Peter Rhodes: Mum knows best

HOWEVER, doesn't it seem faintly silly that the new rules which allow a man to dress as a woman, and vice versa, still sternly insist on proper shoes - "not trainers or sandals"? It's an odd sort of dress code which would welcome Eddie Izzard but turn away Jesus.

LABOUR leadership candidate leader Andy Burnham admits that his mother knew Labour's mansion-tax plan was "toxic" and a return to the 1970s. As the leadership contest hots up and the candidates fail to impress, how many Labour MPs are asking, why can't we vote for Andy's mum?

"PENSIONER fights for right to kiss his wife" is a typical headline on the tragic story of Thomas and Joan Middleton. He is 87, she is 84 and in a care home with dementia. He wants to kiss her but staff say she complains about his attentions. This is a terrible dilemma, familiar to thousands of families but barely mentioned in the Alzheimer's debate. Joan is Thomas's wife. He loves her but it seems she has no idea who he is. He has become not only a stranger to her, but an unwelcome stranger. Like so many dementia victims, she may have no memory of ever having been married. The wicked thing about dementia is that it steals more than one life.

SO there will be no public inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave in South Yorkshire during the miners' strike of 1984. Good. It would surely have turned into something like the Bloody Sunday Inquiry which cost £200 million, changed not a single mind and produced not a single prosecution. Even so, the decision is an opportunity for a little whatiffery. What if Scargill's miners had routed the cops at Orgreave and beaten the Thatcher government? How much longer would the coal industry have survived? The 21st century does not want coal. Whether they had won or lost the strike, and no matter whether the next governments were Tory or Labour, the miners of the 1980s would have been the last generation of Brits to be sent underground in the name of King Coal. Orgreave was more than a punch-up between miners and cops. It was the last death throes of a doomed industry.