40 per cent, as the CBI wants? Because, I suspect, most members of the cabinet have the votes of more than 30 per cent of their constituency electorate, but less than 40 per cent.
Weighty tomes
The newspapers are full, as always at this time of year, with suggestions for "summer holiday reading", sometimes called "beach reading" or "poolside reading". How literary editors think this reading should differ from any other kind of reading - say, February half-term reading or waiting-for-a-Northern-Line-train reading - is never explained, but there is surely only one absolute requirement: that you don't injure your back, or incur excess baggage penalties, from carting the things around. Why, then, do editors and their contributors recommend recently published hardbacks, and almost completely ignore paperbacks?
Peter Wilby was editor of the New Statesman from 1998-2005.
