Simon Carr
The Sketch: This was the apple pie and cinnamon defence
Published: 25 January 2007
Blair not being there was quite handy in the event; in the absence of his messianic mania, the Government's case looks quite as threadbare as cynics and pessimists could desire. Building a safe, just and prosperous world for all. Margaret Beckett kicked off on Iraq with one of Labour's apple-pie statements, dashed with cinnamon.
The Sketch: Honesty is structurally impossible
Published: 24 January 2007
We - by which I mean people - think morality is essentially emotional. We feel that behaving with integrity, with honour derives from the way we were brought up or taught or trained or had our selfish instincts brought under control.
The Sketch: The rising tide of generalisation swamping the country
Published: 23 January 2007
I'm afraid I'm suffering from a certain guild solidarity. I'm not sure I like it. Two of the big wheels at the Mail and the Express turned up to the human rights committee to defend their "bogus asylum-seeker" policy. "The rising tide of ants that is swamping this country". Do headlines such as this infringe the human rights of people seeking asylum? That was the question the committee wanted answering.
The Sketch: From collaborator to revolutionary, the reinvention of Jack Straw
Published: 19 January 2007
What's to become of Handsome Jack when the new regime takes over? Tried as a collaborator with the occupying forces or treated as a hero of the revolution?
The Sketch: Trojan Tony is a lesson for us all
Published: 18 January 2007
I suppose when we're depressed enough to consider suicide we're usually just strong enough not to. "There's always tomorrow," we think. What courage we have, what resilience. What a desire for life we keep up, even when there's nothing to live for.
The Sketch: The Lords works so well it is an affront to government
Published: 17 January 2007
It's been repeated a bit recently, but you may have missed that remark of Lord Salisbury's in the later 19th century: "What do we need change for; aren't things bad enough as they are?"
The Sketch: Good news for conspiracy theorists! Big Brother is a shambling defective
Published: 16 January 2007
For a moment in Question Time there were questions being asked. We all enjoyed that, but then we've a childish pleasure in novelty. Michael Howard became barristerial and asked his ostentatiously forensic questions about whether or not the Home Secretary had seen the letter that the police had sent "Hopeless" Joan Ryan. It was a proper question which Nick Clegg and David Davis picked up. Are all criminal records now entered in the national computer? Do Britons who commit crimes abroad have their records sent back here? Had the police asked for more resources, in fact?
The Sketch: Happy-clapping with the jargonistas
Published: 12 January 2007
Bits and bites. Jim Knight told Education questions that he completely rejected the idea that A-levels had been dumbed down. In our first A-level year, we translated every last 17th-century Alexandrine in Andromache; now they translate whole articles from French newspapers. Why is this question still so arguable?
The Sketch: The artist and the accountant: united, at last, in an extra-orderly transition
Published: 11 January 2007
I came late into the chamber and saw the Prime Minister laying about himself; a little raddled perhaps, by the years, but still the master of his domain. And beside him, the Chancellor looking strangely relaxed, almost calm, collegialising occasionally with John Reid (I think we've all given up on Dr Demento as a contender, haven't we?)
The Sketch: If Question Time was for anything, nobody now knows what that was
Published: 10 January 2007
Is it me, or is there nothing happening down there? They do what they can to Keep Buggering On, in Churchill's wartime phrase, but there is an underlying - not to say overarching - sense of nothing much happening. The only movement is that of the interregnum moving into its maturity. The standing water does nothing except stand ever stiller.
The Sketch: Lies, damned lies and freedom of information
Published: 09 January 2007
Blameless as he may be (there's a gift to hecklers) Jack Straw has the suave geniality of the classic English villain. He cares about tailoring. He has his quiet, lizardly smile. He has pale, strangler's hands which he uses to choke people behind his arras. Doesn't he? The libel lawyer points out that this is entirely untrue. But how does she know?
The Sketch: It's claws out as the angry polecat meets Tom Brown
Published: 20 December 2006
Earlier this year, Vera Baird passed me by as I was talking to one of the Tories' keen young reformers and made what I can only describe as a continental noise in her throat. Kinder souls than myself explained it away, but I felt it communicated a fathomless disgust at an entire sector of modern ideological life.
The Sketch: The unreportable truth about Tessa
Published: 19 December 2006
It always happens at this time of year. The last week before Christmas, St Lucy's just gone, the days still getting shorter, and John Donne ringing in our ears. "I am every dead thing," he says, and it's easy to see what he means as ministers for Culture turn scum into sludge - "the whole world's sap is sunke".
The Sketch: Tories slump into that old complacency
Published: 15 December 2006
The Tories seem to be slumping back into a born-to-rule complacency. Teresa May produced some party research showing how poor the government record was on written parliamentary answers.
The Sketch: Pollytics: Real life as you always dreamed it
Published: 14 December 2006
The divide between the Polly Toynbee school of governors and the one advocated by my lot (by which I don't mean the Conservative Party) is wide. Her manifesto is based on the idea of an active state reliably able to do good things: let's call it Pollytics. The minority to which I belong inclines to believe that even a benevolently active state will most often do more harm. We call this politics.
The Sketch: Finally, as he departs, Blair sees limit of Government
Published: 13 December 2006
Take the money and go. That's my advice to young people thinking of working out four weeks' notice. It's the longest month of your life. The status you've built up collapses. People stop telling you things. There isn't any point in gossiping to you as you've nothing to share (people stop telling you things). Juniors cheek you. And then in the final stages you become invisible in the corridors. It's like a long slow dissolve. One's ghostliness becomes the most obvious thing about you.
The Sketch: If MPs can't decide what is British, how can they decide what is art?
Published: 12 December 2006
Making things better makes them worse; it's well known. Politicians see that church schools get better results, so they encourage them.
The Sketch: Official ignorance punished with brutal questions
Published: 08 December 2006
That nice young Liam Byrne, with the engaging smile, he became the second Home Office minister to fly into the ack-ack of the European Scrutiny Committee. His wreckage mingles with Joan Ryan's (the Marigold gloves are all that is identifiably Joan).
The Sketch: How to lead until 2020: free food for babies; A-levels for all
Published: 07 December 2006
Several interesting things Gordon Brown revealed to us. You don't expect that in a pre-Budget report.
The Sketch: PM's approach is MAD - it's called atomic logic
Published: 05 December 2006
Lesser politicians say one thing and mean another. Our Prime Minister says one thing and its opposite and believes them both at the same time. As we're on the subject of atomic weapons we might consider applying Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle to him. Not that the Prime Minister's uncertain about anything. No, but we may be forgiven for being uncertain about him.
Simon Carr: Predictions are interesting only if they predict that which is unpredictable
Published: 02 December 2006
The Sketch: The art of saying two things at once, and nothing at all
Published: 01 December 2006
The House was meeting at the behest of Michael Connarty's European Scrutiny Committee to scrutinise and vote on some piece of egregious euro-creep, bringing our criminal justice functions into the jurisdiction of Europe. A debate like this is heroic rather than practical; one of the very few members attending recalled that a minister had frankly said that the Government didn't have to abide by the vote if it didn't want to, and that resistance was futile. It's the sort of parliament Henry VIII would have recognised.
The Sketch: Prescott roars to victory in battle of the swamp
Published: 30 November 2006
After Prescott, I went off to look at a Committee on Delegated Legislation about Double Tax arrangements (Poland). What a difference. From the barnyard to the boneyard. The deep, deep peace of delegated legislation with Dawn Primarolo is restorative, at my age.
The Sketch: You need sat-nav, a map and a time trumpet for this lot
Published: 29 November 2006
I love my sat-nav. But unless I know where I'm going, a map is also essential. Health questions is like that. The verbal directions are, at the very least questionable. Without extensive local knowledge you've no idea whether you're going north, south, left or right.
The Sketch: Reid has nothing to say, so he says something stupid
Published: 28 November 2006
Independent Offers
A-Z site map
Indy 100 prices
MORE: Travel podcasts
SAVE: Travel offers
FREE: Email headlines