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Bryan Ferry is a charming man I have known and liked for years. He has had a long musical career bringing enjoyment to millions of people, is knowledgeable about art, unassuming, and passionate about football. His son is a thug who needs to grow up.Immigration plusSo much rubbish is written about immigration, but figures published last week show the positive benefits brought by expanding the EU in 2004. More than 170,000 people from Eastern Europe applied to work here, of whom about a third were probably already here illegally. But only 8,000 of them applied for child benefit and just 43 were given council housing. We've gained 2,500 qualified bus, coach and lorry drivers, 200 doctors, and nurses and 485 teachers and classroom assistants. There are 42,000 Eastern Europeans in catering, 3,100 building labourers and 3,900 care assistants.
In less than a year these immigrants have contributed £500m to the British economy. If you want a cleaner, electrician, builder, plumber or waiter these days, you'll find that the person who does the job will probably be Polish They'll be hard-working and pleasant. Meanwhile too many Brits stupidly think that manual labour is beneath them.* * *Thank God Chelsea Flower Show is over once again, and we no longer have to read gushing reports about award-winning gardens made from recycled cans, gardens based on poetry, gardens inspired by naked women. My garden hasn't got a bloody water feature, black tulips or purple foliage. Kim Wilde hasn't laid my paving stones and I haven't got the Venus de Milo made of bay leaves. I've got a vegetable patch surrounded by rabbit-proof wire, encrusted with non-eco-friendly slug pellets.
I have geraniums in vulgar shocking pink and I still like normal white roses, not varieties named after Princess Diana or Geri Halliwell.My garden is like me, hardly cutting-edge but quietly confident More from Janet Street-Porter. If I were asked to name the most beneficent constitutional changes of the past 40 years, I would reply that there were two. One was that ministers were no longer allowed by the courts to get away almost literally with murder as they had been, roughly from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the post-1945 collectivist consensus. The other change was that the Queen had lost the power to appoint a Prime Minister, as she had appointed Prime Ministers - and, arguably, made a hash of it - in 1957 and then in 1963.
