The Booker column

Booker this morning offers us a story about the baleful effect of EU Regulations on butcher’s bones – the type they sell, that is. Another classic Booker story, illustrating once again the effects of those mad regulators in Brussels when their insanity is compounded by the ministrations of British officials.

For his substantive story, however, he takes on Andrew Marr, the BBC's chief political correspondent so loved by this Blog, and his complaint in his Daily Telegraph column last week about the impossibility of making the recent agreement of the EU constitution in Brussels seem interesting.

While this story was rehearsed in this Blog click here Booker takes it further by cross-linking the Marr ennui with the absence of media comment on the power grab by the EU over economic policy.

He records how he wrote a letter to The Daily Telegraph on the subject, whence Tory backbencher Angela Browning asked Mr Blair to confirm that economic policy had been moved to majority voting. When Mr Blair failed to give a proper answer, another backbencher, Ann Winterton, repeated the question. When he still failed to answer, Mrs Browning put down a written question, asking him to explain the huge surrender he had made.

Up to press, she had been told her question had been referred to the Foreign Office, which no doubt will come up with a similarly obfuscatory reply. But, as Booker wrote in his letter, the person whose views we would really like to hear is the Chancellor. But for Andrew Marr, Booker records, the question would doubtless seem too boring and trivial to ask.