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stays, a growing number of hotels have seen their prices lose any connection with value for money. Mr [Adam Raphael] said: +AuWe have been to some amazingly poor places which blatantly charge over the odds.+Au The guide suggests in particular that the spread of +Auluxury country house+Au hotels has not been matched by equal attention to the British breakfast, which many inter- national visitors hope to try. Mr Raphael said: +AuYou may well get a very grand dinner, because that+[Aos] all part of the trend, but in the morning +Ai and probably your last memory of your stay +Ai it+Aos the soggy toast, cold scrambled eggs and thin coffee.+Au The guide has adapted to meet the new conditions with an experimental +Auvalue+Au section , which tries to sort out good deals at all price levels. It includes a drive to find hotels immune to what the editors call the trade+Aos +Aufailure to make children welcome +Au. More than a quarter of the hotels listed have some form of age restriction. Other black marks are given to an

Britain's tourist trade is under threat from a dismal combination of cold scrambled eggs, soggy toast and soaring prices, according to the latest edition of the Good Hotel Guide. Overnight rates have risen to such a level that the 26-year-old bible of the industry's independent monitors has abandoned its \"budget\" category. The book's staff and their 15,000 voluntary \"inspectors\" failed to find enough cheap but good value places.

The Hatfield crash which killed four people and injured more than 30 on 17 October was an unnecessary tragedy caused by an appalling failure of management by Railtrack. The broken rail which caused the crash had been identified as defective many months before but had not been replaced. The scenes of carnage - carriages with their roofs ripped off and mangled bodies - are hard to forget. But that does not justify the current chaos. Part of the problem post-[Hatfield] is the bureaucratic culture of safety which has been accelerated by privatisation. Everyone is deter mined to guard their own back. Railtrack officials privately admit that if they could be sure of political support they would lift many of the speed restrictions immediately. Since the rail safety story appeared in this week's Economist , Railtrack has revealed that it has asked the Health and Safety Executive to lift roughly 10 per cent of the 550 speed restrictions across the network. The Government's failure to take a balanced approach to safety is shown up by the grossly unequal amounts spent on rail and road safety. Many thousands are killed or seriously injured on the roads each year in accidents which could be avoided if safety expenditure between the two modes of transport was less skewed. All safety measures are judged by estimating the number of lives that can be saved for a given level of investment. The latest government valuation for preventing a fatal casualty on rail is pounds 3.22 million - three times that of a road death. These figures bear no relation to public opinion. A recent Health and Safety Executive report found that the public does not place more importance on preventing rail accidents than road accidents.

Since the News of the World two weeks ago broke the story of the false alibi Jeffrey Archer had prepared before his famous libel trial of 1987, the atmosphere at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester has certainly been closer to despair than the photographs released two Thursdays ago suggest. In them the two exchanged glances that could be read as loving, toyed with their cat, looked for all the world like a couple learning to live with a calamity that was not of their making. \"I am cross,\" she said, in what amounted to an extended picture caption, \"but I have formed the judgment that he is a decent and generous-spirited man over 35 years and that will not change over one weekend.\" In fact, she is much more wounded than this implies. Her brother, David Weeden, says that \"inside she is very hurt and upset\". She is convinced that there can be no return to public life for Jeffrey - and, if that is so, then surely Mary [Archer]'s future cannot hold the honours that Michael Crick, her husband's doggedly hostile biographer, once speculated could be hers: the headship of an Oxbridge college, the chair of the Arts Council or of the BBC. Mary's survival instincts have been forged by the three great crises her husband brought upon their marriage. There is a pattern, almost a template, to her reaction to them. Jeffrey gets himself into trouble. He keeps it from Mary. Finally he confesses a version of events. Mary momentarily reels, then cuts herself off from her feelings, patronises the revelation as \"Jeffrey's little bombshell\" and continues as if nothing has happened. In the next decade, Jeffrey not only avoided bankruptcy, but wrote his way into a fortune. In 1985 Mrs Thatcher appointed him deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. On the afternoon of Saturday 25 October 1986, however, he came to Mary with another little bombshell. He had just taken a call from the News of the World's editor, who was about to run a story that he had paid 2,000 to the prostitute Monica Coghlan. Since he had not, of course, mentioned the six phone calls she had made to him during the previous weeks demanding the money, Mary was \"dumbfounded\". Yet, within a week of his resignation as deputy chairman, Mary was hosting a dinner party at Grantchester attended by John Major, then a minister of state at the DHSS.

Lord Archer's wife described her husband as \"decent and generous spirited\" last night as the novelist peer posed for photographers at their home in Cambridgeshire, with a discreetly place \"sorry\" letter on his desk. The couple posed for photographers at their home, but did not invite any journalists to record their thoughts. One photograph showed Lord Archer writing a letter of apology amid the many letters piled on his desk. One of the apology letters was addressed to Mr Robert Halfon, who was a member of Lord Archer's mayoral campaign team: \"I write to thank you for all the work you did on my campaign and over the past two-and-a-half years. I could write pages expressing my sorrow, but for now I simply want to apologise for having let you down. You deserved better. As ever, Jeffrey.\"