Worthy Successors

There is a certain rough justice - ugly, retributive Michael Howard justice, New Labour justice, the kind of justice that tends to skin its knuckles either on paving stones or on other people's teeth - about the British National Party's leading adipose resource, Nick Griffin, contesting the seat from which the New Labour cockroach Phil Woolas was ejected for lying about his opponent. It was, after all, the British National Party towards which New Labour and its successor, New New Labour, consistently triangulated in their increasingly bizarre and brutal efforts to hold the centre ground; or, in Standard English, outflank the Daily Mail from the right. Woolas, as Minister for Blaming Immigration for Just About Everything, was a particularly enthusiastic exponent of the wogs-out policy, which was known among the cognoscenti as "wooing the white working class" or, even more hilariously, as "mature debate".

Another fun-filled aspect of the Oldham East by-election is that the Liberal Democrats will be fighting their coalition partners. No doubt the Liberal Democrat candidate, Elwyn Watkins - having scraped off his shoe whatever was left of Phil Woolas after Joanna Lumley walked over him - is looking forward to taking advantage of the political capital which his colleagues at Westminster have built up over the past few months, and promising once more a new and more honest politics.