Who would’ve thought a short letter to the Spectator could cause such excitement at the Evening Standard?

In response to Charles Moore’s comments on Slumdog Millionaire (what is the moral?), I wrote to the Spectator to point out that the hero’s truthfulness and faithfulness amid a cracking good love story were pretty good moralistic threads for me!

The Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ has commented on my little letter here.

Perhaps it’s a slow gossip day… Anyway, regarding ‘crossing the party divide’ to write to the Spectator – you know what they say about where to keep your enemies…

I’ll take this opportunity to congratulate all those involved in the making of Slumdog Millionaire - it’s a marvellous film, deserving of all it’s Oscar glory, and I urge everyone to go see it!

The decision by Devon County Council to withdraw funding from Splash – the excellent and much valued city holiday play scheme – is a classic example of a false economy.

The scheme could fold for the want of a few thousand pounds to fund a member of staff.

That is a minisucle amount for local councils whose budgets run into hundreds of millions.
The cost of losing the scheme for parents, children and the wider Exeter community is likely to be far greater.

I’ve been working with Labour County Councillors Saxon Spence and Richard Westlake, along with Mincinglake Cllr Dilys Baldwin, to see if we can’t find a way out of this mess.

Let’s hope we can find a way to keep this valuable scheme open.

Here’s an idea - how about a freeze to the six figure salaries of senior county council staff (following the example of senior civil servants) to fund the shortfall?

The Tories were the only mainstream party of left or right to oppose an economic stimulus package as a response to the global recession.

Now George Bush’s Republicans have joined them. Flying in the face of virtually all the economic advice and Barack Obama’s huge popularity, Republicans in Congress and the Senate voted against Barack’s recovery Bill denouncing it as “socialist”. “Socialist” stimulus packages have also been announced by conservatives Angela Merkel of Germany and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy.

How quickly the false chummyness of Cameron’s Tories toward Barack Obama has vanished!

It’s deeply frustrating that mistakes make by the Boundary Committee in the way it went about dealing with Exeter’s bid to run its own affairs has led to a further delay in the process.

But at least it seems to have accepted what Exeter has been saying for a long time - the Boundary Committee can recommend more than one solution and should take into account the savings across the piece from the reduction in the current number of local authorities to one or two.

However, it is more important to get things right than to rush the process.

It’s good news the NHS in Devon is reviewing the way it allocates long term care packages.

This was prompted by concerns raised in the Express and Echo about a number of people who had been told they would be having their funding withdrawn.

The struck me as particularly odd, as, one of the great unremarked upon stories of the last couple of years has been the big increase in the number of people receiving this kind of help.

The number in Devon has doubled thanks to a big increase in Government funding and the Government publishing new, more permissive guidance on the qualifying criteria.