I understand that Michael Gove, the education secretary, is excessively fond of haddock paste, as spread on Aberdeen sandwiches. But he has never, to my limited knowledge, sailed on a trawler to catch a haddock for himself nor in any other way experienced life at sea. He is at sea, all the same, with his plan to offer the Queen the present of a new Royal Yacht Britannia.

The problem is he never offered to pay for it himself. He invited us – that’s the 60-odd million population of the United Kingdom – to buy it for him, or rather, for Her Majesty, with our taxes. It would cost us, according to one boat-builder’s estimate, £1m a head. A rival boat-builder thinks that’s on the low side. A yacht fit for a queen could not be built, he insists, for less than £100m.

Another problem brought upon himself by Mr Gove is that he appears not to have first discussed his proposal with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nor, indeed, with the Prime Minister.

After George Osborne, when he first heard of it, fell over, the next one to faint was Dave Cameron himself.

But the task of firing a torpedo straight through Mr Gove’s patriotic head fell to the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. "You mean," said Mr Clegg to Mr Gove, "the haves and the have yachts?" That, I think, is Lib-Dem newspeak for No.

And perhaps also not too different from the bluntspeak of Messrs Cameron and Osborne.

On this one issue, the coalition is undivided.

If Michael Gove still wants to give the Queen a new yacht, he must give her one himself.

At least he’s tried. He understood how sadly the Queen, along with her quite large family, had lamented the lack of a yacht to herself since her old one sprang a starboard door leak and was put out of commission in the late 1990s.

How was one to get around the Commonwealth countries without one? Especially in one’s jubilee year? It’s not an unfair question. But not an unanswerable one. Why doesn’t one buy another yacht for oneself?

Such a solution would not, of course, have occurred to the gallant Michael Gove.

It is in his character to please his sovereign in every way he can – and that is to his credit. But how, in a regime of shrinking pensions and compulsory redundancies for teachers and doctors as well as for the queen’s soldiers and sailors, is one to persuade ordinary people that they have enough spare cash to contribute to the Queen’s sailing expenses? Obviously one cannot. Perhaps Mr Gove could organise a whip round among the world’s billionaires. There just might be some who would shell out, if only for a chance of dinner aboard with the Duchess of Cambridge.

But that stratagem, if successful, would pose commercial problems of a demeaning vulgarity.

The boat-building would have to be assigned to China – or if the commissioners were in a soft-hearted mood, to poverty-stricken Greece. Clearly, Clydebank would charge too much.

Inevitably, too, the yacht would have to carry advertisements. Coke labels on the upper deck. Poundworld Discounts on the forecastle. That sort of thing.

When silence wasn’t golden for some movie-goers

‘SPEAK UP!’ someone is reported to have shouted at the two main canoodling characters in the critically lauded new film, The Artist, when it was shown at a Liverpool cinema the other night.

The story, chronicling Hollywood’s last silent hurrah during the advent of the ‘talkies’, uses a bit of background piano to help it along but, apart from one snap of a joke in the closing sequence, does without speech.

Everyone’s dialogue is conveyed in short crisp captions against a coal black background. Moreover, the action, such as it is, is projected in black and white onto a squat screen of the postage-stamp size that all movie fans were obliged to squint at before the huge cycloramic picture-walls came in around the late 1950s.

That shouting Scouse critic was being relatively tolerant of the movie: several of his companions walked out and demanded their money back.

And these, please remember, were until recently residents of an annual European City of Culture.

To be fair on them, despite this unexpected and temporary social elevation, they had probably gone to bog Scouse schools and couldn’t read the captions.

Not that everyone in a Manchester audience which watched the same film, got into the comic (and historical) spirit of the show, either.

Many of them voted with hostile and clumping hobnails, stopping off at the box office to collect Mersey-type refunds.

No doubt their premature departure enabled them to return home early enough to enjoy a cheerless hour or two of pseudo-chav prattle from Coronation Street and EastEnders.

However, it has to be said that there were similar exiting demonstrations against The Artist in Wolverhampton, Newcastle and Nottingham. Not everyone is born to stay silent in suffering.

Which brings me to the subject of another new movie, which as yet few have walked out on, as they certainly should.

I mean Steven Spielberg’s, big, noisy, Bayeux-tapestry version of the kiddies’ book War Horse. Watching this made me realise that cinema punters do, now and then, have a genuine cause for hissing execration.

The blurb for this extravagant epic describes it as ‘Powerful, Courageous and Honest’. It has none of these attributes.

Spielberg has shot the heroic tribulations of a First World War horse (and of several of its equine companions) with a compassion due to Pinocchio and, despite the choreographed inferences of carnage, without a convincing spot of blood.

Sunsets come up, over battlefields and homeland, in the colours of a pink blancmange. War Horse is an old-fashioned Lassie film with hooves. Moreover, it traduces Michael Morpurgo’s calm and elegant book, which I diligently read before submitting to maestro Spielberg’s travesty.

Although written for children – albeit intelligent children – it has no truck with sentiment, and unlike the film, does not allow Joey the equine hero a completely rapturous retirement in home-green pastures.

Albert, the farmboy who lied about his age to join Joey in the trenches, returns home and promptly marries his sweetheart, a dairy maid who dislikes horses and will never give Joey one of her famously tasty Devon pasties.

Her name is Maisie Cobbledick. What was Spielberg thinking of when he edited this heartless but dramatically interesting character out of his three-hour script?

All Stockport girls should have to take speech therapy

JOAN BAKEWELL, who studiously shed her Stockport accent to get on in the literary and broadcasting worlds, now says the BBC considers her voice too posh.

In a tone of near apology, she confesses she started talking posh to keep in with her upper class friends at Cambridge. Thank goodness she did.

All Stockport girls should take speech therapy if they hope to rise above their background by capturing men of higher breeding and intelligence.

When Stockport girls go all hoity toity they sound like the female shop assistants in Are You Being Served.

Baroness Bakewell’s confession coincides with a report that elocution lessons are becoming popular again – especially in the humbler districts of outer Manchester.

She should be hired, at whatever expense, as chief voice tsarina for the north west.

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