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 31st December: Baroness O'Neill
After last year's success of inviting well known people to be a guest editor on the Today programme, we thought we'd do it all over again.
The political philosopher Baroness Onora O'Neill initially asked us to explore just one subject: the declining quality of legislation in the UK. As Principal of a Cambridge college, and a working cross-bench peer working, she had become concerned about the needless complexity, incomprehensibility and downright sloppiness of much new law. She commissioned a package from the Daily Telegraph's Joshua Rozenberg, who interviewed top figures in the world of legislation including the Chairman of the Law Commission, and the First Parliamentary Counsel (or "head of the legislation factory" as Joshua dubbed him), as well as politicians, think-tankers, and people at the sharp end of the law.
Professor O'Neill was persuaded to tell us about more of her interests, some of them stemming from her work on trust - which she explored to acclaim in Radio 4's Reith Lectures in 2002 - other ideas were personal interests unconnected with her work.
As a result we commissioned another package, from BBC reporter James Helm, on the superior quality of language teaching in Ireland. We set up an interview with Simon Fraser, a Professor of Archaeology in Vancouver with a controversial new theory of how people first came to cultivate crops - the so-called "competitive feasting hypothesis" that proposes, among other things, that early cereal cultivation may in fact have been for beer.
We interviewed live on the programme Lord John Alderdice, a promoter of the statutory registration of psychotherapy, on the issues of trust in therapy. And the new Chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, John Sorrell, gave us his first media interview after taking up his post.
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