Oh what a tangled web we weave...

The culture of spin that's infected the body politic in Britain seems to have seeped into the poetry world, or at least into its upper echelons, judging from the fiasco surrounding the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry. The campaign to discredit Derek Walcott could have come right out of a handbook written by Alistair Campbell. And Padel's "apology" could have come from the mouth of one of our shamed MPs - an apology in which she says she has nothing to apologize for:

"I'd like to apologize to Derek Walcott for anything I have done which can be misconstrued as being against him"

You don't need to apologize for having been "miscontrued". The mistake she made was to get caught - that's what she's sorry about. Still, as Aidan Semmens has pointed out, at poetry's coal-face (small presses, webzines, readings in pubs...) the Professorship at Oxford seems like a distant irrelevance.