It was as though Sir Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, were to be quizzed by the press about the Nolan committee report, the Prime Minister reduced to squeaking ineffectually in the background.You will not easily find a resident of Lambeth, or a concerned parent in London, who does not sincerely wish the hit squads well. No one was very interested in what the democratically elected councillors had to say. She has been given carte blanche by the hung council – hapless inheritors of the consequences of mixing together Trotskyism, trades union militancy and fraud.Those employees who are guilty of fraud – or who cannot pass competency tests – are being given the boot.Yesterday, clad all in black in the manner of Hollywood enforcers, Ms Rabbatts was being interviewed at length about the Appleby report on Lambeth. Ms Rabbatts is the Clint Eastwood figure recently brought in to clean up the worst borough in Britain. It has the power to close down the whole shooting match and begin over again, if need be.And more applause for Heather Rabbatts, chief executive of Lambeth council. Things had declined to the point of massive truancy and gang rivalry. Now the governors have all been sacked, the local authority is ousted and the Educational Association has taken over.

Over the years Hackney Down School had fallen victim to the modern equivalents of the Deadly Plagues of Egypt: a plague of suicidal teachers, a plague of quarrelling councillors, a plague of high local unemployment etc. Compelled by my intellect to admit that X’s argument contains some truth and that Y’s thought has validity, I nevertheless long for the moment of pure action, where decisive force cuts through prevarication – and does what needs doing.
So I applauded when Gillian Shephard announced on Thursday that the “hit squad” was going into an inner London school to sort it out. Not the kill-all-foreigners, Volk-and-Vaterland kind, but the trains- running-on-time variety. We all have our guilty pleasures.

Perhaps yours is luxuriating in the messy divorce of an acquaintance, or comparing your own child’s performance in the ballet exam with that of arather pushy neighbour’s offspring Mine is fascism. He told how a man put a piece of cloth over a friend’s eyes “so that the feeble man would not think he was going crazy.” Still crazy after all these years, the blaze of Hiroshima sheds a light which has to be faced.. Against the risks of nuclear conflagration, it is right to set the 30 million people who starved during China’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and the many other cataclysms which we are called upon to combat. But when feet are dragged on the way to a comprehensive test ban, or on the next stage of resisting nuclear proliferation, or on the pointless testing of the latest French technology in the South Pacific, we need to remind ourselves of the risks to which our planet is exposed and to continue the search for international political structures to contain them.John Hersey described the whirlwind produced by the Hiroshima blaze, huge trees crashing down, small ones uprooted. How would we feel, for example, if we had given up Trident and French missiles, only to find a hostile regime installed in Algeria or a north African state with warheads aimed at Paris or London? Or is the British and French determination to remain part of the nuclear club no more than an anachronistic way of buying a place at the top table of international institutions like the UN? Is it just one more way in which we fool ourselves about Britain’s real place in the world?It is not that we should again wish to become obsessed, as earlier generations did, with the nuclear threat. Perhaps they will be needed to deter some other, as yet unknown, enemy. As the United States disengages from Europe, it may be that the French and British stockpile will come to constitute a European deterrent, balanced against a still formidable Russian firepower.