Other road taxes would be graded according to environmental criteria, he said.. We will be a party of all Britain and all Britons.”Tim Yeo, the shadow Environment and Transport Secretary, announced plans for colour-coded tax discs for cars. and we know that today people support each other in many different ways,” she told the conference. “If you’re living together, a single mother on benefits, two elderly sisters or a same-sex couple with a commitment to one other, you are all families and I will stand up for you.” She contradicted Margaret Thatcher who said in 1987: “There is no such thing as society. She urged the Tories to “live in the real world”.”We still believe that marriage is the best environment for bringing up children … There are individual men and women, and there are families”.Ms Maysignalled her backing for the creed of compassionate Conservatism as she said that the party accepted “changes in the way people live”.She declared: “It is not about what you are, it is about how you live. Theresa May pledged yesterday to “change the definition” of the family when she said gay couples, elderly sisters and “a single mother on benefits” would be considered a family unit under a Tory government.

The Irish government stepped up its efforts yesterday to secure the release of the British hostage Ken Bigley by granting him a passport to prove his Irish heritage. Ireland opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq.There were plans last night to broadcast pictures of the new passport, granted within 24 hours of a request from Paul Bigley, the hostage’s brother, on the pan-Arabic television news station, al-Jazeera.The engineer was travelling on a British passport when he was abducted but the Irish government has made several pleas for his release since his Irish roots came to light.Paul Bigley said he hoped the passport would provide Tawhid and Jihad with the basis for releasing the Briton or passing him to a group motivated by financial rather than political gain.In London, the Foreign Office last night insisted the decision to issue Mr Bigley with a passport was entirely a matter for the Irish authorities. Imam Syed al-Kareem said Tawhid and Jihad, which has held Mr Bigley for 20 days, considered Ireland to be a neutral country in the Iraqi conflict and would not harm its citizens. Gordon Brown will tour the country during the next general election and play no part in running Labour’s campaign from London, it was announced yesterday. Occasionally, too, there is a sense that the narrow range of preoccupation needs more modulation.Nevertheless, this is a solid first collection, concerned as much with “out-things getting in” as in things getting out. It is a meditation on the limbo of grief, offering hope within an earthly gloom, whether it is “a clatter of choughs climbing off the headland/ aiming somewhere for God”, or a “church bell moving in the swell, / calling the waters to prayer”. Matthew Hollis is also co-editor of two anthologies: 101 Poems Against War (Faber) and Strong Words (Bloodaxe), both well worth checking out.Buy any book reviewed on this site at postage and packing are free in the UK.

Ground Water is a serious and worked collection of poetry, a long time in the making and shortlisted among the best first collections for tomorrow’s Forward Poetry prize. Ground water works throughout the volume as an extended metaphor: below the water table, flowing downhill, but not necessarily replicating the flow above the ground, always on the move and draining into streams, rivers, lakes and oceans Landscape becomes the domain of elegy. Stand by for a dozen new additions to Mitchell’s menagerie of voices, a muttering crew of new recruits to the parliament in his head, a score of new instruments to the orchestra from which this pro- digiously gifted conductor extracts polyphonic harmonies never heard before.And that, I think, is quite enough metaphors for one interview.’Cloud Atlas’ is published by Sceptre, £16.99. It is the landscapes “we carry within us,/ like a blueprint for water” – their emergence into the floods of emotion across which we as humans valiantly row, and how we translate them into language – which sit at the volume’s heart.

“It’s a kind of self-defence, in that I want to understand what it is and the mechanics behind it.”David, I say, you’re losing me. What is it you’re trying to understand?Finally, it comes out “I wasn’t badly bullied at school I was one of the borderline ones. As long as I watched out for myself, and played the playground political game the best I could, I wouldn’t be picked on. I wasn’t one of the leaders, and I wasn’t one of the victims. I was one of the in-between kids, always having to keep an eye on relegation, never being quite ignorant.”So the great six-domed cathedral of Cloud Atlas, with its dramas of power and manipulation, has its roots in childhood? Watching people feeding on other people?”It’s true.