Collectives

I was interested to read in Saturday's Telegraph of a rumour that Cabinet Ministers will be allowed to break ranks over the new runway for Heathrow, a debate last mentioned in these columns at reference 1.

That is to say that while the Cabinet will make a decision and will make a recommendation to the Commons - although what exactly this combination amounts to I am not sure, given the theoretical sovereignty of the Commons - Cabinet Ministers will be allowed to speak on both sides of the subsequent debate.

On the one hand, it is good to allow full and frank debate. It is a bit of a nonsense to have people not believing the words they use in debate. Or even just sitting there silent, not challenging the words they are known not to agree with.

On the other hand, we want coherence in our government. We those in charge, for practical purposes the Cabinet, led more or less forcefully by the Prime Minister, to be seen to be in charge of events, to have a coherent and sustained plan. We don't want them to be chopping and changing with the tides of media fashion or to be sucking up to the less savoury elements of the public. We want them to be standing in line, singing loudly from the same, respectable hymn sheet.

Us in the know trust them to have a full and frank debate in private. And those in the Cabinet know that there has to be a bit of give and take: I'll let your pet scheme through, if you let mine through - they just accept that agreement on a whole raft of complex and difficult issues is just not going to happen. Life is too short. Keeping in mind the bad precedent set by most communist regimes, which used to decide policy behind the locked doors of their committee rooms, then foist that policy on their parliaments and their long suffering citizens.

All in all a tricky business. But not one that our media will try to trouble our tiny minds with. Not even, I don't suppose, the Guardian.

PS 1: I am sure that I have posted in the past about the way that we spend huge amounts on money on inquiries into tricky matters and then shelve or put aside the resulting reports. Wasteful, when one might have thought that the whole point was to get on and actually do something, rather than paying lawyers large amounts of money to talk about it. Irritated just presently because I cannot find it.

PS 2: breaking news. The battered caravan and the elderly camper van which have been in residence down Blenheim Road (appropriately, the road to the tip) for some months now, have been moved on. Perhaps I will find, over the next few days, where they have moved on to.

Reference 1: missing.