Pot, Kettle, Big Ears

2 July 2006

You can always tell the kind of person we have running the country these days by the time that elapses between the day of their sacking and the bitter, twisted back-stabbing of the boss. Some former ministers bide their time, waiting for the iron to become hot, striking at a time of maximum embarrassment. While Jack Straw falls into the former category, pretending, for the time being, to be perfectly happy as Father of the House, for former Home Secretary and Safety Elephant Charles Clarke, it was a massive fifty-two days. Classy, we don't think.

It was not so long ago that Wingnut was Tony Blair's number one fan, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Captain Teeth on even the most reactionary of legislation, put before the House, we suspect as part of a huge dare that went horribly, horribly wrong.

In fact, Clarke's entire career, we suspect, has been nothing but a huge act of revenge on the British people. If any boy was bullied at school it was the young Charlie, whose ears must have ached red raw from the constant flicks and tweaks of his peers and masters alike. Then, it was just a matter of waiting for decades, biding his time, until he was in a position to pass laws allowing the aural torture of any suspect in Belmarsh Prison, and PING! there he was, wearing his ministerial ear-torture gauntlets, giving the bastards what-for.

And you think we're making this up.

It's one thing for Charlie to accuse his successor John Reid of pandering to a so-called tabloid agenda, but what, then, were both he and David Blunkett doing in their time at the Home Office? If you listen carefully, you can still hear the dying echoes of Rebekah Wade's banshee-like wails for all kinds of pointless law-making which has found its way into the statute books, before quietly disappearing, unused, unloved, and unenforceable. A pot-and-kettle job. A big, scary Scottish thug of a cooking pot, and a kettle with a couple of huge handles. You have to ask yourself, then, what price loyalty? Not just in the government, but in any organisation. Politicians, who like to portray themselves as Man (or Woman/Undecided) of the People, see themselves as a cut above us mere proles, even if they are no different from the rest of us.

It took us some time to realise that the bald bloke who lives round the corner who has fallen into the ministerial post responsible for running schools in England and Wales is not a lot different from the chap who runs the Neighbourhood Watch. Except he's got a somewhat higher budget when it comes to photocopying leaflets, of course. They both, however, have equal capacity in the climbing-over-the-dead-bodies-of-my-former-comrades stakes coupled with an unrivalled talent for toadying.

Politics, then, cannot be trusted to politicians. Not unless we just lock them all in a very small room without electricity and leave them to get on with it, leaving society for the rest of us to sort out. Even then, we're pretty sure that they'll figure out some dreadful means of enslaving humanity whilst our backs are turned. We actually tried this approach not too long ago as part of a bizarre medical experiment, locking Tessa Jowell in the cupboard under the stairs for a few days, and you will not be surprised to hear that society was none the worse for it, restraining orders or otherwise. However, the adage is true, even cabinet ministers are just two missed meals away from going feral.

So, if we cannot trust the very people we put into office to run our country, whom can we trust? As we said last week, we should hand the entire lock, stock and barrel to a committee of newspaper editors, because they've clearly got an answer for everything, and with Ms Wade in the hotseat, Britain is clearly not going to take any stick from anybody. Just look at how she sorted out that bald fella from 'Ultimate Force'.

With the Daily Mail running the Department of Health, for example, we can look forward to the banning of everything and anything that could possibly give us cancer (leaving our shops devoid of any stock whatsoever), simultaneously dealing with the health problems that really matter to the middle classes. For example, the scourge of fat mums on crutches that make playgrounds look ugly at the end of the school day. We would support any government that promotes Yummy Mummies on the school run. The Daily Express, on the other hand, will get to the bottom of the Great Diana and Dodi Mystery, revealing, for once and for all, that they died in a car crash whilst not wearing a seatbelt. Finding themselves in a position of power, they would be duty bound cover it up.

But why stop at running the country? We've long held the belief that our top newspaper columnists are an untapped source of talent that is simply going to waste. The back pages of our national press, for example, have long held the opinion that any man who is fool enough to accept the job of England football manager is in no mental state to accept the job of England football manager. So, by that twisted logic, it then follows that John Sadler and Harry Harris are the only two men on God's Earth fit to pick eleven names out of the hat to take on the collected might of Andorra once this inconveniently successful World Cup is out of the way.

On second thoughts, enough of this unworkable madness. What we really need is some sort of system, one which allows suitable people to be chosen by their peers to represent them in some sort of assembly which can pass laws on the best ways to live as a society. We could call it 'democr...' Nah, that's rubbish too. Roll on anarchy, we say.