Real change can’t be imposed from top

WHILE I've spent a lot of time battling the Conservatives, I actually came to like some of their people.

- Hilton Dawson

If all these right-wing folks continue to desert them, I wonder if the 'one nation' party of Macmillan and Heath might reemerge?Then of course there’s Labour, about to contend with the radicalised Greens and something new, a socialist Your Party gradually forming.

Is there some hope in this new year?

Last Sunday, coming from half a world away, my half third cousin made contact and we talked together easily across all the miles, and the 150 years between us.

Third cousins because we're connected through our great-great-grandfather. 'Half' because he had two 'wives. We can plot the relationship neatly on paper and after five generations there'd be enough DNA to confirm it. I think of other places even further distant than Canada, of more of our cousins with the same links, the same identity and the same history, held in the bones of one drowned fisherman, from Newbiggin by the Sea. Of others, just over the border in the United States, yet more branches of a family divided in Northumberland, now piecing ourselves together, from all across the world.