Being Poet Laureate used to be for life, but now, like being married or appearing on the BBC's Maestro, it's a short-term commitment that provides you with a captive audience to whom you can bare your soul.

When Andrew Motion was made Laureate, he insisted it be for only ten years and, as his decade of glory draws to a close, speculation inevitably turns to his successor. One fancied runner, Carol Ann Duffy, was in the news last week after some concern that a poem of hers about the feelings of a psychopathic killer might not be suitable for 15-year-olds. But rather than dwelling on whether this should be a disabling or a recommending moment in her career might it not be better to ask if it is time to confer the Laureateship not on a different individual, but on a different calling?

I love poetry, but the days when it was the primary mode of public discourse are long gone. From Dryden to Tennyson, even to Bridges or McDiarmid, poetry could provide the last word in public commentary on matters of moment. The political conflicts of the Augustan period and the central Victorian intellectual movement - the ebbing of the sea of faith - were captured better in poetry than anywhere else. Pope and Swift, Arnold and Browning, were the definitive voices of the public struggles of their age.

But in the 20th century poetry has retreated. With the exception of Geoffrey Hill, postwar English poetry has become more and more personal, interior and private, less and less engaged with, let alone influential on, the big public debates. Whether it is Larkin or Hughes, Douglas Dunn or Duffy, the personal matters much more than the political.

So if a public intellectual is to be honoured for writing on the events of the day wouldn't it be better instead to appoint a Philosopher Royal? After all, if we want someone to write on the issues of the moment in a way that places them in their proper historic and human context, we are more likely to go to philosophers than poets. A.C. Grayling is the man who appears on Newsnight to discuss the proper limits of freedom in the age of Google, not Motion.

Grayling might well be a frontrunner, but with Roger Scruton, Simon Blackburn, John Haldane, John Gray, Jonathan Glover, Alain de Botton, Jonathan Sacks and Mary Midgley all contenders, the race would surely be intriguing. And isn't the thought of an honoured and official voice applying logic, rigour and deep, disinterested thought to contemporary issues attractive?

Not a mark on them

I spent most of last Thursday watching some of London's most lithely athletic young men in various states of undress. And as I sat rapt during the performance of Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray, a curious thought about the bodies of the young dancers intruded. It was a thought that took hold as I saw most of them in little more than their underpants.

Not a single one of them had a tattoo.

I've remarked before on the growing prevalence of body art. But here was a group of young men whose bodies were used to create great art and they were untouched by the inky needle. Just like, as it happens, our Olympians. I may well have missed it, but in all the two weeks of the Games I didn't see one of our athletes sporting a tattoo. Which makes me think.

If those Britons who really do value, depend on and make the most of their bodies keep them undecorated in that way, what does it say about those who don't?

Bess not...

Last week I shared with you the transcript of an al-Jazeera broadcast from 2,000 years ago in which the Red Sea Coast Establishment cast doubt on the wisdom of the Almighty's decision to pick an unknown from the tiny community of Nazareth for the key role of Blessed Virgin. This week, idly looking through the Google archives, I've come across an interesting leader from the New York Times of 1588.

“It was a speech that delighted the party faithful but the new darling of the English Right, the lady they call Good Queen Bess, but who's better known in the Chancelleries of Europe as an Upstart Heretick Whore, may well live to regret her combative rallying cry. Already aides of Philip II are saying that her description of herself as a ‘weak and feeble woman' is a gaffe that underlines her inexperience on the throne.

“And indeed her decision to align herself with warmongering neocons like Drake and Frobisher does suggest she lacks the foreign policy wisdom to avoid a confrontation with the resurgent Armada. Although she may try to counteract that weakness with a pitch on ‘Reform', her much vaunted commitment to breaking with the old, corrupt, clerical ways seems hard to credit when she comes from the Tudor Party that has had a mixed record on values issues recently. So we have to doubt that her so-called Protestant Settlement will get anywhere. Yes, she delivered her lines with aplomb but when the dust settles it's hard to see this feisty lady doing much better than Lady Jane Grey, the Geraldine Ferraro of the 16th century...”

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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