Four op-eds of considerable length reached this desk between Tuesday evening and Thursday morning, and the Editor has chosen to print one and to summarise the others in the paper's political column. This is not a neutral decision and the reader is owed an account of it.

The three that were summarised argued, each in its fashion, that the responsibility for the state of the pier and the condition of the Kingdom lies with some other party than the one the author leads or defends. These are legitimate arguments and, in their place, useful ones. They do not, taken together, tell the reader of this paper anything he or she did not already know by Wednesday lunchtime. To have printed all four in full would have produced six pages of men telling the reader whose fault it is, and no pages telling the reader what, if anything, can be done before Monday.

The Cardenal's essay tells the reader what can be done before Sunday, which is a shorter horizon and a more manageable one. It does not name a minister. It does not ask for a vote. It asks for bread and for sitting, and it reminds us of a custom that predates most of the institutions now quarrelling over the pier.

The Editor does not suggest that the Church is the only voice worth printing in full. He suggests only that, in a week in which the other voices have not been short of platforms, the Cardenal's essay has earned its page by the modesty of what it proposes. Parity of summary has been kept in the political column. The reader will judge whether parity of column-inch would have served better. The Editor's view, for what it is worth to a paper whose readers have long since made up their own minds, is that it would not.