London taxi-driver, to your columnist, on passing the British Museum while bewailing the state of modern Britain: “I mean, look at that! Those Romans really knew how to build.”

Opposition burrowing revealed this week that the Department for Work and Pensions has a Director of Communications, a Head of Strategy and Planning, a Head of Strategic Communications, a Head of Communication Operations, a Head of Internal Communications, a Head of Network Services, a Head of Communications (Child Support Agency), a Head of Marketing (JobCentre Plus), a Head of Communications (JobCentre Plus), a Head of Customer Relations, and a Head of Customer Acquisition.

Some news requires no comment.

Dismayed Times readers, suspecting the PC-motivated removal of the cigarette from the bronze sculpture of Oscar Wilde near Charing Cross in London — A Conversation with Oscar Wilde — wrote to our letters page. On Monday a Westminster councillor replied that, however frequently replaced, the cigarette kept being stolen by vandals; and the council could not agree to a request from the sculptor, Maggi Hambling, for CCTV to protect it.

I suppose we cannot have CCTV monitoring everything valuable anyone might take. The problem is really the nature of this wonderful sculpture, a witty and whimsical head emerging from a sort of sarcophagus, half-impressionistic, with something both confident and flimsy about it, like the man himself.

The sculpture was not, however, my choice. A decade ago I served on the committee chaired by Sir Jeremy Isaacs to select and fund a memorial to Wilde, there being (amazingly) no public monument to him in Britain.

Surveying a range of proposals, we were broadly agreed that Hambling's was the best and most interesting — I found it incomparably so. But I thought it too delicate a work, both in conception and construction, for display as street furniture. I argued that a conventional statue with stylish cloak, stick and wide-brimmed hat would suit the site better. I argued, too, that we should place Wilde unapologetically within the tradition of great lives — kings, poets, admirals and engineers — celebrated by nice, big, galumphing classical statues.

I was outvoted. Too bad. But it remains a splendid thing that A Conversation with Oscar Wilde was created. Now we must keep careful watch over Hambling's precious work. My own view is that we may eventually have to bring it in from the cold.

Myths about the past should not be allowed to take root, so I must challenge my colleague Tim Hames (“If only Mother Teresa had been a Labour donor” — December 3) on two counts. Countering the anti-Brownite prophets of doom (count me in, please), Tim suggests that Tony Blair got off to a comparably bad start. Within months of Mr Blair's becoming Prime Minister (he writes) things turned “absolutely awful” for three months, leaving “the new administration looking hapless and incompetent”.

Tim is a psephologist. I am not. But I really don't recall either that early mood of utter disillusion with Tony Blair, or any polls suggesting it. The first niggling doubts were surfacing, but no sense that the media or nation had turned against him. Rather I recall how adept Blair was at getting out of these holes.

Secondly, Tim suggests that as early as 1994 Blair was discouraging colleagues like Alastair Campbell from pursuing “sleaze” allegations against the Tories. Well, I cannot gainsay claims about Mr Blair's private scruples, but have the clearest recollection that they did not stop him attacking John Major with brutal vigour. In 1996 I remember Blair at the opposition dispatch box shouting at a reeling Mr Major that his administration were “knee-deep in dishonour”.

So Mr Blair did this with a tear in his eye? I'm not sure how interested we should be in how squeamish he felt. Diddums, as Alastair likes to say.

Says the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado: “I hate it but I do it.”

For Mr Blair's unease there is in any case another, simpler explanation than what I take to be Tim's view — that Mr Blair feared that if honour in politics was too relentlessly impugned, it would be bad for public trust. Couldn't it have had more to do with pots and kettles, and the fear of reprisals?

Descending a downward escalator at Monument station on the London Underground before midnight, I pass a man who has elected to stand still. The trouble is, the escalator isn't moving. It's bust. For all I know he's still there, stationary, halfway down: a tragic victim of modern Britain's faith in the all-encompassing beneficence of public provision.

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