Peter Rhodes: Better pure than in power

MY damaged-sink saga continues. I have persuaded the supplier to give me a refund. The courier was due to collect the sink on Monday so I stayed in all day. No show. I rang. They apologised and promised to turn up on Wednesday. They arrived on Tuesday. I understand a computer is involved.

MOST significant moment of this week's Labour Party Conference? It came when one speaker said that, if Labour wanted to win a general election, it must attract some former Tory voters. Someone in the audience shouted: "Why? We don't want Tories." Behold, the problem for any political movement which puts high principles above common sense. The Left cannot gain power without mass support, yet some of them would rather reject new supporters than risk pollution from anyone less Left than themselves. That's the mind-set that prevented communism taking off in Britain and the fixation that turned the People's Front of Judea (or was it the Judean Popular Front?) into a splinter group in Monty Python's Life of Brian. Corbynism cannot unite the Labour Party, so what hope has it of attracting supporters of other parties, especially when its activists despise such people? Better powerless than impure, eh, comrades?

AND the conference quote of the week? It must be: "The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal," from Jeremy Corbyn who, during 33 years in Parliament, has voted against his own party at least 500 times.

FOOTBALL, cycling, athletics, cricket. Is there any area of sport that is squeaky-clean? Here's an idea. Let's have an investigatory pause between any team or individual winning any competition and the award of the trophy. About four years should do it.

"I HAVE more roots than Kunta Kinte," declared Eva (Catherine Tyldesley) on a trip to Audrey's hair salon in Coronation Street (ITV). Corrie has now been denounced for racism and Ofcom is to investigate. The bizarre part of all this is that Kunta Kinte, star of Alex Haley's book and TV series, did not have roots. He was the root. It was Haley, tracing his lineage back to Africa, who discovered his own roots, all the way back to Kunta Kinte. The Corrie line was not only nonsense but an example of middle-class humour being put into the mouth of a working-class character and no-one in the editing process having the balls to say: "That's a really rubbish line. Cut it."

IF Eva had said: "I have more roots than Alex Haley," it would still have been an unlikely line to hear in a Lancashire hair salon but at least it would have made sense. And I doubt anyone would have complained. It was the uttering of an African name that caused offence (either genuine or feigned).

AFTER last week's news that millions of BT and Yahoo accounts had been hacked, did anyone believe the email that popped up this week advising us all to change our passwords? Not me. Unless emails have my name on, I spike them, even if they look genuine. Only when the same message appeared on the BT website did I change my password.

AND since then, the email service has been useless. This column is brought to you not thanks to BT Yahoo but in spite of it.