The Tories' elephant in the room

I've not written anything thus far over the big issue gripping the Tories at the moment, namely the potential return of Ken Clarke to the political frontline, but that's been more due to lack of opportunity than lack of interest. As it happens I am a huge KC fan and nothing, bar the appointment of fragrant Yvette Cooper as Chancellor over the head of her bumptuous other half Ed Balls would give me greater pleasure than to see him back in the Shadow Cabinet.

Will it happen? Well, David Cameron has allowed expectations of Clarke's return to reach such a point now that it would be a serious setback for the Tories if it didn't, which probably means it will. But it should be as Shadow Chancellor rather than Shadow Business Secretary. Gideon Osborne is a smart operator, as he proved in autumn 2007 when his inheritance tax ploy frightened Brown into cancelling the election, but he lacks the essential gravitas for the role at these troubled times and would be much better employed as party chairman and key strategist for the 2010 campaign.

Cameron should also bring back David Davis as Shadow Home Secretary in place of the ineffectual Dominic Grieve, and Iain Duncan Smith as Shadow Defence Secretary in place of the lightweight Liam Fox. Defence is one of the big jobs in a Tory government alongside Foreign Secretary, Chancellor and Home Secretary, and a "Big Five" line-up of Cameron, Hague, Clarke, Davis and Duncan Smith would for me have the look of a formidable government in waiting.

Meanwhile, here's regular cartoonist Slob's take on it all. What I like about this image is that it shows how the Clarke conundrum is currently dominating Tory politics, Heathrow, recession and Gaza notwithstanding.

My grandparents' cat was called Sooty

And no, they weren't racists either.

Riverrun

The peerless Jonathan Calder - peerless in the sheer range of esoteria featured on his Liberal England blog - has recently highlighted a plan to restore some of the Lost Rivers of London to their natural glory.

The Lost Rivers have long held a fascination for me. They merited a chapter in that wonderful book London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd - the man who should have been Mayor of London all along in my view - and, many years earlier, a whole book of their own in Nicholas Barton's The Lost Rivers of London (1960), which is probably now out of print but well worth snapping up if you ever come across it in a secondhand bookstore in Hay-on-Wye or Cromford or some such place.

Jonathan draws our attention to a little-reported proposal to open up some of the rivers of south and east London, including the Effra and the Ravensbourne, which have long been culverted beneath parks. A brilliant example of what can be achieved by this can be seen in Sutcliffe Park, near Kidbrooke, where Gill and I lived before we moved to Derbyshire in 2004. A sterile open space has been utterly transformed into a natural river valley by opening up the River Quaggy, which had previously been submerged since 1964.

But in my view, the Environment Agency's plans don't go far enough. If they really want to do something radical which would make Central and North London a much pleasanter place to live and work, they should open up the Fleet, which wends its way from its source beneath Hampstead Ponds through some of North London's grimiest streets, flowing into the Thames just south of Fleet Street.

The river which gave its name to the national newspaper industry has been buried for more than 150 years and for much of that time was a sewer, a fact which some will doubtless regard as deeply symbolic.

Ackroyd records in his book that at one point, the noxious gases in the underground river built up to such a point that it exploded, taking three houses in the Kings Cross area with it. If tape recorders had been invented at the time, this would probably have constituted the loudest recorded fart in the history of the world, ever.