The Sketch: Simon Carr
Ask the same old questions - and you'll get the same old answers
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Your support makes all the difference.The leader has had a good night's sleep. We're in safe hands again. So safe that nothing happened yesterday. Apart from 15,000lb bombs turning the Afghan sands into glass. The Prime Minister stood over the Dispatch Box (the Sketch was at home with an ear infection).
Iain Duncan Smith showed a bit of form. Good man. Settle down. Joke over. Carry on. Where were we? The Tory leader still hasn't quite got the hang of this question time thingy. It's early days yet, of course, but it's not too early to realise that Tony Blair's been giving the same answer to most questions for the last – what? how long has he been Prime Minister? Ten years? For health his all-purpose answer is: the Government wants to put the money into health, and your party wants to take it out.
How long, oh Lord, how long will it be before the Tories either neutralise that point, or failing that, ask a different question. Goodness knows, it's only rocket science (which is to say very, very simple). But week after week, they put their heads down and run full tilt at the wall and fall backwards reaching, more in hope than expectation of success, for their brains.
Why do we hear so little of the waiting list targets that forced varicose veins ahead of cancer operations? Clinical distortions that have been imposed on doctors and patients by vile politics? What about the dead? What about the waste? What about tracking the money and finding out exactly where it evaporates? I'll have to do it myself.
And the same with Railtrack. The charges are either poorly made or confusedly delivered, or worst of all, old hat. How about the rail regulator, whose vindictive regime presided over a collapse in the share price, making it impossible for Railtrack to raise its own capital? How about the fiasco of the shadow Strategic Rail Authority? How about the role of the monstrous ex-minister of transport, sitting there chewing a lower lip like five pounds of sausage meat? And in sticking up for the shareholders, isn't it essential for Tories to focus on the small-time, oil-spattered linesmen who've lost their pensions, not the fat cat pension fund operators?
The House of Lords reform was presented by that masterful goblin Robin Cook, who has descended gracefully to his level of competence. He impressively presented the reform of the Lords as a process of democratisation that will put most of the peerages in the gift of the Prime Minister.
Denis Skinner said: "The chattering classes are going to reproduce themselves in the House of Lords." That'd be worth watching.
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