Last of the Kennedy boys

Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy has been sitting up, chatting to Barack Obama by phone, and following the Boston Red Sox baseball team on television. That has not stopped America going on deathwatch. Since Kennedy was airlifted to hospital from the fabled 'family compound' on Martha's Vineyard, the nation has been gripped as if waiting for the passing of the crown.

The Senator from Massachusetts is the man who brought disgrace to America's Camelot, and then managed, somehow, to restore its glow.

At 76, it is remarkable that the youngest of the four brothers of the Kennedy generation which gave us John Fitzgerald as President and Robert as Attorney General is alive at all (Patrick, the eldest, died