Whitehall Farce

As everybody knows, tomorrow (Thursday) is Election Day.
This time around it won’t be so much an election to vote for your county councillor, more of a referendum on whether Gordon Brown should call a general election.

The government is in so much disarray, the outcome doesn’t need predicting.

The lower house has turned into the real, reality show. Forget next week’s forthcoming new series of ‘Big Brother’, it will be no contest.

So far this week we have had three government ministers falling on their swords. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister, (that ones a surprise, he is a close ally of Mr Brown), and Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, are all leaving the Government. We are still waiting for the top scalp in this massacre, Alistair Darling. Surely he must resign!

The Prime Minister is now forced to have a Cabinet reshuffle, but wait, some ministers, including David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, are reluctant to drop their post to take up another.

Four Labour MPs caught up in the expenses scandal, namely Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, Ian Gibson and Margaret Moran were all barred from standing at the next election by the party’s disciplinary panel. Jim Devine has also been referred to the panel over allegations that he submitted receipts from a firm that may not have existed.

To top it all, there’s a rumour going around that senior Labour MPs were urging colleagues to sign a letter declaring that they had no confidence in Mr Brown.

All we need now is sex! Are we only days away from seeing a couple of back benchers copulating on a bench at the back?

Expenses scandal? Tony Blair must be sitting in his £4m mansion laughing up his Armani sleeve!

"Taxi!"

Here’s a story that has managed to keep a low profile this week. The Home Office has spent almost £2,000,000 on taxis and hire cars in the past year.

The bill for taxis was £1,045,671, (excluding tips, I’m assuming), and hire cars cost £917,908.

They are costing the taxpayer thirty three times more for riding in style than they did when Labour came to power in 1997!

So who’s burning all of this rubber? I have a friend who works for the UK Borders Agency, he doesn’t get afforded the luxury of a taxi, even though he has to work awkward hours. Another friend works for Customs and Revenue, he has to use his own means of transport.

My guess is that no non-executive workers who are employed by the Home Office get a free ride in a cab, so who does?

Does Jacqui Smith’s husband call a buckshee cab to pick up his tacky videos? Does the top brass hail a taxi outside of their Whitehall office on Friday afternoon to take them to their weekend retreats down in Cornwall?

We are in a recession so shouldn’t they be leading by example? Surely there is a tube/bus/train that could take them to their destinations!

As Norman Tebbit once said, “Get on your bike!”