Secrets of the Red Book

HEALTH and safety department. I have bought a new corded phone which comes with the instruction: "Before you wall mount, please check that the wall can support the weight of the phone." The phone weighs precisely 10 ounces.

THE phone bumf also assures us: "All our phones are designed for talking." Not whisking eggs, then?

TONY Benn's body will rest overnight in Parliament's chapel. This is a rare honour granted not because Benn was a great political leader but because he lived long enough to become a national treasure. He achieved this status without actually doing much apart from smoking a pipe, drinking his tea from a mug, treating his enemies with courtesy and preaching socialism to the public long after the public had rejected it. In his prime, Benn was a hard-line leftie who magically transmogrified into a sort of friendly aged uncle. We regarded him with the sort of affection reserved for very old lions in zoos when they can still roar a bit but are no longer dangerous.

AS I pointed out on Friday, it takes a few days ploughing through the Red Book before all the Budget details are revealed. Unmentioned in George Osborne's speech is the fact that tax on company cars is to be raised by two per cent. This is part of a great unfairness. Officially, workers start paying the higher 40 per cent rate of income tax when they earn more than £41,865. But that sum includes what the taxman calls benefits in kind. If you have a company car, a fuel allowance and private health cover, it is perfectly possible to be paying higher-rate tax when your actual salary is about £35,000. As thousands of middle-managers are bitterly aware, you are then paying 40p in the pound tax on pounds you haven't got.

THE voice of the people. From CNN's online debate about the Crimea crisis, a redneck writes: "Obama needs to do something manly for a change and invade Russia and let that Commie Putin know he can't have the Ukraine. We should not be afraid to start WW3 if we need to. Sigh, if only our sorry excuse for a president had the guts like a real man, like Bush. Can't wait until we have a decent white Christian man as a President again!!" And he's got the vote.

THE Queen is 87. The new 12-sided £1 coin will be launched in 2017 when she'll be 90. All the images of the new coin shown so far bear the Queen's head. But you can bet your life that hidden away in the Royal Mint is the mould for a £1 coin with the head of George VII, the title likely to be taken by Prince Charles.

THE row over where the remains of Richard III should be buried is all about money. Either York Minster or Leicester Cathedral will attract millions of extra tourists if the decision goes their way. My heart favours York but that city is already stuffed full of tourists and you can't help feeling that poor little Leicester (did you even know it had a cathedral?) deserves the new attraction. But there is another, tried-and-trusted solution. In mediaeval times, a cathedral didn't need the entire saint or martyr to attract pilgrims. A thigh bone or even a knuckle would suffice. In the best ecclesiastical tradition, why not divide Richard's bones and let each church have half? Richard III would entirely understand.

THEATRE trivia. Thanks to the poison-pen treatment he gets in Shakespeare's play, Richard III is known to actors everywhere as Dick the S***.