Gordon Broon's Blackout Book

I haven’t written much blogstuff lately. Partly it’s because I’ve been busy, partly because, to be honest, the political scene has now become so surreal that it’s very difficult to parody or even make fun of. It has passed the “duck horizon”, that point in any news story where ducks are first mentioned, after which it just becomes progressively more and more surreal, to the stage where you literally could not make it up.

No sooner had we digested the debacle of the European elections, with the triumph of UKIP and the BNP, two parties who are not known for their pan-European aspirations, than we were plunged into the reshuffle. By the mid morning it was like one of those offensives in the First World War where if you managed to survive until lunchtime you were likely to find yourself in command of a battalion!

James Purnell resigned, Jacquie Smith resigned, Caroline Flint resigned, Hazel Blears stormed out of 10 Downing Street via Humphrey’s cat-flap, a few others resigned too, I may have missed them. One woman resigned before I even realised she was in the Cabinet. I still don’t really know who she was. Kitty something. She may actually just have been a market researcher who happened to knock on the door of Number 10 to ask them if they’d ever considered changing their electricity supplier and got sucked into the general maelstrom. For a while, people were resigning faster than Broon could actually appoint them, and you got to the stage where it really seemed that at 9am tomorrow it would just be Broon, running round answering all the phones, and some guy who originally called in to fix the photocopier, but ended up as Foreign Secretary.

And over it all bestrides Gordon, like a colossus, and about as deft and flexible. I have no idea who is in the Cabinet now, and I am not sure that Broon does. Except that we have got Alan Sugar, God help us. Because parodying yourself on reality TV is of course a perfect qualification for kick-starting a broken economy. What next, Clive Sinclair as minister of transport?

But still, at least, the Government was getting to grips with the idea of the need to reform expenses, and even the Telegraph was starting to run out of steam, having failed to find a match for Douglas Hogg’s moat. So all Gordon had to do was to basically institute some reforms which would mean that MPs were no longer robbing the taxpayer, and then turn the focus on to the opposition and start asking them some awkward questions about their plans to cut public spending.

But no. Instead he diverted us down some bewildering avenue of his own choosing about constitutional reform, this presenting Cameron with a few more free open goals. We don’t need constitutional reform. A thieving crook who has been elected by proportional representation is still a thieving crook. All we need is for the people who have been elected not to rob the people who put them there. All that was needed was sorrow, contrition, apology, and restricting people’s expenses to things like folders from Rymans, envelopes, and toner cartridges.

But no. Just when the whole thing was starting to die down and maybe even heading towards the first step on the path to getting sorted, the Government goes and publishes the same expenses that the Telegraph published, but with anything useful blacked out! What mastery of the public mood! What skill! If you could have done one thing to ignite the whole scandal again and simultaneously make it seem to voters that you were totally cynical and didn’t care; that you thought they were complete idiots who would swallow anything; or that you weren’t actually in control of the situation anyway, this was the way to do it.

So, the whole thing has re-ignited once more with a mighty ka-boom! The Telegraph has gained a new lease of life, pointing out that Lembit Opik claimed £19.99 for a comedy wig (and I always thought that was his hair) Ben Bradshaw, technology minister, claimed £20 for a service engineer to plug a cable into his TV, and some nameless Tory apparatchik claimed 1p for a mobile phone call. Once more, we’re in “you couldn’t make it up” land, Toto, and we’re a long way from Kansas. OK, so we are not quite yet in the same league as Iran, where thieves broke into Ayatollah Kharmonyhairspray’s palace and stole next year’s election results, but by God, we’re getting there.

And now Inspector Knacker of the Yard is taking an interest, it’s only a matter of time until one of them does the perp walk. Still, at least Cameron was forced to pay back some of his mortgage, so it’s not all bad news. But given the easy ride he’s been getting from the Gay Gordons of late, he’s still laughing all the way to the bank. Me, I am off down to William Hills to put £25.00 on Humphrey the Cat to be Chief Whip by Monday. True, he’s dead, and he’s a cat, but he’s still got 101 more uses than any current member of the Cabinet.