Seems to describe the life of a Labour Cabinet MP these days. John Reid is starting to rock as he admits some more statistics about early release prosiners on "life" sentences. I'm losing track of how many admissions he and Clarke are up to, now . . . is the actual depth of Home Office incompetence that great that we can't know all the gory details in one go?

Bit like Microsoft patches, if you had to fix the whole thing in one go it would take forever and Bill Gates wouldn't have been in the position to retire to take control of his charity . . . instead there's regular installaments of hassle and swearing at yet another fucking code hole, but by and large no-one is asking the company to get it right from the get-go.

So whilst Reid is looking a bit more off-kilter, Prescott - who seemed suspiciously stuck to his perch after being hastily moved to the back, more out of sight, by the stallholder after his last pelting; takes another palpable hit after it is dragged out of him that he took an expenses trip to a US gambling tycoon's ranch.

Pure co-incidence, of course, that the same Phillip Anschutz wants to open a casino in the Millennium dome . . . and this isn't the first bit of scandal to attach itself to Labour ministers and lobbying on gambling laws.

Go on . . . give it some welly and knock that fat, smirking prick off his perch once and for all.

Sadly though, any joy at another MP resigning in a flurry of sleaze (who'd think that Labour would stoop to flattering Tories by emulating them so intently?) will be short-lived, as the arch-fiend Blair is still very much in power, and will be casting his sombre reflections for tomorrow's anniversary to mark the July London bombings when his foreign policy (for "policy" read "capitalist genocide") has a large part to answer for it.

Joseph Conrad, commenting on the Imperial colonialism of Africa, called it "the vilest scramble for loot ever to disfigure a century". But then he'd never seen the oil industry in full swing . . .