Well what a remarkable week we have had at Westminster – who said politics is boring! Just seven days ago the Government appeared to be heading for defeat over their proposals to extend the detention of terrorist suspects to 42 days when up popped 9 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP’s to save their bacon. Now the DUP almost always supports the Conservative Party in the Commons so you can imagine this did not go down well with David Cameron who scented a first government defeat under Gordon Brown’s premiership.

I ONCE lost the receipt for our dry-cleaning and all attempts to persuade a rather formal gentleman behind the counter that my sense of loss was genuine fell on deaf ears.

After much pleading he reluctantly agreed to let me describe some of the items to help identify my cleaning. Alas that did not help at all! As the majority of items were my wife's - he was not impressed!

I recall this story as it reminded me of the difficulty Alistair Darling had on Tuesday to explain how 25 million individual financial records held by HM Customs and Revenues has 'gone missing'!

I have always looked forward to Budget day.

Long before I became an MP I enjoyed the drama of the occasion and the swift calculations as to whether I was a winner or a loser in the process.

Like all great stage artists – successive Chancellors leaving the best to the last – some exciting new announcement – a rabbit pulled from the hat – the key talking point to deflect attention from the inevitable bad news buried deep inside the minutia.

January is always a depressing month with little to look forward to other than dark nights, inclement weather and a distinct lack of good cheer. It is amazing just how quickly the seemingly endless supply of bon-homme that exists at Christmas disappears in the January gloom.

Lord Sainsbury’s seminal report ‘Race to the Top’ published just over a year ago was a stark reminder to all sides of the economic eco system that, in order to compete in a global economy, the creation of knowledge and its rapid exploitation for societal benefit was essential. Few could have predicted in 2007 that the necessity for knowledge transfer would become an imperative as the UK faced into the gale of a global recession.

In February of this year John Denham the Secretary of State for DIUS announced his intention to develop a framework for Higher Education over the next ten to fifteen years. His telling challenge that ‘We need to decide what a world-class HE system of the future should look like, what it should seek to achieve, and establish the current barriers to its development’ was absolutely right. After four and a half decades of expansion which has seen UK higher education develop from the elite pre Robbins era to the current mass system, it is time to pause for serious reflection.