Letter: Dalyell casebook

TOM Peterkin's interesting feature on Tam Dalyell (16 August) might have mentioned that it was the Pakistani scientist AQ Khan who passed on his nuclear weapons expertise to North Korea; and that it was Enoch Powell who coined the phrase "the West Lothian Question" after Dalyell's House of Commons speech on 14 November 1977, which has probably given Dalyell's very pertinent point much more mileage than it might otherwise have received.

On a less flattering note, he could also have pointed out that Dalyell claimed 18,000 from us (reduced by the Fees Office to 7,800) for bookcases needed "in the performance of his parliamentary duties" just two months before retiring as an MP. And Roosevelt died in 1945, not 1935.

John Birkett

Horseleys Park

St Andrews