Dear Michael Buerk, I regularly listen to the moral maze and usually find it a program that irritates and soothes in different proportions as you consider difficult issues and allow your panelists to test hypothesis and use their opinions to interrogate and occasionally bully your guests. The title suggests that this process is to help us find our way out of a maze. However this week I believe that one of your panelists crossed a line and appeared to retrace some steps. Michael Portillo stated as fact something that Matthew Taylor disagreed with, in effect taking us further into the maze, both men cannot be right. Portillo stated that charity CEOs can meet Cabinet Ministers more or less as they wish to and in doing so this would obviate the need for public money to be spent on lobbying. Of course public money is spent every time Ministers or Charity CEOs hold meeting with anyone so in one sense Michael was obviously speaking pure nonsense. However on the issue of access, Taylor denied this is the case which is entirely consistent with my own understanding and experience as I wrote in my blog yesterday. This would suggest that Portillo was either lying or has been lied to by the civil servants who he worked with when he was in Government or perhaps he thinks we all have access to the Ministerial phone book. Clearly if the Moral Maze is misled or being dishonest then the whole project falls apart. It was clear from this weeks programme that the discussion could go further than the hour allowed, how about a debate on Michael’s view that Cabinet Ministers are accessible to outside points of view. After all that is the basis of our democracy!