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Off the rails

In Times Comment this morning Matthew Parris draws attention to:

The valedictory dispatch of Tom Winsor, the Rail Regulator, who departed his post in 2004. This is Mr Winsor's candid advice to his successor as Regulator. It's a beautifully crafted epistle of bitter wisdom about political cowardice, short-termism and deceit, and “the courtier mentality of some civil servants”.

It's worth reading in full for insights like this:

The tendency of Ministers - especially in this Government - is to want to control things. They wrongly assume or accept public responsibility for operational matters rather than overall transport policy, and then when they start getting blamed for things, they look around for levers to pull; finding none, they want to seize the existing ones (usually from the regulatory authority, because it has the richest endowment) or (worse) create new ones which overlap or conflict with the existing system.

A rollercoaster ride with Matthew Parris

Hear whether Theresa May ever got mud on those leopard-print boots.

Find out when David Davis last knocked someone out.

And discover what Tory delegates actually think about Gordon Brown's 'animal magnetism'.

Click here for all the gossip from Matthew Parris's Blackpool podcast.

Alice Fishburn

Free "No tribute from the Prime Minister" card!

Matthew Parris was on incomparable form in his column yesterday where he railed against Tony Blair and his tribute to the late Nick Clarke, presenter of Radio 4's World at One.

So as a service to Comment Central readers, please find above a cut out and keep card that you can stick in your wallet from now on, just in case.

The mistakes of war

My article in this morning's paper began as an answer to Matthew Parris, something that Tim Hames has also provided.

Yet while working on it, I stumbled on an answer to a question that has always worried me.

I am self-aware enough to realise that if I had been alive at the time, I would have supported the Vietnam war. Yet I also realise that it ended in disaster. This leaves the question - why didn't my recognition of the failure of the Vietnam war change me in such a way that I became the sort of person who wouldn't, if they had been alive at the time, have supported it?

And the answer? The mistake is to consider the war as a single episode rather than as part of a successful cold war policy. If you've got a moment, read my argument in full and let me know what you think.

Matthew Parris's podcast

Matthew Parris is doing a series of podcasts on this year's party conferences. You can find his first podcast on the Lib Dem conference here.