A popular choice

Congratulations to Simon Armitage on being named as the new poet laureate. Damned with faint praise by the Guardian as "one of the UK's bestselling poets", he's right in thinking he's cut out for the position: "I feel I've been writing the kind of public-facing, public-occasion poetry that this role will require for quite a long time now."

Encouragingly, Armitage sees the role as that of "a kind of negotiator between what inevitably is something of a specialist art form, and the people who want to read it and respond on occasions with poetry" and feels that climate change is the most critical subject matter of our times: "it's the obligation of all of us and every art form to be responding to this issue. It shades into all our politics, so I want to find a way of recording and encouraging poetry's response to that situation."

I was surprised to learn that the position "comes with no formal requirements, and individuals can choose whether or not to write poetry for national and royal events". It's good to know that Armitage won't be forced into writing things he doesn't truly believe in or that aren't "up to it" - hopefully that will spare us from anything as cringeworthy as the awful rap that one of his predecessors, Andrew Motion, wrote to mark Prince William's 21st birthday.