Watch Out

Even though they should be able to see that I’m dying, friends will still ask me to join their committees (3,952 hours), and take part in quiz supper evenings because they think I’m going to be good at them even though my team always comes fourth having played a joker on the geography round and scored zero (532 hours). I will also go through a phase of reading the New Statesman in order to discover what the Left is thinking (2 minutes).

So you see, by the time I’ve done all this I will have less than an hour of my life left and I’ll need at least 30 minutes to reply to annoying e-mails accusing me of double counting.

I think I’ve proved my point.

I haven’t got time to start doing Su Doku.

You figure it . . .

I TUNED in to Any Questions last weekend just in time to hear David Blunkett talking about the Tories and tax and quickly wished that I hadn’t.

Labour has been arguing that a Conservative government will cut spending, when what the party is really offering is a slower rate of growth for public spending.

Blunkett asserted that he was perfectly within his rights to call this a cut. “If I ran a company and offered you a £500 increase in your wage and then someone took over and offered you only £200, you would call it a cut, wouldn’t you” he explained.

There is one problem. Labour isn’t promising the £500 increase. And if it did it would have to put up taxes.

An intelligent man like Blunkett is perfectly well aware of this. So why repeat his charge? Because he knows that even if people think it is a lie, they will still remember this.

A senior Tory strategist told me that for this reason he was worried about arguing with Labour over its figures. Establishing the truth might simply embed the accusation in people’s minds.

Sad isn’t it?

That's rich

DRIVING home from the Budget, I saw a London Evening Standard poster that read: “Brown gives cash to all”. I had no idea he was that well off.

Game of the name

MY CALL for regulation to harmonise the spelling of Alastair has produced a blizzard of e-mails in support. I am particularly pleased to have the backing of Alisdair Haythornthwaite who combines a spelling error on his birth certificate with a surname more difficult to spell than mine.

Pamela Storey suggests that we shouldn’t let the Alastair issue distract us from the creeping use of Rachael, when there is nothing wrong with Rachel.

Finally, Brian Williams suggests that I seek advice from readers on other new regulations. He proposes that “every set of premises should have its street number clearly displayed”. Good idea. Do you have a better one?

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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