The other day I bought a minor Ealing comedy on video. Made in 1950 and starring a very young James Fox, The Magnet features ravishing shots of Liverpool and New Brighton. There is even footage of the long-dismantled Liverpool Overhead Railway.
But its jokes about Stafford Cripps and the new-fangled National Health Service have dated The Magnet – something the best Ealing films have resisted. And it has an aggressively middle-class ambience: Fox’s father is a psychiatrist, his mother a housewife.
Reader’s voice: What does all this have to do with Andrew Smith’s statement about the Child Support Agency on Monday?
Patience. Smith announced that new technology would simplify payments from absent parents. We are talking about the CSA, so the news was not as good as it sounds. The change was promised for October 2001, but the computers did not work. Now they do work, the project has gone £23m over budget.
Like every disastrous idea, the CSA at first received all-party support. But it was set up under John Major, so David Willetts could make little capital for the Conservatives. Paul Holmes was on firmer ground calling for the whole thing to be handed over to the Inland Revenue. At least they know where we all live.
Every MP will welcome reform of the CSA. In its early days it dominated their surgeries and postbags. Fathers felt hard done by, yet mothers often received less than before. Only last summer it wrote off £2bn of payments, admitting that it would never be able to collect them.
But the problem goes deeper than the failings of the CSA. When The Magnet was made, James Fox’s parents could support their comfortable lifestyle on the genteel Wirral on one income. Nowadays it takes two incomes to live like that.
Women at first embraced work as a liberation. Over the years market forces, Nigel Lawson’s tax reforms and the inexhaustible appetites of the middle classes have turned it into an economic necessity for them. So it should not be a surprise that many couples find maintaining two households after divorce ruinously expensive.
The second wives whose used to picket Liberal Democrat conferences were campaigning to abolish the CSA. They should have been campaigning to abolish the laws of arithmetic.
According to a South African professor, we are all descended from aardvarks. There are worse animals to be descended from than this inoffensive member of the Orycteropodidae (Aardvark never killed anyone, as the saying goes), but it sounds unlikely. Is there really a little bit of aardvark in all of us? A study of politicians' behaviour may help us decide.
Let's look at what the books say about aardvarks.
Almost nothing is known as to aardvark reproductive habits. Not a promising start.
They are predominantly nocturnal. Better. Before this year's change in hours at Westminster that was true of MPs.
While they are above ground they spend the whole time foraging for food. That still goes for many of them.
Aardvarks are very rarely seen, but their preposterous looks make any sighting a memorable experience. There used to be a lot of Tory MPs like that in the shires.
The digging ability of the Aardvark is unrivalled. That is true of today's Tories: they are in a deep, deep hole but show no signs of stopping digging.
They readily crash into obstacles when spooked. That is the clincher. A lot of politicians are spooked at the moment: spooked by rumours of war, the terrorist threat and press campaigns about asylum seekers. And at Monday's home office questions it showed.
David Blunkett was spooked about the Cheriton Hotel in Sittingbourne. He demanded a "step change" from the Immigration Service in the way it relates to local communities. ("This is the worst decision in the Western Hemisphere." "No, no! I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne....")
Andrew Mackinlay was spooked about the same body's record-keeping, run from the appropriately named Lunar House in Croydon. He promised "one hell of a bloody row" unless things improved.
But mostly it was the aardvark's digging that was on show. Politicians burrowed down to the comfort of their most cherished policies. David Blunkett called for entitlement or ID cards for everyone in the country. Simon Hughes sought salvation in a Europe-wide policy.
And for the Tories, the normally civilised shadow home secretary was digging hard, trying to establish a link between asylum seekers and terrorists.
Is that Oliver Letwin or a frightened aardvark? From this height it is hard to tell.
What is the Commons talking about these days? Not Iraq.
Tam Dalyell, the Father of the House (though he sometimes sounds more like its eccentric uncle) was the first to try. Last week he asked for an emergency debate on the subject. "If we send British troops to risk their lives, they are entitled to know that it is the settled and overwhelming conviction of their countrymen that their cause is just."
No, said the Speaker, I do not consider the matter that is appropriate for discussion under standing order 24. Not only that: "I have to give my decision without stating any reasons."
Most people at this point nod sagely and say "Ah, yes … standing order 24 … can't give a reason." House Points will wager that generations of Speakers happily gave reasons. Then one of them was overcharged by the man who powdered his wig or had to wait in the rain for a sedan chair. He arrived at the House in a filthy mood, turned down a debate and a precedent was born.
On Monday Dalyell tried again. He was backed by the massed ranks of Labour's awkward squad. Glenda Jackson, Paul Flynn, Alan Simpson. They even got Dennis Skinner out of mothballs, but the Speaker was not much more helpful.
So what did the House discuss instead? What was more important than the fleet setting sail for the Gulf? Well, on Monday we had a debate on the transport infrastructure in East Kent. If you live in those parts then the Ramsgate Harbour Approach road, the Sandwich bypass and a safer-routes-to-school project at Drapers Mill primary school in Margate are probably fascinating. But most people had their thoughts further east.
And Tuesday? Bob Blizzard introduced a bill on litter and the fouling of land by dogs.
Meanwhile there are still plenty of Labour loyalists. On Monday David Winnick jumped up to defend the government. He should have been a minor Dickens character: Mr Winnick the toady. "Wery vise, Mr Speaker, wery vise."
This just in: The speaker of the Iraqi parliament has refused a request for a debate on the American build up. Consideration of the Camel Fouling (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill will therefore continue as planned.