Speaking on “Thatcherism – The Next Generation” he dealt with market forces in the public sector services He said: “Every individual is a market force. we need to add a thriving personal sector to the public sector NHS we already have.”Mr Lilley himself has a mass of words for eating, not least in the lecture he gave in 1989 just before he secured his cabinet place. This requires us to define a Conservative philosophy of health care … Even Alan Duncan, a close friend of Mr Hague, was furious that Mr Lilley had cut the ground from under his feet.Only three weeks ago, Mr Duncan, a health spokesman, issued a Central Office press release of a much-praised speech on health care he had given to the Social Market Foundation.In it he said: “The NHS cannot do everything, so there will always be more to be done.

Emphasising that there is more to life than defending and extending the free market he declared: “There are distinct limits to applying the free-market paradigm in the public services.”
The speech had the full approval of William Hague but harsh criticism of it came from Eric Forth and Edward Leigh of the No Turning Back Group, who led the attacks on him at the 1922 Committee.Mr Lilley is still a member of the group, of which he was a founder member in 1983, but he failed to attend its monthly dinner two days after the speech and members were angry that he was kicking away the Thatcherite ladder, up which he had climbed to prominence. His speech, given earlier this week for true believers to celebrate (slightly early) the 20th anniversary of Baroness Thatcher being elected prime minister, was certainly ill-timed. THE DEPUTY leader of the Conservative Party, Peter Lilley, has faced a barrage of almost universal criticism and ridicule from Tory backbenchers and several members of the Shadow Cabinet for his change of tone towards health and other public services. If there is a contest, she is unlikely to be chosen by Labour as the party’s candidate.Yesterday’s hearing was adjourned and a full hearing is expected to be held next week.. Mrs Jones had hoped to receive a “positive” declaration.
Although Mrs Jones won her appeal, the Commons authorities are applying to the High Court to clear confusion over whether a vacancy can be filled without a by-election. The High Court was told that the Commons Speaker and the Attorney General were both “neutral” over whether a by-election should be held in Newark to fill the vacancy created when she was convicted for making a false declaration over her election expenses. FIONA JONES, the former MP for Newark, suffered a setback yesterday in her legal battle to resume her Commons seat.

The divisions of India are complicated and those in the Balkans probably more so We need all the help we can get.. The words were the same – “village”, “majority”, “polling station” – but what they described was totally different.You had a narrative but its spare, simple lines badly needed the cross- hatching ink that could describe the society in which it was set (and which you, as a reporter, were just beginning to discover). An election in Uttar Pradesh could read like the same thing in Hertfordshire. Example, that the hybrid Serb-Croat language died with Tito’s Yugoslavia, to be succeeded by Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, which are virtually indistinguishable; and that Slovenes and Macedonians have separate languages, but still Slavic.Why does it help to know stuff such as this? In the Seventies, as a reporter in India, I used to look at the copy I’d sent back to London and think what a poor match it was to reality. Example, the British knew Serbia as Serviauntil 1916 when the “v” was replaced by the “b” to remove any implication of servility, which would not be fitting for one of our gallant allies in the First World War.So I’m grateful to Marcus Tanner in this new series for supplying answers to the most basic questions.

My own knowledge of the Balkans is distressingly thin, a rag-bag of odds and ends. The paper has had many excellent dispatches from the Balkans, perhaps especially those of Robert Fisk and James Dalrymple, but daily reporting has its limitations.By its nature it’s good at the present but bad at the past, and it often assumes (because it has to – the pressures of time and space) that readers know more than they actually do. It’s couched in the most humble of forms – question and answer – but I was glad to see it. Personally, on the principle of women and children first, I believe we behaved rather well.uTHIS WEEK a regular little feature began to appear in The Independent’s foreign pages under the title “The Balkan Question: Key issues behind the war explained”. The problem is that neither X nor I is English (X being Welsh-Italian, two identities not known for reserve). More importantly, I was with my family in bucket-and-spade mode and didn’t want to have a desultory conversation about The Independent.The editor was astonished – “desultory” and “Independent” not being words linked in his mind – and turned his cross-examination to X, who at first denied all knowledge of my presence in the Seaview Hotel, Seaview, near Ryde, and then confessed that yes, he’d sat four foot away from me in the bar and averted his eyes for the same reason.All this week, the editor has been telling audiences that this story is the most perfect illustration of English behaviour he has ever heard, as though X and I were Charters and Caldicott in The Lady Vanishes, or two Victorian explorers passing each other in Arabia Deserts with nothing more than a gruff “good day”. Because, I said, I hardly knew him (he works full-time in the paper’s Canary Wharf offices, a place I haven’t visited in four years).