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Sketch

A greasy whiff dispels the stench of worthiness

Special report: parliament

There's an old story they told when I was a young reporter in Manchester. No doubt it's still passed on. Some whippersnapper from the BBC is told to make a programme about people who do the jobs nobody else wants. He goes to the toilets at Piccadilly station and interviews the attendant.

"Oh, it's terrible here," says the fellow. "We get drunks coming in here to be sick, and guess who has to clear it up. We get drug addicts in the cubicles, sticking needles into themselves. And we have these ho-mo-sexuals, and heaven knows what they get up to. I tell you, someone comes in here for a good honest shit, it's like a breath of fresh air."

I felt much the same way at 3.23 yesterday afternoon. There had been a strangulated session on foot and mouth disease. Messrs Blair and Hague were each desperate to be more statesmanlike than the other. Gosh, it was dreary.

People often complain that prime minister's question time is like a bear garden, whatever that might be. But you realise how preferable that is to the cliched alternative, a vicarage tea party.

(I once invented a vicarage tea party for my unfinished script, Pride & Prejudice - the Panto. It featured a character called the Naughty Vicar, and was much more fun than the recent prime minister's questions, consisting of double entendres - e.g. "I love to go riding, vicar. There's nothing I like better than swinging my leg over the saddle. Tell me, vicar, do you like to get your leg over?"

Or, "I can offer you ordinary tea or Earl Grey. Would you like some Earl Grey, or do you fancy a bit of the other?"

But nobody would produce it. They said the audiences wouldn't get it. Ha! They'd enjoy it an awful lot more than the House of Commons on a Wednesday afternoon.)

Mr Hague was monumentally dull, entirely ignoring the slurry of sleaze lapping round the prime minister's feet - not just Keith Vaz, not just Geoffrey Robinson, but now Stephen Byers and Gordon Brown as well.

But Mr Blair matched him for sheer knuckle-chewing, yawn-making, narcoleptic somnolence. The Tory leader sort of wanted to say that the government should deploy the army more rapidly, but - heaven forfend - he didn't want to imply that it was anybody's fault that the soldiers hadn't been deployed! (Even though it appears that part of the problem is that the Treasury can't bear to pay the Ministry of Defence any more money.)

Mr Blair replied that there were three problems facing the army. These were logistics, slaughter and disposal. The slaughtermen were there; so were the contractors to do the disposing. "The principal problem is logistics; it is actually organising and administering that in all the areas most affected."

In other words, what we need is more bureaucrats! What does the civil service advise? Why, it advises the immediate deployment of more civil servants!

Mr Hague made a feeble attempt to persuade the prime minister at least to consider legislation in case he needs to postpone local elections. Labour MPs took this as a try-on, a desperate hope that the general election will be postponed, so they jeered like mad.

Then after 23 minutes of unmitigated mind-numbing worthiness, Jonathan Shaw, Labour MP for Chatham, stood up and begged his Rt. Hon. friend to lead a campaign to "save the pounds" - yes, the £15bn of cuts which the party opposite..."

The rest of his "question" was drowned by bellowing Tory jeers, it being so oily, so greasy, so creepy, so crawly, so obviously scripted by the whips that to me at least, it was that breath of fresh air.