Desert Island Discs isn't known for its political incisiveness but it was fun listening to Nick Clegg squirm in response to Kirsty Wark's deceptively affable questions.* He's an Old Wet (like myself) and thus knows the value of good education. How, then, to wriggle out of the coalition plans concerning university funding? Even that famous Public School savoir-faire and ability to bullshit seemed to fail him. You could imagine him thinking what a fool he'd been in agreeing to go on - what was this? - worse than bloody Paxman on Newsnight ...

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* Was Wark showing some Caledonian solidarity with the humiliated and departed Brown?

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More politics ... I'm starting to grade essays on Gulliver's Travels. I turn to page 139 of the cheap Penguin edition. It's worth giving in full - the Brobdingnag King is addressing Gulliver:

"... My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice, may be sometimes the only ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one virtue is required towards the procurement of any one station among you; much less that men are ennobled on account of their virtue, that priests are advanced for their piety or learning, soldiers for their conduct or valour, judges for their integrity, senators for the love of their country, or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself (continued the King) who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

Cup of tea anyone?