Simon Carr

The Sketch: Miliband is charming, clever and ill-informed

Published: 06 February 2007

It may be too early to write off David Miliband as prime ministerial but if he gets anywhere near it, I'll eat my hat. Quite a meal, considering the size of my head.

The Sketch: What the world needs now is a green fascist

Published: 02 February 2007

Theresa May had a good idea. Mind your head on the sharp edges as you fall backwards. She asked for a debate on the cost of government reorganisations.

The Sketch: Tiger Tone keeps on swinging as even the pygmies pull his tail

Published: 01 February 2007

"Sad to see someone of Blair's stature being so diminished by these events," I ventured.

The Sketch: Tessa and her twin keep their eyes down to gamble on Manchester

Published: 31 January 2007

The joy of Tessa. Twice in two days. She was sitting on the same bench as Harriet Harman, looking more and more sororal. Same face, more or less. Same hair. Same earnest, decent manner; same well-meaning, blue-stockinged goodness.

The Sketch: Will Tessa be evicted by Big Gordon?

Published: 30 January 2007

In the absence of anything happening, the temptation to play no-win games is hard to resist. You look down into the pit and note, almost with fear, how thin on top Owen Paterson is getting. He used to be one of those nice young men the Tories did so well, and now he's old enough to be losing his hair. Maybe he'll get fat and then we'll really feel the throb of time passing. I've got a little Latin: Eheu fugaces, postume, postume. "The days flee away and are lost to me, lost to me."

The Sketch: All greased-up and ready to praise the Chancellor

Published: 26 January 2007

It was the first really sincere suck-up session we've seen. The greasing season is officially open, and no one out-greased Ashok Kumar: his question began: "May I congratulate the Chancellor on the great job he's been doing?" (Cries of "Answer!")

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.

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