The things they say: MR K D VARNALS

An insight into the minds of local personalities and politicians through their own words.

This week, Mr K D Varnals, whose manic diatribe against local government in the correspondence columns of the St Ives Times & Echo - the "new unitary dictatorship", "this leviathan" and "the faceless incompetents who reside in Truro" - managed to equate it all with the collapse of the Evil Empire:

"...we have all watched the Soviet block [sic] with its centralised control and bureaucracies crumble, because the whole thing became too slow to respond to local conditions".

It almost makes one nostalgic for the sweet reasonableness of the front page of Pravda.