Every time Grandmother turns around the prospect of ground troops being deployed against the Serbian army seems to have crept closer and yet nobody

Every time Grandmother turns around, the prospect of ground troops being deployed against the Serbian army seems to have crept closer, and yet nobody will admit to having moved.
But moved they have. Mr Blair began the war by promising that “there is no question of Nato ground forces being sent in unless it is to police an agreed political settlement”. Three days later, he said that forces could go in with the refugees in order to “lead them back into their homes in Kosovo”. On Monday this week, the wording became more active: “There will be an international military force that will go in to secure the land for the people to whom it belongs.” And in the Commons on Wednesday he said: “The difficulties of a land force invasion of Kosovo against an undegraded Serb military machine are formidable.” So, while Nato troops will not fight their way into Kosovo, they may yet drive in against a degraded military machine.Whatever the reasons for this slow, much-denied shift in British, American and – by next week probably – Nato policy, it is to be welcomed. The deployment of ground forces should have been planned and threatened a year ago, but it is none the less essential now.However, our leaders should be taking Britain and its Nato allies into this thing without creeping around the point.

Ambiguity is hardly the right way to mobilise public opinion. Nor should the peoples of Nato countries be soft-soaped about the consequences of setting up a protectorate in Kosovo against Serbia’s will. Suggestions from Nato that troops will be able to drive into Kosovo without opposition from a bombed-out and demoralised Serb army are wishful thinking.Milosevic, in his propaganda counter-strike yesterday, said: “When our soldiers are dying, they know why they are dying They are dying for their homeland, for their fatherland. And for what will your soldiers die, 5,000 miles from home?” Well, they will be dying to put an end to “ethnic cleansing”, for a democratic, peaceful Europe.But to defeat Serbs fighting for their fatherland will require leadership. Fighting a war by multinational committee, which is what Nato is, requiring a consensus among 19 nations, demands tact and diplomacy. But, just as Mr Blair has insisted that Milosevic does not have a veto on Nato action, nor should Greece. The Greeks may be Nato’s weakest link, sympathetic to the cause of their traditional ally, orthodox Christian Serbia, but they will not leave Nato.

Fortunately, Milosevic has so far acted in such a way as to keep Nato together, while Russia is unwilling to move beyond its stance of bellicose neutrality.Nato’s leaders must give a lead to their peoples this weekend. Public opinion is less of a constraint on Mr Blair than on any of his fellow leaders, and he is under more of an obligation to come clean. He should prepare us for a ground war not by stealth, but by saying clearly that British lives will have to be risked at some time soon And he should come to Parliament and win a vote for it.. IT SEEMED like a good story at the time, but we cannot help but wonder whether we should have started the whole business.

In February, our education editor reported that Chris Woodhead, guardian of school standards and bugbear-in-chief of the teachers, had made some interesting comments to trainee teachers in Exeter. The “messes” involved in relationships between teachers and pupils over the age of consent, he said, could be “educative”. This was provocative but, on balance, Mr Woodhead was right Such relationships should be discouraged, forcefully. There should be a strong presumption that any teacher doing such a thing will lose their job But it should not be absolute. Some 18-year-olds are unusually mature, and some 21-year- olds can do unwise things without being bad teachers. A teacher should not be “automatically drummed out of the profession”, as Mr Woodhead said.
Since then, his personal interest in the issue has been exhaustively laid bare.There is no evidence that his affair with a former pupil began while he was her teacher, although his ex-wife and some former colleagues are convinced that it did.The fact that our report came while a Bill is going through Parliament to criminalise such liaisons should have drawn attention to a bad law. Instead it was used as an excuse by the teachers’ unions to try to hound a political enemy out of office.