Recovering from the sight of Prince Charles's kilt and vivid blue socks on the front of the Telegraph, I turned to the Mail for more serious matters. An extraordinary piece about some LSE academic reporting for Policy Exchange says he recommends the wholesale abandonment of dead or dysfunctional northern cities, whose inhabitants should move to new towns to be built around London, Oxford and Cambridge. Places like Liverpool are beyond repair, and the regeneration money poured into them has been pointless, Dr So-and-So claims.

This rubbish has been swiftly condemned by leading Tories, coinciding as the publication does with David Cameron's forthcoming tour of northern cities. Do we really want the SE to be some super-rich Singapore detached from its English hinterland, with the middle bit suspended somewhere between us and a more dynamic Scotland? I thought the Tories were the party of Union. 

The other night I was gripped by a Channel 4 documentary about a couple of women who single-handedly campaigned for a rather beautiful bridge to be built linking Castleford in Yorkshire. This was to be the first step in regenerating an otherwise dying former mining town, whose river was filled with the usual detritus of shopping trolleys. After four years in which the local council, some other residents, and property developers put every obstacle in their way, the bridge was finally built. And what a magnificent thing it was too. A series of S shaped curves on V shaped steel struts with hardwood decking for a surface. People could sit and watch the fast flowing waters of the weir.

A friend suggested another way of reviving some of these places- especially those on the coast. The British Museum and other London galleries have basements heaving with unseen works of art. Why not circulate them to places whose rather modest holdings are pretty uninspiring?

Meanwhile,

The Tories rush to support accelerated Georgian membership of NATO seems to reflect the luxury of non-choice. In the real world, you either have Russian cooperation on Iranian sanctions, or you offend them over Georgia and you don't. The US, apart from Dick Cheney, understands that. Talk of 1938 seems misplaced. Chamberlain's problem was that he was unable to make choices, neither curbing Hitler, nor detaching Mussolini from the Axis, nor rearming at sufficient pace. Merely annoying someone without changing their behaviour is hopeless.