Until last night, it had never been worth anyone's while to commit to memory the name of Phil Woolas, the United Kingdom's immigration minister. He may well have been calculating that, with a year to go of Labour Government, a prominent place on the Shadow Cabinet would be his for the asking after the bloodbath that will doubtless follow the next General Election. It was all going so well.
Searching for Phil Woolas on Youtube (that new instrument so beloved of Downing Street) it is possible to find a video of him on the receiving end of a custard pie. Those were the good old days, however, for now he finds himself unwittingly in the vanguard as Brown and company charge the Russian guns. "Someone had blunder'd" indeed.
The guns in question belonged, of course, to Joanna Lumley who - short of setting about them with a closed umbrella - could scarcely be doing a better job of treating our political masters as the pack of whelps and curs that they are. Our government is much happier to deal with the Great British Public in general, believing (quite against overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that you can fool all of the people some of the time. By saying that she trusts the prime minister, however, Ms. Lumley eloquently conveyed precisely the opposite, and Mr. Brown would do well to view the retribution visited upon his hitherto-anonymous lackey as merely a foretaste of what will come if he does not approach the issue of the Gurkhas with the same pre-emptive haste that he previously showed on the subject of MPs' pay.
Which reminds me.
Harriet Harman - who (let us recall) unsuccessfully introduced in January a Commons proposal to exempt MPs' personal expenses from the Freedom of Information Act - was on Newsnight last night defending her fellow cabinet members as a consequence of the Telegraph's revelation that some of them had been sucking over-enthusiastically on the national teat.
(Evidently the Prime Minister and his brother have been mucking out at the Augean stables, since they found it necessary to spend £240 a month of our money cleaning something. If Lady Macbeth had committed that scale of investment she might have been able to sleep better at night.)
Ms. Harman is, it seems, the government apologist of last resort, and this sets up a potential title bout that might cast the Rumble in the Jungle into the shade.
Harman vs. Lumley.
Let it be.
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