I’ve always found Andrew Motion one of our more boring poets, to be honest, but his comments in Saturday’s Guardian about his experiences as poet laureate are particularly dull. I don’t think less of him for not going to Iraq and Afghanistan, but I do find it disingenuous for him to say the reason he didn’t write about the wars was because nobody ‘encouraged’ him by flying him there. Bush and Blair never had much encouragement from their domestic audiences but that didn’t stop them from airing their opinions whenever possible. And if Motion had felt the poet laureateship cramped his style he could always have quit while he was, er, ahead. Just lie down and have another Lemsip, Andy.

EDIT: Actually this is a bit unfair. Motion did write two poems in protest against the Iraq war, which can be found linked from the abobe Wikipedia page. I just thought his remarks were a bit daft – if he’d really wanted to go out there surely it could’ve been arranged…