The outcry over the treatment of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly and a string of critical reports calling for controls on special advisers have added to the unease.The Government’s response to the report, to be published tomorrow, will further define the boundaries of special advisers by rewriting their official code of conduct. The adviser will be called to investigate only at the behest of the Prime Minister.Mr Blair, in his official response to a report by the Wicks Committee on Standards in Public Life, will also announce plans to bring forward a draft Civil Service Act – responding to the publication of a model Bill by the Public Administration Committee of MPs – which will define in law for the first time the role and boundaries of civil servants and ministers’ special advisers.The move follows criticism that special advisers have been heavy handed in their dealings with civil service press officers and have overstepped their responsibilities. He is also expected to assume the Prime Minister’s role in judging whether a minister has breached the code of conduct.But the proposal could face criticism for being not far removed enough from the inner workings of government. He will also provide independent advice to ministers on how to behave.The ethics adviser will assume the power of permanent secretaries, the most senior civil servants in government departments, to rule on how a minister should behave.

Tony Blair is to announce curbs on the role of special advisers and the appointment of an official “ethics adviser” to investigate ministerial sleaze.
The adviser, whose post is likely to be advertised this week as part of reforms to curtail spin, will be able to investigate irregular financial dealings and potentially damaging conflicts of interest, such as those exposed by the Ecclestone, Mittal and Hinduja affairs. The government plan would be likely to channel £30m a year into party coffers.. Peter Hain, the Leader of the House of Commons, told The Independent this week that Tony Blair was preparing to consider plans for full state funding.Mr Hain, who chairs a cabinet committee on electoral policy, said Mr Blair was ready to override Tory objections by including a pledge in Labour’s manifesto at the next general election. Most people oppose using taxpayers’ money to fund political parties fully, a survey published today shows.
But the study for the Electoral Commission also found that most people believe that the current system of voluntary donations is vulnerable to abuse.The research, conducted by the Mori Social Research Institute, found that just 7 per cent of the electorate think they should foot the total bill for party financing.Three quarters (76 per cent) think parties should be financed by their own fund-raising and most (56 per cent) do not think that parties would become more honest if they were funded through taxes.The findings will come as a blow to the Government. One quibble: the “easy chair” identified in Alice Squires’ watercolour is surely a hip-bath?By Jan MarshThe reviewer’s life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. However, it is not the human informants who drive Flanders’ narrative, but the inanimate objects.

The range of sources includes the familiar – Dickens’ characters, Jane Carlyle, the Linley Sambournes, Gwen Raverat – and the lesser-known (a 12-page appendix offers an annotated bibliography). As Hilary Mantel’s comment on the jacket indicates, The Victorian House is for browsing and dipping, for the touch is light, if sometimes overwhelmed by mind-numbing lists of utensils, menus or mourning requirements. The first was to allow guests to choose from a selection – originally set out like a buffet, later served in sequence as from a menu – and the second, it seems, to provide cold meat and cooked dishes for women, children and servants for the rest of the week.Drawing on recollections, advice manuals (the original How To books) and fiction, this book is a remarkable redaction of information. Easy now to mock the moral emphasis on cleanliness, but the daily experience was always a battle and one main reason for the ever-spreading suburbs, where one’s hair and laundry were freer from grime.Victorian dinner parties are also decoded, showing that the multiple courses served two functions. Corporate heartlessness and marital tensions are, of course, still with us, but we might be watching material from a few decades ago, so bereft is the writing of present-day detail and insight.What is noteworthy here is the strain of self-pity. An unemployed man and his wife play each other and reveal their mutual contempt.

They walk back and forth, looking sillier and sillier, while Mary gives them suggestions on improving their posture.Later, a man told to take the part of his boss tells himself off for being a failure not only at work but at home, and dissolves into tears. The unemployed call out names of big companies in tones of reverence or imminent orgasm. She puts them through a series of exercises designed to expose their weaknesses and then expunge them.Some of these are brief and what the generous might call impressionistic. Yet there is not a minute’s worth of novelty or surprise in Patricia Benecke’s production, and not an instant of visual excitement or pleasure.Four actors and two actresses, all in dark suits, introduce themselves by their real names, then begin playing their roles: Mary is the director of an executive retraining agency, and the others are her clients, all recently sacked. This play, first staged in Zurich in 1996, won three German theatre awards the following year, including the critics’ prize for the best new play. Look at the conclusion I might have jumped to from seeing that Urs Widmer, the Swiss author of Top Dogs, describes his plays as “full of humour, wit and esprit”.
Dialogue Productions may have subjected its audience to 80 minutes of self-important inanity, but it has done wonders for my inferiority complex about the supposed greater sophistication of the Continent.