Cherie gave him the wrong answer and Tony quickly corrected him.”But too late. It had already become the highlight of a rather dull day on the election stump.A plan to create a government co-ordinator to tackle the country’s drugs crisis will be announced by Tony Blair today.The Labour leader has been persuaded that concerted action is needed to curb the drugs problem. During a visit to Aberdeen today he will say that, if elected, he will appoint an overlord to take on the drugs barons; someone with the power to call in the police, education authorities, the Prison Service and any other body facing a drugs problem, to co-ordinate action.Labour said last night that the number of people convicted of drug offences in the United Kingdom had more than trebled over the last decade; up from 26,958 in 1985 to 93,631 in 1995.. The right-wing Conservative MP Allan Stewart stood down from the safest Tory seat in Scotland last night, saying press reports on his health and personal life had caused “great family distress and personal strain”.

At the weekend his name was linked in the media with a married woman he was said to have met at a clinic in the Borders specialising in alcohol problems.
In a letter to his local Conservative association chairman, Ian Muir, Mr Stewart said that after discussing his position with his wife, Susie, he had decided to resign as prospective candidate for Eastwood, near Glasgow.”I do so with great regret so near to a general election, but I am sure that the association will be able to select an excellent candidate and achieve a resounding majority,” Mr Stewart said.After the media reports, in a Scottish Sunday newspaper last weekend, he told members of his constituency that he wanted to resign and they met last night to finalise the matter.The 54-year-old MP had a majority of 11,688 at the 1992 election, the safest Tory seat north of the border. Until 1995, he was a junior Scottish Office minister, a role that ended after he was fined for a pickaxe confrontation with anti-motorway protesters on the site of the new M77. He resigned his post, writing to John Major to say he did not want “in any way to be an embarrassment to a government I have been proud to serve”.Mr Stewart’s views were seen as a litany of Thatcherite principles: a staunch Unionist, an anti-devolutionist, in favour of hanging, and an undiluted market-forces man.He is also a libertarian non-smoker who has loudly defended the freedom of smokers to poison themselves if they want to.But after Mrs Thatcher made him a Scottish Office minister, MPs found his performance at the Despatch Box less confident than his extravagant mutton-chop whiskers might have suggested. Mrs Thatcher dropped him from the Government’s ranks during a major reshuffle in 1986.Mr Muir said last night: “There should be no glee on the part of our political opponents.

This is a human tragedy of immense proportions which will touch the hearts of all but the most hardened.”The association will meet later this week to choose a successor candidate.. A future Labour government must be prepared to break its promise of a two-year freeze on public spending and pump more money into education. Speaking on the first day of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference in Cardiff, the union’s general secretary, Peter Smith, said that by sticking to the spending pledge “like Araldite”, Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown would provoke cynicism among teachers and voters.
It was questionable whether the party would be able to tackle problems it had identified as needing attention, he said.Mr Smith called on Labour to review spending on education within its first 100 days in power if it gained office on 1 May.Increasing cash for schools should be its top education priority, since the sector had been squeezed “till the pips squeaked.”A recent Harris poll commissioned by ATL revealed 86 per cent of the public thought more money was top of the list if schools were to improve.Mr Smith, who heads a moderate union of 150,000 teachers and lecturers, stepped back from condemning Mr Brown, but added: “If he really is saying that for two years he will apply the decision, with no moderation whatsoever, put into place by his predecessor Kenneth Clarke, then it will only be a matter of time before people ask, ‘Time for a change? Where is the change in that?’”. It was elementary spelling that earned Dan Quayle a place in the history of political gaffes when he told a classroom full of children that “potato” had an E on the end. Yesterday, it was simple arithmetic that caused blushes in the Blair household when Cherie gave a 10-year-old the wrong answer during the presentation of Tony’s big idea on homework.
As political gaffes go, it was a mild one quickly corrected by the Labour leader and handled smoothly and with great humour by a slick husband and wife team.But it was an illustration of the extent to which a message – in this case the recruitment of Premiership football teams to encourage children to do their homework – can be lost in a growing media maelstrom hungry for splits, cock-ups, injudicious asides and simple errors.The Blairs were at Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday FC, to launch the homework scheme under which four Premiership clubs, supported by private and public finance, would encourage literacy in problem children. Mr Blair was wired up for a satellite link-up with David Blunkett, the shadow education secretary, who was at Chelsea FC, one of the four clubs.But first he hovered over 10 children aged from 10 to 13 who sat shivering, doing homework for the benefit of cameras, in the middle of the pitch.”You’ll need a rubber for that, it’s wrong,” he corrected one of them, Tom Lane, 10, from Brookhouse School in nearby Beighton.Unfortunately for the Labour leader, the lad pointed at Mrs Blair, who uses her maiden name, Booth, in her profession as a barrister, and said: “But she told me…”"Gosh,” said Mr Blair, laughing at his wife. “And you with all those brains, too.”"Oh, alright, show off,” she replied “I’ll never hear the end of this, will I?”Indeed not.