Guardian loses it

Of all the newspapers to have a front page lead on the death of Michael Jackson, the Guardian was the last I'd have expected. Not only that, they gave us an umpteen-page supplement on the man with Saturday's edition.

All this for a pop singer? Are they taking the Murdoch route?

Whatever happened to news values?

DNA database

If the Metropolitan Police, as reported, investigate some MPs for alleged expenses fraud, will those MPs have DNA samples taken? If so, will those samples be stored on the DNA database, even if they're acquitted, or even not charged, as happens to everyone else?

Or will a busy Parliament find time to change the rules?

Or, will it be a case of rules applying to everyone except Members of Parliament?

Your guess is as good as anyone's.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson, King of Pop? Blazed a trail for other black artists?

BULLSHIT!

He followed Diana Ross (and the Supremes), Aretha Franklin, Martha and the Vandellas, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine (both big in the 1950s), Leslie Hutchinson ("Hutch") the black West Indian singer popular immediately before, during and after World War Two, the Inkspots (ditto) and Paul Robeson, to mention just a few.

Martha, in her 60s, is not only touring Britain just now; back home she's a busy Detroit City Council member. You don't have to be wacko to be talented.

Please, let's have no more synthetic grief for a reasonably talented yet flawed (aren't we all) individual most of us never met.

Public disaffection

All MPs should have a page like www.dearjacqui.co.uk/ devoted to them. I say this because some, Jacqui Smith included, don't always reply to or even acknowledge receipt of emails sent to their official email address.

Dangblast it! Didn't she pay her husband with our money to do the clerical stuff back in her "second" home in Redditch? What was he doing when he should have been acknowledging my emails? Oh yes, that's right! Part of the time at least he was viewing dodgy stuff that was later "by mistake" claimed on her expenses.

He spent another part of his time writing numerous letters in support of Jacqui's policies to local newspapers, signing them "Richard Timney" (his real name) but failing to add that he is married to one of the most repressive Home Secretaries we've ever had.

There are more restrictions on our freedoms now than there were during World War Two, when we all had to have national ID cards. I've never met anyone who was ever asked to produce their civilian ID card in that period, when national security was genuinely threatened.

Two things most people don't know about WW2 ID cards:

1. They were made of cardboard;

2. They did not (repeat not) have a photograph;

3. They were valid until 1948, the year the National Health Service started. The alphanumeric code unique to your ID card became your NHS identification.

(I just remembered number 3 while typing the first two.)

Jacqui Smith, replicant?

Jacqui Smith, MP for Redditch and soon-to-resign Home Secretary, I can exclusively reveal, is a replicant. (See the film Bladerunner, or read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," the short story by Philip K Dick which the film was based on.)

New Labour technicians must have worked hard and long to produce a convincing "double" of the real candidate, which was tested on Church Green, Redditch, as early as the 1997 general election campaign. Knowing nothing of this, I approached the "candidate" and asked a few questions about her political aims and beliefs.

What came out of her mouth was the purest Blair-New-Labour-bollocks with little or no connection to the questions asked. Repeating the questions in a different form produced an identical response. There was no attempt to actually engage with the questions - with hindsight, this was probably a programming fault.

Much the same fault was later exhibited when the replicant stood in as Home Secretary, adamantly insisting that 42-day detention without charge was a good idea, even after senior police said it would achieve nothing. Similarly repetitive behaviour was exhibited in discussions of identity cards, the replicant being programmed to insist they were vital for our national security despite mounting evidence from abroad that terrorists and criminals are not deterred by ID cards, or the lack of them.

The eeriness of my first, and only, encounter with Jacqui Smith stayed with me for a long time. Now two other things have led me to the conviction that there must be a replicant Jacqui Smith: the claim that her main home was a spare room in the house of the MP's sister, and the revelation that her expenses included a claim for two blue movies rented by her husband, Mr Richard Timney, who looks after their Redditch home.

A spare room in London would be ideal for the android version, providing a suitable location for recharging internal batteries, periodic servicing and such. The adult movies, I guess, were rented at a time when parliamentary duties, or android down-time, forced the real Jacqui Smith to go to Westminster.

Her resignation as Home Secretary is an attempt to damp down curiosity over her domestic arrangements and so cover up the existence of this advanced, though still flawed, piece of technology.

That's my theory, anyway.

Jacqui Quits as Home Sec.

The news many of us had feared would never come has broken: Jacqui Smith is to stand down as Home Secretary. (Pause for audience cheering).

This is the Home Sec who wanted to extend detention without charge to 42 days, despite police saying it was not needed and would achieve nothing; the one who totally supports the idea of national identity cards, despite masses of evidence from abroad that they would do nothing to deter criminals.

As a constituency MP she is said to be hard-working, effective, committed blah blah blah ...

Ask the people she was photographed with outside their local post offices what they think. The local press published photographs and quoted her as saying that post office X or Y should remain open, much-valued service, blah blah blah ... and the protesters in the pictures with her were smiling, thinking they had powerful support in their campaign against proposed closures.

A week or two later who voted for the wholesale closure of around 2,500 post offices, including the ones Jacqui Smith had said must remain open? Jacqui Smith, that's who, thereby exhibiting hypocrisy, and contempt for her constituents. Did she assume they wouldn't find out how she voted in the House of Commons on this issue, or did she simply not care?