I am now a “take refuge behind that Eddie Stobart lorry at a steady 65″ kind of guy. A-roads tend to force me into the bracket of old dears in their wheezing Austins.So, I’ve learned to love to the speed camera. As for the seething RAC-endorsed insurrectionists, I’m reminded of that classic bit of TV footage, filmed around the time when the Government first moved against drink-driving “This is a matter of personal liberty,” spat a man with his car keys in one hand and a pint in the other. “I’ve been drinking a gallon of bitter and driving past schools at half past three in the afternoon since 1912 The police should concentrate on tracking that Biggs fellow. Incidentally, you’re my besht mate, you are.”On sober reflection, the latter-day heirs to this proud libertarian tradition will doubtless see sense. They have nothing to lose but their Emerson Fitipaldi fantasies.

In return, they’ll get a life free of four of the curses of modern motoring: 1) Rejected insurance claims, 2)Irate policemen, 3) Monday morning visits to the nick with one’s “documents”, and 4) The heart-stopping clang of bodies bouncing off their bonnet. That’s why, if anyone cruises past me, hugging the kerb and listening to Classic FM, they’ll see that I’m wearing a very big smile indeed.johnrhys.harris virgin s. In the heyday of the 1950s “Butskellite consensus”, the French used to have a saying, “En Angleterre, tout va ?auche, sauf le Labour Party.”The most significant fact of the recent election is that it marks the final achievement of Tony Blair’s “project” to assemble his own one-party (or more precisely, one-man), Butskellite consensus.
Tony Blair is not (I would like to add “yet”, but cannot yet bring myself to) a great prime minister. He is certainly not a great political thinker or philosopher ­ unlike Gordon Brown, he is far less interested in ideas and creeds than in pragmatics. But he is a great strategist and positioner.Now he has repositioned himself as he always intended, four-square on the ground of the centre-left. With three key exceptions ­ a continued enthusiasm for centralisation; a lack of clarity on Europe; and illiberalism on home affairs ­ his party now stands, in tone, style and content, exactly where the old SDP/Liberal Alliance stood in the 1980s. The crucial ground, from centre-right of Kenneth Clarke through to the centre-left of Menzies Campbell, is now dominated by a vast encampment of Labour tents.This is a shift of genuinely historic importance.

And a potentially deadly one for us Lib Dems.It is not in anyway to diminish Charles Kennedy’s success to recognise that our victories last Thursday were as much a product of the weakness of the other two, as of our own originality and appeal. It was Charles’s judgement which spotted this opening and it was his personal skill which capitalised on it.But we Lib Dems will not always be able to rely on the extremely unusual combination of a growingly unpopular Labour government and a remainingly unpopular Tory opposition. Sooner or later (and my guess is sooner), the Tory Party will return from their journey to nowhere to find the crumpled and familiar figure of Kenneth Clarke, or the rather smoother one of Michael Portillo, patiently waiting for them to return. Then they will reoccupy the only place from which they can win elections again ­ the centre-right. And then, all those decent moderate Tories who voted Lib Dem as a refuge from the awfulness of their own party will go home again.And our policies are, in perception at least, hardly designed to diminish this threat. To be seen, whether justly or not, as the chief proponents of simple tax and spend and the chief defenders of the producer interest in the public sector, will not be a good way to retain the growing number of seats we hold from the Tories. Mr Kennedy has initiated a full-scale policy review, starting with public services.He is absolutely right to do so.