With Clear Blue Water Between

Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives, as is well known, are opposed to New New Labour's erosion of privacy and its authoritarian measures to control the public, except on those occasions when they aren't. Chris Graybeing, who has the unenviable job of opposing James Purnell while adopting the policies of James Purnell, has announced plans for wholesale invasion of the life of any family which fails to satisfy the Daveybloke administration that its members are taking the best advantage of whatever life chances the said administration may happen to omit denying them. The Daveybloke Idleness Police "could examine children's school performance or problem behaviour, check whether the parents encouraged homework and school attendance, and intervene if necessary to stop children risking future unemployment". Quite how the risk of future unemployment is to be averted, except in cases of governmental precognition and omnipotence, is apparently not a matter with which the Graybeing cares to concern itself.

This latest round of Idleness Police pushery is being announced this week in order to take full advantage of the publicity attendant upon Karen Matthews' conviction for taking advantage of the publicity attendant upon the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. "The Shannon Matthews case was a horrendous extreme and in no way typical," Graybeing observed, before implying that, while in no way typical, it was actually rather typical: "it raises the curtain on a way of life in some of our most deprived estates, of entire households who have not had any productive life for generations", perhaps since as far back as the early 1990s, when an intimate friend of Edwina Currie was in charge of his own little economic recession.

Much as the Glorious Successor might accuse the Conservatives of economic incompetence, a spokesbeing for James Purnell accused Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives of "cynically chasing headlines".