The Times these days is a sadly diminished paper, I'm afraid. The Irish Times is far better.

If you want an English Conservative paper with some journalistic quality, the Daily Telegraph is a better bet, though that's gone down the pan a bit. (It's still got a good cryptic crossword though .

The idea that you lose your vote once you've served your sentence seems a weird one to me, and when it came out in the media recently, I think most people over here were pretty astonished to hear about it, and about the fact that it affects such enormous numbers of people. I'd have thought it's the kind of law that wouldn't survive a passage through tyhe US Supreme Court. It pretty definitely wouldn't stand-up in the European equivalent, if a European country had that kind of law.

It sounds the kind of notion one might expect to find in some screwed up antiquarian monarchy. But in England the only people who can't vote once they've reached the age of 18 are people actually in prison, hereditary peers (including the royals) and "lunatics" (the vocabulary is a bit dated) - but that last one in practice only applies to some in-patients in psychiatric hospitals.