Brown was a bully, Dave is a bore.....

'Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, and its salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment’.

Broon and his unspeakable gang were a constant and rich source of amusement because of the sheer dottiness of much of their programme. The present coalition is about as amusing as genital herpes. It is smug, dull, earnest, self-important and totally out-of-touch, but it is also very, very boring. I feel for the Parliamentary sketch writers who have to make something entertaining out of such dull material.

Even the loony lefties and council jobsworths seem to have gone into recess (but see below). Nothing to laugh at all.

But there was an amusing story on BBC World TV News about a prison in California teaching cricket as a means of rehabilitating thugs. That should do the trick.

Well, kiss me neck, as we would say in Jamaica. The House of Commons has voted by a ten-fold majority to tell the European Court to get lost over its ruling that prisoners should be able to vote. Whether this will be of any effect remains to be seen. Refusing to follow the ECJ ruling could lead both to fines and to compensation claims.

From memory, in my time prisoners were not amongst the disenfranchised, but they had some difficulty in getting to the polling station.

This may be the beginning of moves to extricate the UK from the ‘human rights’ nightmare. There is certainly great pressure from Tories and many others. A possible answer to the current dilemma would be to wipe out Blair’s postal voting reforms that debauched the system, like so much else he did, and opened the door to voting fraud.

Just to demonstrate that all is not lost, here is another corker from Big Brother Watch.

Barmy Britain. ‘A 64-YEAR-OLD grandmother says she was made to feel like a criminal after stooping to pick up a cigarette wrapper in Coventry city centre that she’d just dropped. Lesley Apps was hit with an instant £50 fine when a council officer swooped. Lesleysays a piece of the wrapper had accidentally fallen out of her pocket and she was picking it up when she was fined. She said: “I was doing the right thing but I was still punished.“Maybe I would have been better off if I had left it’.’

The incident happened at 9.45 a.m on January 14 after the retired café worker bought a pack of cigarettes at a newsagents. She said: “I was already bent over to pick it up.I was probably a bit slower than usual because I was having back trouble but even then it was clear I wasn’t just going to leave it there.I tried to explain but she didn’t give me a chance.

And there was the mother of a student with schizophrenia. When he went missing she phoned the University for information about him, she was told that they could not release information without his permission under the Data Protection Act