You’re a riot, Lord Waldegrave

ON SATURDAY, Radio 4 will be broadcasting a documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of the introduction of Margaret Thatcher’s muchhated poll tax in Scotland. (It was imposed on England and Wales a year later, in 1990.) Lord (William) Waldegrave, one of the Cabinet architects of the policy, tells the interviewer with delicious understatement: ‘The rates change had an intellectual beauty.’ What about the bloody poll tax riots which led to Mrs Thatcher being forced from No 10 just seven months later?