Big Guns, Flat Feet

Even if the script is becoming a little monotonous, the saga of the breached control orders continues to provide quality entertainment for addicts of game-show sadism and films in which the boom microphone spends more time in shot than out. It has emerged that the Iraqi in the case is technically not under a control order at all, since the police "did not get to him in time" to renew the order by handing it to him physically, as is required. Control orders are merely "a loose form of house arrest, usually placing suspects under a curfew and requiring them to report regularly to police"; so one can understand how the police might have lost track of the gentleman more easily than they would have done had circumstances been as Guantánomalous as the Vicar of Downing Street originally wished.

His reverence's pocket Tebbit, the Minister of Unfitness for Purpose, today echoed his master's voice, claiming that the Home Office would never have shot itself in the foot if only Her Majesty's Opposition had allowed it to use a larger calibre weapon. "The opposition in parliament is led by the Conservatives and the Liberals," he announced. "If they want to prove their credentials, why don't they vote in parliament for every single stronger measure that we bring to combat crime?" The last time I checked, the opposition in parliament was in a minority by a factor of some sixty seats. If the Labour government could persuade members of the parliamentary Labour party to prove their own credentials, perhaps others might feel more confident about the merits of those ever-stronger measures.