Ruthless People

Airport executives and motorists' organisations are blackening the skies with their emissions of praise for Ruth Kelly, who has decided to leave the Cabinet for "family reasons", now that her children are all old enough to be shunted off to school. Apparently the brilliant Kelly, whose various stints as Sectarian of State for Muslim control, gayness control, transport clinics, airport expansion and education have exercised your correspondent on one or two occasions before, can no longer cope with the strain of being viviparous and fatuous at one and the same time.

Amid the gushing tributes, the executive director of the Campaign for Better Transport found it "odd that her espousal of low-carbon transport has been combined with such a gung-ho attitude towards building more runways"; which suggests that the executive director of the Campaign for Better Transport has not yet caught up with the difference between rhetoric and reality - a rather important distinction to make when dealing with politicians, and an essential one when attempting to sort the tough but tender bubble-gum of New Labour rhetoric from the rancid pork-barrel of their policies.