Mixed press over Prince's letters

There are two main questions considered by the papers about the Prince of Wales's letter writing to ministers - who leaked the letters to the press, and is it right for the Prince to be writing them in the first place?

On the first question, The Guardian balks at a palace statement saying that the prince can draw the government's attention to issues on our behalf only if complete confidence is maintained.

"It's pure chutzpah for the Prince's office - which makes the average sieve look seaworthy - to lecture anyone on confidentiality," says the paper.

But the Star disagrees, suggesting that the letters have hit a nerve with Labour, persuading them to leak the details in the hope that it will embarrass him and shut him up.

Rejoice at the worry

With this in mind, the paper encourages the prince to keep the letters coming, to keep ministers on their toes.

On the second point, The Guardian argues that the royal correspondence is not an act of selfless representation, so much as one of mild self-indulgence.

But the Prince's biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, writing in The Daily Telegraph, not only believes the leaks came from number 10, and says the public should rejoice in the fact that he worries so much about the state of the nation.

The Sun's political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, says whatever the constitutional niceties, the Prince's latest arguments resound with common sense.

Has he been reading Sun editorials?, he asks.

The face of the RMT leader Bob Crow, on a London Underground picket line, stares out from many of the newspapers.

The Daily Mail does not mince its words, asking whether tube drivers are Britain's greediest workers.

The paper points out that they are paid more than £31,000 for working a 35-hour week with 45 days holiday a year, making them paid more than police constables and firefighters and about £10,000 more than some nurses and teachers.

Beneath the same photograph, the Sun observes that Mr Crow wants this salary "doubled, if not tripled" and accuses union leaders of bullying members to walk out, with only 3,000 of more than 18,000 members actually voting to strike.

Transport chaos

The Daily Telegraph rounds on the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, noting how while three million people were struggling to get around town, he was relaxing in the autumn sunshine on the seafront at Brighton, where he addressed a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat conference.

The Times says Mr Livingstone should accept personal responsibility for the transport chaos in the capital and apologise to everyone who missed an appointment, or lost business because of the strike.

It is a scandal, says The Sun, reporting that Lord Archer apparently enjoyed champagne at a party hosted by the former Conservative cabinet minister Gillian Shephard, when he was meant to be on a home visit from his open prison in Lincolnshire.

Detailing how he drives himself to his job at a theatre in Lincoln in his state-of-the-art BMW, and takes hour and a half lunch breaks in different restaurants each day, the paper asks "how can this man be called a prisoner?".

The Daily Mirror takes issue with Chancellor Gordon Brown over victims of thalidomide - taken by women in the early 1960s to combat morning sickness, but which led to thousands giving birth to deformed children.

The £11,000 they receive annually from a compensation fund is taxed.

In an editorial The Daily Mirror accuses the chancellor of acting like Scrooge.

Spelling Jedi

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has taken a leap into the future with the inclusion of more than three thousand new words in its latest edition.

As The Daily Mirror points out, the Klingons have boldly gone in.

The Star Trek aliens are accompanied by dilithium - the fictitious fuel of the show's spacecraft, Jedi knights and "the dark side" from Star Wars and the Tardis from Doctor Who.

The Independent explains that to be included, words must have been used five times, in five different sources over five years.

That newspaper also gives the definitions of some of the more down to earth entries, like wedgie: the action of pulling up the material of someone's underwear tightly between their buttocks, as a practical joke.