Bong

Lord Anderson had come up to check his speech on Bosnia. This is to his credit, as most of them don’t bother.

“Are we sure how to spell Republika Srpska?” he asked my colleague, who didn’t have the faintest idea and had in fact thought it was an acronym. So I told him.

“How about Srebrenica?” he said. I told him again.

“Ah,” he twinkled, and too late I realised he had decided this was a challenge for the office smart-arse. “It's my job to know this stuff!” I wanted to yell, but too late; the noble Lord had come up with—he thought—a cracker.

“Banja Luka?” he proffered, as if this was the question that would decide whether I won a car. Like a performing monkey, I spelt it for him.

“L, U, C, A,” he corrected gently.

“Really?” I said uncertainly, and immediately started Googling to check.

“Ha ha! BONGGG!” he said jovially, and left.

If it was spelt “LUCA” it would be pronounced “Lootsa”, which it isn’t. BONG yourself, my Lord.

(no subject)

Yesterday the Tory peer Lord Lucas was asking quite sensible questions about the whole ID cards thing (well, all right, he had mentioned Judge Dredd), but then he played a blinder:

Lord Lucas: If I find myself coming back from holiday with my young daughter and I fail my checks at the airport because something has happened with one of my fingers, or the machine is on the blink, or I am developing some disease that means I am full of water and everything is out of size, what happens to me? Will I then be made to wait in the airport for two weeks while they identify me, or will I get sent back to Tenerife?

He is the king of “what if?”. This is the man who, while debating the Civil Contingencies Bill, stretched the definition of “contingency” to its limit with this slice of future history:

Lord Lucas: What concerns me in Part 2 of the Bill is what happens in an extreme case. Are we opening up our system to the equivalent of what happened in Germany in 1933, where it became possible for an extreme party to legitimately hijack a democracy and turn it into something totalitarian?

It is not that difficult to imagine what happens. Perhaps next election we will have a hung Parliament. The Liberals will join Labour, and their price will be proportional representation. In the Parliament after that, a chance for PR: you vote for who you want to make a difference. UKIP and the BNP get significant representation in Parliament. Then the Conservative party, pretty desperate for power, allies itself with UKIP and has a stand-off pact with the British National Party. The consequence of that, perhaps, is that we have an ex-Labour MP—a demagogue, shall we say? [Robert Kilroy-Silk’s name had been bandied about earlier]—who becomes a senior member of the Government, perhaps Home Secretary, and that is the price for co-operation.

This scenario does not last for very long. There are too many tensions in it, and they can never really agree on what to do about Europe. Six months later, the Labour party, sensing a real division, organises a vote of no confidence in the Commons. UKIP and the BNP are very unsure about what they will do. They disappear into a conclave of their own, which continues to last as the debate goes on. Just as the Prime Minister rises to speak, a small tactical nuclear weapon explodes on a barge outside the Houses of Parliament. The only surviving Secretary of State is the member of UKIP, and it rapidly becomes clear that the BNP are in with him. [Hansard]

So Kilroy becomes prime minister via some nuclear Reichstag coup perpetrated by the BNP. It's fair to say that whoever had prepared the Minister's brief hadn’t second-guessed that.

The Minister responded that this blue-sky thinking was “interesting”.

FFS

Lord Harrison: Music teachers, the sine qua non of music education.