UFO Info Week-End

It disowns Margaret Thatcher’s legacy by declaring that there is a such a thing as society and says

It disowns Margaret Thatcher’s legacy by declaring that “there is a such a thing as society” and says “the right test for our policies is how they help the most disadvantaged in society, not the rich”.Labour has accused Mr Cameron of “opportunism” and believes its best line of attack is to say he has “flip-flopped” on policy, saying that he has now renounced key elements of the manifesto he wrote for last year’s general election.Mr Cameron’s supporters insist that the voters do not mind him changing his mind, so long as he retains what they say is the most vital ingredient for political success – consistency. But, amid signs that his media honeymoon may be coming to an end, his allies admit they now need to change gear to make further progress.The party’s private polling shows that Mr Cameron has established himself in the public mind but that voters are still unsure if the party as a whole has changed. In any case, we wouldn’t want to outline final policies for another two years,” said one senior Tory.After boosting the Tories’ standing in the polls to draw level with Labour, Cameron and his team can look back on their first 100 days with satisfaction. Some ideas may be road-tested and dropped if they hit problems.”Far from being a policy vacuum, we can show that we have plenty of ideas for tackling the country’s problems. Critics claim his 18-month review will leave the Tories a “policy-free zone” with little to say about the key issues facing the country. But Mr Cameron intends to turn this argument on its head by asking his review groups to publish a series of interim reports, discussion documents and proposals submitted by his frontbench spokesman.
Mr Cameron, who is in his 100th day as Tory leader today, will use the policy review to set out a clear “direction of travel” as he modernises his party’s programme to keep it firmly on the political centre ground. Their strip came from a local outfitters called Daft’s.Nick Groom’s The Union Jack is published next month.

David Cameron will answer the charge that he is “all spin and no substance” by using his sweeping review of Tory policies to map out a new direction for his party. He had visited England in 1864, and the team resolved to play with their hero’s dashing spirit. The most remarkable thing I learnt from this delightful gallimaufry was that Nottingham Forest football club, formed in 1865, decided to play in red to honour the architect of Italian unification, General Garibaldi. Buses bring a sense of unity to villages, towns, counties, and ultimately to a country justifiably proud of its lack of a cohesive identity.Great British Bus Journeys is restless and aimless, a travelogue driven by an eagerness for the next diversion. There is a fetching nostalgia for the old high streets of fishmongers and butchers, for local trades and their impertinent radical politics.This is a sociable social history. The trips are punctuated by cups of tea and the conversations and camaraderie of travellers, usually schoolchildren or the elderly, for whom the bus is a social nexus. Here are the overlooked, the unfashionable, the forgotten, and the strange music of such place names as Ashby-by-Partney, Claxford St Andrew, Tumby Woodside and Yaddlethorpe.The outlaw French poet Paul Verlaine is here (he abandoned his excesses with Rimbaud to be a schoolmaster in Stickney, Lincolnshire), as is Attila the Hun, invader of Hunstanton.

In this un-epic journey, McKie rides from one end of Britain to the other, from Glasgow to Cornwall’s hamlets – where he traces St Brychan and his 24 children, all of whom became saints (including “St Wimp”).
McKie’s technique is digressive and anecdotal: the bus route’s circuitous sweep takes in an unexpected panorama of British life and history. Here are 24 journeys around “not very special places that do not often get written about”. William Hazlitt once declared that “You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.” Among my own favourite bus journeys are the daily return from school that passed a gloomy Georgian house with a chilling resemblance to that described by MR James in The Mezzotint, and a rollicking cross-country trip to Oxford itself when some garrulous old gents tutored me in the intricacies of campanology

Such stuff makes David McKie’s mesmerising book. It is a powerful scene, as the grief and sorrow of separation washes away in a wave of understanding and consolation. Here, the tying up of plot strands was played for laughs.But the general tone was spot-on and came with a refreshing New World irreverence – a few “G’days” were chucked into a production that occasionally went off-piste. This company’s abundant supply of comic fizz ensured that they got away with it..

Blazey Best’s sexy, exasperated Adriana, verbally roasting her husband while leafing through a fashion mag, was a treat.There was a price to pay, though, for the breathless levity of the recognition scenes in which the twins finally encountered each other. Cue double takes, marital rows and looks of slack-jawed grievance as the denials pile up.The Antophiluses, Christopher Stollery and Sean O’Shea, were both excellent. So, too, were the womenfolk, caught up in the cat’s cradle of mistaken identities. It is one of the joys of the play that everybody is convinced of the insanity of everybody else. A man arrives in a town unaware that his twin brother is living there. The same goes for the brothers’ twin servants (both called Dromio), a pair of slapstick artists.