Where There's Ass There's Brass

The chairbeing of the Other Party for Business and Immigrant Control has undergone a Damascene conversion following a performance on the BBC's Question Time that caused embarrassment even to the chairbeing of the party that includes George Osborne, Chris Graybeing and the London Haystack. Responding to a question about MPs' taxpayer-funded second homes, Eric Pickles went from self-pity ("hang-an-MP week") through self-righteousness (he has to get up early and sometimes gets home late, unlike single-residence commuters) and back to self-pity again ("I'm an MP and therefore I'm guilty"), while leaving himself open to demolition by, in succession, David Dimbleby, Caroline Lucas and a member of the audience who advised him to try, of all things, rational argument.

Pickles, who is MP for Ongar in Essex, an astounding thirty-seven miles from his place of work, echoes the echt-Texan pronuncifications of George W Bush with a would-be-populist twinkle that "as we say up north, 'I buy me own bed'," even though it may be in a taxpayer-funded house. Pickles now believes that the point he made was "trivial"; or, in Standard English, not advantageous. He now says he "cannot justify members of parliament claiming flat-screen televisions, buying beds, buying three-piece suites, buying cookers, buying microwaves", which he did not, to my knowledge, try to justify on Question Time but which apparently constitutes a change of mind anyway. Since he has "never done that and would never dream of doing that", presumably Eric Pickles can oppose such heinous practices without causing too much inconvenience in the life of Eric Pickles, beyond the nearly insurmountable but courageously faced one of doing his job.