Yes, but Pickles later explained that the new rules would allow prayers during meetings. A spokesman for the Local Government Association said that that was his interpretation, too.

Such intense moral scrupulousness is rather a modern phenomenon, isn't it? There was a time the Catholic Church was able to persuade itself it wasn't burning heretics by handing them over to "the secular arm". And Medieval bishops of Winchester made a good living from the rents on brothels in Southwark.

Agree with your general point. Strangely, though, as I get older I increasingly think Prince Philip would have made an excellent king.

When the present queen was asked, on her accession, how she wished to be styled, she replied "by my name, of course." Liz doesn't do pretension.

The most ironic part of the Bradlaugh story for me is his friend Annie Besant, a runaway vicar's wife and early campaigner for birth control, who eventually got fed up with atheism and joined the Theosophical Society? Towards the end of her life she found a young boy in a slum in India and decided he was the Messiah.

I'd certainly say it's interesting that the intellectual leadership of atheism has been dominated by people who remember the days Christianity had a largely unchallenged cultural position. To some extent, though, atheism was always an old men's game. Before Dawkins there was Freddy Ayer, and before Ayer there was Bertrand Russell. The more surprising development is the popular following these old codgers now have among the young.

Yes, that was rather naughty of me.

Indeed.  Newt is, I admit, marginally more interesting than Romney.

Yes, "right wing Al Gore" just about sums him up.

But I don't think the American right will tear itself to pieces, any more than they did in 2008.

A black president has as much right to be a failure as a white president.