Going Down Gracefully

When a man has just been dumped from his ministry, it concentrates his principles wonderfully. A pale orange leaf from Daveybloke's autumn bonfire has noted that maintaining continuous submarine patrols with weapons of mass destruction is not only insane even from the military point of view, but also costs too much. Nick Harvey said he hoped the Government would "descend the ladder of options", which hardly seems likely with Nick Clegg and Porker Hammond sawing away at the rungs. Harvey suggested expanding a different submarine programme, named Astute after Geoff Hoon, in order to protect jobs and dampen the squeals of BAE Systems; but he also pointed out that giving every worker a redundancy payment one-fifth the size of Rebekah Brooks' would be cheaper than continuing as we are. "I am very clear the government does have a moral responsibility to step in and make some kind of injection into the local economy," he said, "including a considerable financial commitment"; which, if nothing else, shows that Daveybloke was correct in his judgement of Harvey's unfitness to serve in a ministry once hallowed by the presence of Adam Werritty.