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The Education Department treats universities like poorly performing secondary schools, and now intervenes in them so much that the ONHS may well propose bringing them into the public sector.
The former Prime Minister is of less importance than resisting the temptation to make her mistakes all over again.
With the Assembly elections in May fast approaching, it is clear that there is a finite time horizon for these negotiations to bear fruit.
The volte-face that he is currently trying to manage in seeking to defend a Withdrawal Agreement that he opposed is farcical.
The Corporation has lost its grip on its Reithian inheritance – which, for all his criticism of the BBC, the former Telegraph editor understands.
Needed during the coming weeks: a Government information campaign for older people, their families, employers and businesses.
Nothing I have written should be taken as a suggestion that we drop our guard or stop taking precautions. But, assuming we do that, there is no reason to panic. Cheer up.
If the Daily Telegraph catches a whiff of threatened tax rises, it will offer pretty robust coverage.
The relative downsizing of election news is likely to freeze the current campaign in aspic. That ought to help the party which leads in the polls.
Plus: should Patel have come? Should Mordaunt have gone? And: my predictions. What I got right and wrong.
A basic problem remains unaltered – that there is no Commons majority for a No Deal Brexit. This point has been well made by Ann Widdecombe.
Mordaunt, Rudd and Hancock offer three examples in today’s papers of how British politics work now.
Ireland risks a hard border, imposed on it by the rest of the EU, if a way isn’t found by all parties of climbing off the self-contradictory backstop clauses.
“I think we can burn off a few of ours plus get a few Labour votes and, equally important, absentions”, this site is told.
Plus: Vicious Cybernats. Bolton’s brass neck. Widdecombe’s ratings. Johnson’s death wish. And: the courage of my friend Tessa Jowell.