After a while you realise there are only a limited number of questions MPs can ask. When it comes to culture, media and sport, there are precisely three. They all appeared on Monday.
The first involves asking how much your patch gets from the Lottery, then complaining it’s not enough. With the second, you ask about London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics and then demand your constituency gets some involvement.
Shades of past school assemblies often haunt this question time, and Tessa Jowell sounded as though boys had been caught booing the first XV. “The world divides into those who want to win and those who want to whinge … Too many people are whingeing on the sidelines. They will damage our bid.”
In other words, we are going to spend a fortune on this and anyone who questions us is unpatriotic or stupid. This has been the philosophy behind every human folly from the South Sea Bubble to the Millennium Dome. If politicians were trying to turn Norfolk into a skiing centre, they would use exactly this argument.
The London bid sounds a better idea than that. It had better be. Because if it isn’t, Jowell will be the last to know.
But the most popular question remains the one about selling off playing fields. When Labour was in opposition, there was no surer sign of Tory wickedness. Now Labour is in power, they are still being sold.
Why? Go back to a speech Jowell made to her department’s ‘sport summit’ last July.
“We have become bogged down in a trade of statistics, with critics clinging to a world of jumpers for goalposts,” she said. “Here’s the truth – children don’t want to play sport on badly drained 1950s scraps of land. They want showers, fences and floodlights.”
Maybe these seven years of Labour government have reduced the nation’s children to a state where they are no longer capable of organising their own games. Maybe they do need an external facilitator to help them pick sides and counselling when they lose. And maybe they don’t like “1950s scraps of land” because they are in black and white.
But House Points suspects there will be jumpers for goalposts long after Tessa Jowell has been forgotten.
Tony Blair likes people to think he is a pretty mean hombre. Hat pulled down, eyes screwed up against the desert sun. Think Charles Bronson in the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West.
So he must have been delighted when George W. Bush told Alastair Campbell that “Your man has got cojones.”
Oddly, in a later interview reported in Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack, Bush said: “Of course, these Brits don’t know what cojones are.”
Of course we know what they are, even if we do wonder first whether C. O. Jones used to keep wicket for Glamorgan. And in any case, Bush probably thinks the trouble with the Spanish is that they have no word for cojones.
This macho Blair wants to be seen as standing shoulder to shoulder with the President. Trouble is, more and more people are finding that a less dignified position comes to mind when thinking about their relationship.
So we have to find another way of picturing them. One possibility is to see Blair as Bush’s resourceful boy assistant. Every superhero needs one: Batman had his Robin; Sexton Blake his Tinker. And when Hollywood got twitchy because Tarzan and Jane were not married, Johnny Weissmuller found himself, on moral grounds, sharing the jungle with a pretty little boy in a loincloth.
But George W. Bush is no Tarzan. He is no superhero at all, unless it is Can’t Manage Whole Sentences Man. That would make Blair The Incoherent Kid. We had better think again.
The Beano suggests a more promising approach. “Young Tony Blair was the envy of all his chums, for he had his very own pet chimpanzee called Dubya.”
Think of all the scrapes they would get into together. Reporting asylum seekers to the authorities. Attending one of Charles Clarke’s summer homework camps. Invading Iraq. (“Crikey, Dubya! We’ve gone too far this time.”)
At this point in the comic the vicar and village bobby would step in to set things to rights. (“And no more monkey business from you, young Tony!”)
In the real world, unfortunately, it is unlikely that anyone will be laughing in the last frame of this story.
Here in the East Midlands, Geoff Hoon’s dismal performance answering questions on his statement on Iraq was no surprise. He comes from a long line of Hoons. “There’s allus been ’Oons at ’Oon ’All,” as they say in his Ashfield constituency. (It’s in what used to be the Nottinghamshire coalfield.)
The most celebrated member of the family, of course, is the outlaw. Who can forget those flickering black-and-white episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hoon?
When did Robin find out they were using the rack? “The interim report contained material about the dungeons of Nottingham Castle that had already been resolved. Therefore,there was no need, as far as the interim report was concerned, for Ministers to be involved.”
Why did the Sheriff’s men burn down John the Woodcutter’s hovel? “I recognise as a result of recent experience and of allegations of failures in the training system that we still have more work to do in that respect.”
Who will rescue Maid Marian? “The honourable gentleman would not expect me to go into precise operational detail.”
No, the Hoon family has not changed much over the centuries.
Three things were clear on Monday. First, the Tories bitterly regret having supported the invasion of Iraq. But they are stuck with this ruinous policy because of the vanity and bizarre judgement of their previous leader.
Iain Duncan Smith was sure voters would warm to him when they saw what an authoritative military figure he cut. And he was equally sure the country is full of people who, like him, believe that Tony Blair is not close enough to the Americans.
The second thing was clear to everyone except Ann Clwyd. She asked why, when she is the prime minister’s special envoy on human rights to Iraq, the government had not shown her the Red Cross report.
Third, the strategy of blaming it all on Piers Morgan and the Daily Mirror is not working. Labour managed to convince everyone that the debate on whether we were right to invade Iraq hinged on the accurarcy of a single news report by Andrew Gilligan. But no one is going to fall for that trick this time.
People are beginning to suspect there may not be Hoons at Hoon Hall for much longer.
Sometimes you are given a new toy and you want to play with it all the time. House Points is like that with Eric Martlew. The Labour MP for Carlisle is the puppy we cannot leave alone.
We first noticed him introducing a bill to make cycle helmets compulsory for children. He turned up again at prime minister’s questions last week, full of indignation, asking if Tony Blair realised that people dread long summer evenings because of loutish behaviour. In Carlisle under-age drinkers are a severe nuisance. Wasn’t it time he took action?
You can accuse Tony Blair of many things (try it, it’s fun), but failing to act against youthful bad behaviour is not one of them. If Martlew read this column – or anything else – he would know the authorities have all the powers they need.
And down the road in Wigton, the police imposed a curfew on under-16s during the Easter holidays. It is hard to see how they could go further than that.
There are important questions here. Why do adults no longer feel able to remonstrate with unruly youngsters? Why do the police want powers against all teenagers when, especially in a small town like Wigton, they should act against the few who are causing trouble?
But you will get no help answering them from the Today programme. Last year it held a poll to see which new law its listeners would like to see introduced.
The winner was an act giving householders the right to use any degree of force against intruders. It was widely called the “Tony Martin law” and caused acute embarrassment to Stephen Pound, the Labour MP who had agreed to introduce whatever the listeners voted for.
This bill finally made it to the Commons on Friday under the stewardship of the Tory MP Roger Gale, and was, thank goodness, talked out. In the mean time Pound had appreciated the wisdom of Edmund Burke:
“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
An ornithologist writes: A martlew is believed to be a cross between a martlet and a curlew. It does get very foggy on the Solway Firth.