At least one of the several formidable people on the left is likely to run against Mr Blair, and rightly so. He has the backing of the Worshipful Company of Butchers and believes that the poulterers will also back him. STEPHEN REID, the genial Tory candidate for the Eastleigh by-election, made much of the fact that he had consistently run a ‘positive’ campaign. ‘Why not? As a diver, I’ve come across so many odd things in other parts of the world. While the top ‘clean hands’ judges were back at work yesterday, basking in the success of their quit threats in forcing the government to back down, MPs from the three ruling parties traded recriminations. Fewer and fewer drinkers are willing to while away evenings at the bar, and many of those who do – such as lonely pensioners – make a half last two hours.A host of other trends are taxing brewers: fathers wanting to spend more time with their children – since children’s rooms or properly appointed gardens at pubs cost money; rural depopulation and drink-driving legislation; the attitude of women towards pubs (often reluctant, appalled by unpleasant lavatories); the perceived unhealthiness of drink.One thing is certain: the nation is ‘over-pubbed’.

It was difficult to know what to expect, because we’ve had no experience of this sort of commercial classical station over here, but I found the tone quite like Radio 2 – it’s a strange sort of classlessness that’s relaxing, there’s something very direct about it. You would never succeed in getting it to turn somersaults or to leap for fish (this would be a special waste of time, since manatees are vegetarians).The manatee’s greatest trick is that as a species, against all odds, it has clung tenaciously to life for so long. Banks and Montgomery responded defiantly by pulling the Mirror papers out of the PCC.Panic seized the newspaper industry. Like all entries, it will be sent to the MP for his comments before publication.

Sir: As a gardener I appreciate the frustration of ’slugs eating plants’ (Weekend, 26 February). ‘We’re not saying it works for everybody, but it certainly seems to for the vast majority.’So if some people can face a future of baked potato without grated cheese, fish without chips and roast beef without roast potatoes, where’s the harm? Ms Marsden claims not to be making a mint from others’ gullibility.’While it’s hugely enjoyable,’ she says, ‘from a financial point of view it’s a waste of space. Alongside opposition at board level, he admits that there has been hostility from ‘one or two senior players’.Dissatisfaction on the terraces was echoed at this week’s AGM ‘A lot of people wanted my head,’ Dorahy said. Dr Glatt, appointed in January, faced the unenviable challenge of choosing and preparing two operas in double- quick time and her solution was to buy in productions of Rigoletto (from Opera du Rhin, Strasbourg) and Fidelio (from the Grand Theatre de Tours). InSkinParams = new Array();

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An unenviable task, but one made all the harder by the fact that Dresden suffers desperately from that plague sweeping every eastern German city – of disputed claims on properties expropriated by the Communists Until claims are settled, no work can start. ‘The gilt organ pipes in one of our churches have been covered with slanting slashes of brown stain. ‘One of the most important factors for the Nazis coming to power in 1933 was mass unemployment and the people’s absolute hopelessness.’The xenophobic violence, shocking when it flared up again in Rostock, is already slipping into the obscurity of a gruesome daily routine in Germany.Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s centre-right coalition ceaselessly bangs the drum of ‘asylum abuse’, using the violence to press its case for changing the liberal asylum provision in the constitution. ‘It was on our 38th wedding anniversary,’ said Mrs Lavergne, now 64.’At the time, I used to smoke,’ her 66-year-old husband added, ‘and, as was my custom, I was holding the cigarette away with my left hand.’In 1990, the Lavergnes appeared in the weekly Journal du Dimanche, which said it had found the couple in the famous clinch.

In markets where we cannot compete because our costs are much too high we are going to withdraw.’The Airbus cuts come in the wake of President Bill Clinton’s attack on alleged ’subsidies’ to the aircraft manufacturer.However, an Airbus spokesman said yesterday that repayments of any launch aid from European governments were being stepped up to about dollars 1bn a year over the next few years, from dollars 700m last year.In common with other US carriers, American, which flew 86 million passengers last year, has been hit badly by the economic downturn, foreign competition and a fare-cutting war that has driven two rivals out of business, pushed a further three – TWA, Continental and America West – into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and left another, Northwest Airlines, teetering on the brink.The first casualty of the cuts is likely to be American’s dollars 3bn fleet of 34 Airbus A300 jets The airline is expected to cancel leases on all but nine. But the respectability which she has engineered so skilfully has been bought at a terrible price, as becomes impossible to ignore when she is widowed and her offspring returns from Paris to the joyless temple of a home.Having just finished playing Gertrude in Hamlet, Jane Lapotaire now impersonates another mother with acute son trouble. Ross Perot wants to put high tariffs on Mexican imports until Mexican workers are paid the same as American ones. MOST PUPILS, parents and teachers at Crook Primary School in Co Durham seemed somewhat bemused by the report which will inevitably leave it branded one of the worst schools in Britain. About 56 per cent endorsed a Kremlin-drafted charter granting the President sweeping powers.That offset the gloom of the reform camp, but compounded fear for the future.