All they really have to do is let him slowly work his magic on the voters, who will soon come to love him as Heathcliff rather than Cliff Richard.
The same sort of mistake was made once before with a national celebrity, when Laurence Olivier was cast in a West End play entitled Semi-Detached in which he was required to play “an ordinary bloke”. It was in fact withdrawn after Waterloo; then brought in once again in 1842 It’s been with us ever since then

ROBERT DAVIES
London SE3. Murder, rape and child abuse all involve objective harm to an unconsenting human being Hunting does not It really is as simple as that

JONATHAN JONES
Oxford. DESPITE what William Hartston says (Budget Bite, 18 March), Income Tax has not been with us ever since 1799. Pitt abandoned it almost immediately because of technical problems He reintroduced it soon afterwards. Complacency is rife.RICHARD BRAMHALLCo-ordinatorLow Level Radiation CampaignLlandrindod, Powys.

STAN ROSENTHAL asserts (letter, 17 March) that hunting is in the same category as paedophilia, rape and murder It is in fact extremely simple to distinguish between them. Predictably, those risks are judged to be “below regulatory concern” so the consumer will not be informed and will have no choice.Mr Meacher says “there is never room for complacency”, but when abundant evidence of genetic damage at very low doses was reported to the European Parliament in February neither the UK government nor NRPB was represented, and neither the UK nor the EU is funding research into this field. Second, the studies are silent about the health effects of internal radiation.These and other weaknesses show that the officially accepted model is not scientifically secure, yet it is used to estimate the risks of discharges from nuclear plant like Sellafield, and of letting nuclear waste be recycled into consumer goods under the new European Basic Standards Directive. These studies have fatal flaws.
First, Professor Alice Stewart has shown that the radiation resistance of the A-bomb survivors is not, as ICRP assume, typical of the population at large.

Mr Meacher gets his advice from the National Radiological Protection Board, who believe that internal radiation can be understood in terms of a crude “average dose” model; NRPB’s belief rests on that of the International Commission on Radiological Protection; ICRP’s rests on studies of disease in Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors – people exposed to external radiation. YOU report (“Britain’s radioactive lobsters upset Norway”, 19 March) Michael Meacher’s confidence that radioactive foodstuffs pose no threat to health. Incidentally, it may be that once upon a time a trial was a necessary process only for the third class of individuals neither obviously guilty nor obviously innocent.
ROSS KESSELMalborough, Devon. It was a monumental blunder by the FCO “advisers”.
OLEG GORDIEVSKYLondon WC2. WHATEVER method the Dean of Westminster Abbey uses to separate the sheep who come to pray from the goats who come to gawp, it will not be by triage (“Pray or pay at Abbey”, 19 March). For that, as its name suggests, is the dividing into threes: originally of coffee beans into those of the best quality, middling or broken; and, more recently, of patients caught up in a medical emergency into those whose lives can be saved by rapid treatment, those who can wait a while and those alas for whom no treatment will avail. In 1991, John Major, during a visit to the USSR, was not allowed by the Foreign Office to meet the lader of the opposition, Boris Yeltsin, who a few months later was elected president.

NOBODY should blame Robin Cook for his real or alleged blunders in Israel Ministers act mostly on the advice of their officials. Our unemployment figure of 9.9 per cent is the highest in the south east. Wages on the island are 16 per cent below the national average.The Government must act to ensure that we do not remain in picturesque poverty as the “undeserving poor” of Europe.S COWLEYDeputy Leader and ChairmanEconomic Development CommitteeIsle of Wight Council. However, there are other areas which have equally severe problems and yet seem to be offered no help and are to remain excluded from the benefits of EU membership.The Isle of Wight is one such area Our GDP is 64 per cent of the EU average This is lower than South Yorkshire, Merseyside and Cornwall. In fact, financial assistance to support job creation should be given to the poorest regions and they are those with the lowest gross domestic product (GDP). South Yorkshire has been highlighted as one such area where declining heavy industry has had a severe impact. To date the Commission has allocated resources according to need.

However, following publication of the draft regulations, it appears that richer EU regions may stand to benefit at the expense of other regions with equally important economic and social problems.
The UK is being penalised because of its lower levels of unemployment. The UK is the fourth poorest country in the EU and one of the largest net contributors to its funds. It would appear that we in the UK fall into the second category. THE announcement this week by Monika Wulf Mathies, European Commissioner for Regional Policy and Cohesion, about changes in EU funding (“Britain to lose EU aid to regions”, 19 March) divides the people of Europe into the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.