Save the world!!!

The next poet laureate could work from the heart of government to influence areas from literacy to public health, from roadbuilding policy to the Ministry of Defence. It’s a wide remit, but poets are wide thinkers. He or she could sit on those committees that decide what money goes where, and gently suggest that members of the civil service had workshops with a poet as part of their training. Poetry could influence NHS thinking even more than it does at the moment; it could become fundamental to prison policy and to adult learning and to the idea of what public transport can become. These things happen already, of course, but often in an uncoordinated way. The poet laureate could present the world with a country that took language seriously, as a unifying force and a liberating and redistributing tool.

Because we all know gentle suggestion works wonders in an impenetrable bureaucracy.