Yet together they create an impression of a government that is growing complacent with power. The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, has still not given an adequate explanation why foreign prisoners were released after he had been alerted to the urgency of the situation. In a way that cannot be underestimated, the errors of Home Office ministers and officials undermine the essence of Mr Blair's political positioning in recent months. He had no time for chips on his shoulder or anyone else's shoulder.Michael Smith.

It is often written that Tony Blair has suffered his worst week in power The observation has been repeated to the point of absurdity. Orita wrote to Dennison:It is through the efforts of brave people like you that British and Japanese people are able to grow closer together in the spirit of peace and friendship, without forgetting the past.Last year, the Royal British Legion poppy day appeal featured Dennison, sitting in his wheelchair in a field of poppies, on their poster campaign."He was a warrior," remembers the journalist Graham Turner, who wrote a chapter on Dennison in his book More than Conquerors (1976):The idea that the world could be remade absolutely gripped him He was always looking for the big idea. Dennison told the local paper:Quite a few of my comrades try to hang on to their twisted bitterness, but if you want a decent world the only way forward is reconciliation.The following year, he was in a second reconciliation ceremony, alongside Ambassador Orita, at the city's inauguration of a Hiroshima Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Exhibition. I beg you to forgive me and my nation." The encounter, described in Michael Henderson's book Forgiveness: breaking the chain of hate (2002), deeply touched Dennison, who commented that Sugitawas genuine and that was the beginning of a remarkable change in my attitude. For a long time I felt bitterness and hatred but I don't want that to be passed on to the second generation.Dennison, a member of the British veterans' Burma Campaign Fellowship Group, subsequently visited Japan in journeys of reconcilation. In a BBC interview broadcast from Japan marking the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, he was asked what he would say to the Japanese nation. He replied:I would bow low in humility and just beg their forgiveness for my callousness at the time when I heard of the bombs being dropped on the cities of Japan and I would humbly ask their forgive-ness for the years of my bitterness, resentment and hatred against the people of Japan.In 2002 Dennison took part with the then Japanese ambassador, Masaki Orita, in a ceremony of healing in the ruins of the old Coventry Cathedral.

A retired Japanese general, Ichii Sugita, who had been at the surrender of Singapore in 1942, bowed low before Dennison, telling him: "I don't ever expect you to forget what happened. He began insisting from his fellow workers on "a moral day's work rather than a legal day's work" Productivity, and wages, shot up. Brickies who had been laying 400 to 500 bricks a day now laid 1,200. The then Coventry South MP and Housing Minister, Richard Crossman, commented on the "dynamic force" of building trade workers, at a dinner hosted by them for him.

He had thrown his eldest son Karl, named after Karl Marx, out of the home for wanting to marry a major's daughter, which Les had seen as a class betrayal Now he apologised to his son and they were reconciled. Vera, who had been about to leave home with their three other children, could hardly believe the change in her husband, who now began to cherish her.At work, too, he found a new motivation in meeting the housing needs of Coventry citizens rather than observing strict demarcation lines. Peachey and his friends, of Christian faith, spoke to Dennison of revolution beyond Marxism - building a "hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world".Their care for him seemed sincere and this so shook Dennison - by now disillusioned with Communism following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 - that he began a search to "find God". With diffidence he approached a local vicar and, in an empty church, the two men prayed together. "I had talked about peace all my life, but I'd never known what inner peace was till then," commented Dennison, who later converted to the Roman Catholic faith.Thus began a transformation in Dennison's family life. He became convenor of shop stewards on a site, in charge of nearly 400 men.In 1959 a plasterer and fellow shop steward, Stan Peachey, confronted him about his family life.

The "brotherhood of man" didn't work there, and he was a dictator in his home, Peachey said The men on the site feared him. The most obvious change was her awareness that the Western academic study of Zoroastrianism had made a critical mistake in believing that Zoroastrianism could be understood only on the basis of its literature and that this literature should be studied with the well-established instruments of philology only.What Boyce witnessed among these Iranian Zoroastrians was a whole world of priestly and lay rituals and observances, beloved festivals and rites of devotion, that were of much greater significance to them than anyone had realised previously. On his return to Coventry he donated part of his war gratuity to the local Communist Party, trained as a plumber and was an agitator at the Standard Motors car plant before joined the building industry. Forced to carry his dying comrades, Dennison was one of only 400 survivors out of a group of 1,600 POWs. On liberation he weighed just 5st 4lb.Anger burned in him, and his young wife, Vera, whom he had treated with violence, was hardly glad that he had survived the war. The work included building the last stretch of one of the bridges over the River Kwai between Burma and Thailand.Cholera and dysentery were rife and none of his friends survived.