Just as for Lord Lundy in Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tale the press was squared the middle classes all

Just as for Lord Lundy, in Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tale, the press was squared, the middle classes all prepared.Then, by the evening, it had begun to unravel badly. Suddenly it looked as though Mr Livingstone would be dropped from the shortlist. Which was what Mr Dobson wanted and told the Prime Minister he wanted, not least because while polls showed he had a sporting chance of beating Livingstone in a Labour electoral college, they suggested he had almost none of beating him among the wider electorate if Mr Livingstone, bounced off the party shortlist, decided to run as an independent.
The clearest signals from Party HQ had indicated that this was indeed what the Prime Minister wanted. The networks had been alerted that Tony Blair was to declare his undying admiration for Mr Dobson’s qualifications for the job, and his undying opposition to Ken Livingstone. But it ought not to be beyond the wit of humankind to devise laws that will control both of these idiocies and not throw away the greatest step forward since the invention of writing.MICHAEL CULEHigh Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. DO SOMETHING unfashionable Look at it from Frank Dobson’s point of view.

On Tuesday afternoon everything looked as though it were, at long last, going according to plan. Ken Livingstone, he was confident, would be on Labour’s shortlist to be London’s first mayor. When this technology improves sufficiently, there will be damn few parents around who will want to face children asking why they were left with less than adequate genes because of,well, to be blunt, because of neophobia, technophobia, ignorance and prejudice.There are dangers to the diversity of the human genome, especially the polar dangers of rigid social control by governments and the flood of individual decisions following the whims of fashion. Letter:

`Designer’ babies
Sir: Every time I read a headline like yours about designing human beings, I am moved to cry, “Will someone please, please tell me what is wrong with it?” Why are people so horrified at the prospect of producing future generations that are healthier in all ways than their ancestors?Looking around me, I think I can truly say that most of the people I meet could do with a bit of design work, and I do not exclude myself.

I am saddened that the politicians who laid the wreaths at the Cenotaph are the same ones who support an arms trade that continues to bring hurt and destruction to so many.My great-grandmother was commended for her sacrifice, but it was known within the family that she felt that the loss of her sons was not a price that was worth paying for the inability of the human race to resolve its conflicts in a civilised way.ALISON H MANDEVILLEAntony,Cornwall. Letter: Arms trade scandal

Sir: As the great-granddaughter of a woman who had five of her sons killed and one paralysed in the First World War, it was with mixed feelings that I viewed the Ceremony of Remembrance.
I mourned those lost and damaged lives but I am also angry that we invest war with the mantle of respectability and glory. Letter:

Illusion in Ulster
Sir: It is a truth universally acknowledged, except by the Ulster Unionist Party, that undefeated armies do not surrender their weapons.If David Trimble now has to eat his words and accept that sharing power with Sinn Fein must precede any IRA decommissioning, which in any case can only be voluntary and is unlikely to be more than token, he has only himself to blame.It was a disastrous failure of leadership for the last 17 months to collude with his party’s absurd collective illusion that it could unilaterally amend the Good Friday Agreement and compel the IRA to decommission before devolution occurred.MICHAEL McCARTHYLondon W5. Yet not one mainstream British newspaper carried a single news report or feature about any part of this journey.Does this not indicate a serious failure to confront the real moral crisis in a policy, in which our own country is deeply implicated, which punishes millions of Iraqi civilians in a stand-off over which they have no control?GEORGE GALLOWAY MP(Lab, Glasgow Kelvin)House of CommonsLondon SW1. Between our arrival in Tangiers and our reception by two million people in the streets of Baghdad, our route was carpeted by rose petals and confetti and we were accompanied by the cheers of millions.We met two Prime Ministers, two Foreign Ministers, two Health Ministers, six Speakers of Parliaments, five Chairmen of Foreign Affairs Committees, 86 Members of Parliament and audiences at public meetings numbering tens of thousands in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Jordan.I gave more than 300 interviews which were published or broadcast in countries as disparate as Australia and Norway, Japan and the USA. All Virgin staff who use a company mobile phone are given free earpieces, or can buy one on the company, and it remains a matter of personal choice as to whether or not they use them.Every Virgin Mobile phone sold to the public comes with a free earpiece – something unique to Virgin Mobile.RICHARD BRANSONChairmanVirgin MobileLondon W8. Letter:

By bus to Baghdad
Sir: A group of British volunteers and I have just returned from a 67-day journey from Big Ben to Baghdad aboard a London double decker bus.Its purpose was to highlight the suffering of the people of Iraq under their nine-year siege, to deliver $500,000 worth of medical supplies and such dangerous contraband as pencils, and to demonstrate to the British and American governments the strength of feeling in the countries through which we travelled against this unjust and disproportionate embargo which, according to the UN, is killing Iraqi children in their hundreds of thousands.Our bus chugged across three continents, 11 countries and 15,000 kilometres.

As you know, there is no evidence linking mobile phone usage and ill health.Nor did I ban Virgin staff from using mobiles without earpieces. Letter:

Mobile message
Sir: In writing the diary story about Virgin Mobile, our new venture, Pandora (16 November) chose to rely on incorrect and very old reports in other newspapers.Before my friend Michael von Clemm died of a brain tumour, he told me that he suspected the tumour might have had something to do with his regular use of a mobile phone. He did not know for certain if there was a link, nor did his doctors, and nor do I.What I said at the time of his death was that Michael said his mobile use might have been a factor in his death That is very different from what you implied I said. It appears under the title “Workers of the World Unite” on the National Lampoon album Lemmings, a pastiche of the Woodstock Festival.TONY GOSSLondon SE15. Letter:

Marx and Lennon
Sir: John Harris is wide of the mark in describing “Imagine” as “The Communist Manifesto set to music” (“Muzak of the Millennium”, 17 November). As a critique of capitalism, Lennon’s other Red Period masterpiece “Working- Class Hero” is head and shoulders above it.