On a pounds 45m project completed under budget and ahead of schedule, there were stone masons, plasterers, joiners, flooring specialists, carvers, gilders, glaziers and even passementerie specialists. In fact, there are only a handful of trades that employ more than a hundred people. This is not the stuff of dark satanic mills.Let us look at the restoration at Windsor for a moment. Mass production does indeed use machines but is nonetheless capable of making objects both cheaply and to good quality, but it does not essentially depend on machine tools or any other sort of tool.

It depends on the size of the market and how much you can afford to spend on organising manufacture. It can also mean just lots of people and no machines at all - think of the cheap labour around the Pacific rim. This is not to belittle the horror of the Lancashire cotton mills.It is certainly true that the larger factories, the Staffordshire potteries of Wedgwood, say, or Chance's Glass works were large, dangerous and sometimes dehumanised, but was this always the case? I think not.There is a big difference between heavy and light industry, the large- scale assembly lines and the small-scale metal bashers and much of industry is, and always has been, in small and medium-size workshops.If you look at the Distribution of Trades and Occupations in 1841, in, say, Worcestershire (a technologically advanced county close to Birmingham, well-connected to the canal system) we see large numbers of nailers and ironmongers (which would seem to suggest a major industry) but elsewhere, you will see that the number of cabinet-makers, carvers and gilders, upholsterers, and chair makers is probably the same number as there are today. The reason why this is so owes much to confused philosophies and debates.The equation seems to go: mass production = machines = technology = shoddy. until, by the early 1900s they appeared to behave, in the words of Roger Fry, like a bunch of "dour and melancholy old hypocrites who represented to perfection the hideous sentimentality of the English wanting to mix moral feeling in with everything".The commentators involved in the debate - Pugin, Ruskin, Morris, Lethaby, Gill, Herbert Read, Coomaraswamy, Nash, Gropius, Pevsner, David Pye and Peter Dormer, to name but a few - come and go, but the debates about the crafts and industry seem perennial. They flourished. Then come the reactionaries, the Arts and Crafts movement, first idealistic, then sentimental, becoming polarised and eventually bigoted - against any kind of industry ... Otherwise British entertainment may never recover.First they take away our favourite target And now Jeffrey Archer has time to write another novel Haven't we suffered enough?.

From a lecture delivered by the furniture designer at the Royal Society for the Arts, in London LET US begin with the Industrial Revolution, created by practical makers, people who used the knowledge gained from their craft to transform industry and society, like Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton. They brought together new materials, production methods and approaches to marketing. Most important, their enterprises linked art and industry without inhibition. Ask whether he behaved with politeness and humility.This is the sort of politician that British satirists want. The Americans have a philanderer as a president; the Russians have a drunkard What do we get? A church-goer with a new baby on the way. So we must turn to the Conservatives to step in and rescue the British comedy industry.

Immediate steps should be taken to make Jonathan Aitken the Tory candidate for Mayor of London with Neil Hamilton as his deputy. "There's no beginning to your talents," said Clive as he probed the great storyteller about his duplicitous past. After the show we were treated to the real Archer, ranting and raving in the studio car park, threatening to sue if the programme was broadcast.With this memory, I am comforted that this spectacular downfall could not have happened to a more horrible man. Don't take my word for it; go into any branch of Waterstones and ask the booksellers there if Jeffrey Archer has ever been in to sign. He got every answer wrong, so Magnus Magnusson got to put him straight on all the porkie pies that Archer had told about himself down through the years.Soon afterwards, Archer was foolhardy enough to come on Clive Anderson Talks Back. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman once wrote a splendid Mastermind sketch in which Jeffrey Archer answered questions on the life of Jeffrey Archer. "So Jeffrey, were you the mystery second gunman in the Kennedy assassination?""No!"`"Oh well - he obviously was then."Over the years, the Archer cocktail of naff showmanship and casual disregard for the truth have provided meat and drink for hungry satirists in an age when our politicians have becoming disappointingly bland and sanitised.When I worked on Spitting Image, Jeffrey Archer's little puppet could be brought into any sagging sketch to tell a few outrageous lies.

Archer is now in the impossible position that no one will ever believe anything he says again. Would you trust Jeffrey Archer? There are lies, damned lies and Jeffrey Archer's life story. The campaign was a period that the Conservatives were dreading. I imagine that the weekend's conversation between William Hague and Lord Archer went something like this:"Anyway William, I don't think it's a resigning issue.""Okay Jeffrey - I accept your resignation.""No, I was saying, I think we can ride this one out.""So will you announce your resignation or shall I?"What is incredible is that the Tories ever thought that Archer was fit to run the capital This man was their number one choice. It is, quite literally, a very serious situation. Jeffrey Archer's candidacy for the Mayor of London had promised to keep us entertained all the way to May.