Tell it in 100 words

Novelist Jeffrey Archer, who has sold about 300 million books worldwide, has set a writing competition to encourage budding writers.

The winner will receive £250 in book tokens and the top ten best entries will be published in The Mail on Sunday.

Flash fiction writers, give it a go!

Make every one of your 100 words count.

100 words excluding title.

Send your entry to shortstory@mailonsunday.co.uk.

Deadline midnight 17 November.

Here’s Lord Archer’s 100-word short story:

‘Unique’

Paris, March 14^th, 1921. The collector relit his cigar, picked up the magnifying glass and studied the triangular 1874 Cape of Good Hope.

‘I did warn you there were two,’ said the dealer, ‘so yours is not unique.’

‘How much?’

‘The thousand francs.’

The collector wrote out a cheque, before taking a puff on his cigar, but it was no longer alight. He picked up a match, struck it, and set light to the stamp.

The dealer stared in disbelief as the stamp went up in smoke.

The collector smiled. ‘You were wrong, my friend,’ he said, ‘mine is unique.’

                                                               image - public domain

Good luck!

'Will of the people'

Brexit alert!

In the recent Mail on Sunday, which is a pro-EU, Remain periodical, Lord Falconer wrote an article headlined ‘Off with her Head!’ I doubt if the former Lord Chancellor actually wrote the headline; a sub-editor probably thought it was a good one in light of the allusion in the text to Charles I losing his head.

This Labour peer who, alongside Tony Blair, took Britain into an illegal war in Iraq supports the recent High Court ruling against the Government regarding Article 50. You couldn’t make it up.

He states that ‘the executive – in this case the Government led by Theresa May – cannot take away the rights of the people simply by issuing an executive decree.’

Clearly, it is the government led by Theresa May that is actually fulfilling the rights of the people by opting to trigger Article 50. The rights of the people, Lord Falconer; your phrase.

The elephant in the room is that the Remain lobby is ever-hopeful that taking the issue to Parliament will delay implementation of Brexit or even ultimately confound the will of the people. Smoke and mirrors, it's called.

The referendum asked the people to vote, and they did so. That is defined as the will of the people. Argue all you like, but that’s the basic fact.

As an aside, what I find fascinating is where newspapers stand on this issue; they’re all the same. Those pro-EU feature letters from readers confirming that stance (notably judges and lawyers in The London Times, for example), as if no reader of their august periodical holds alternative views. The same goes for the pro-Leave papers too. Even-handed? No, of course not. It just confirms you cannot believe everything you read in the press, no matter what political complexion they wear on their sleeve (to mix metaphors).