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to attend. Other Tory front benchers also stressed that the only way to resolve major problems was , to vote on them after debate (maybe forgetting the existence of the whips).

The Left in the unions pressed for elected official for years -exactly on the basis of 'decision by debate' tells us what to think.

Unions which use postal ballots for elections cannot boast much about the turn out - often well under ten percent. Yet where mass meetings can be arranged for strike votes, turn out of over 75 percent are common.

We might assume that the MCC is a Tory-style body. Its members stem from old-style blimp Tories to new style Tebbit Tories - with just a thin sprinkling of David Shepherd-style clergy.

Their exercise in 'democracy' on the question "shall we send a team to racist South Africa right now or shall we wait a bit?" also went the way of the rope -with a defeat for the radical right.

Yet even this august assembly, stuffed full of 'responsible' people filled brim full with civic responsibility managed a turnout of less than 50 percent on its postal ballot — more than 1,000 of whom voted at a special (darewe-say-it) mass meeting.

On hanging it is really quite surprising that we did not get a story something like this:

"Militant extremists infiltrated a mass meeting of MPs yesterday and swung a vote in. favour of letting murderers go scot free.

"MPs were swung by demagogic speeches to vote in a way that they know will not do them or their families any good."

And on the South Africa tour:

meeting, let militant extremists railroad their organisation into victimising misunderstood South Africa.

One reason why these stories did not appear may be that the press itself was divided over the were not yet sure that the tour would not produce whites-only cricket which would not draw in the crowds, or therefore the money.

Even the Sun in the end came out against hanging, and the press by and large contented itself for calling for Leon Brittan's head for cocking up the government's major speech.

But they were full of praise for windbag Hattersley. In our own press awards at the ènd of the year, Hattersley, who writes about 50,000 newspaper articles a week, should be in the running for a special award for hypocrisy.

His argument that hanging Irish republicans was a form of 'special status' and would therefore be "giving in to their demands" is another inglorious footnote in the history of British Labour callousness across the Irish Sea.

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•Moderates who stayed at home rather than attend a rigged mass