Sketchup
A selection of lines from parliamentary sketch-writers.
the appearance of Jill Pay, Serjeant at Arms, in front of the select committee looking into Damien Green's arrest and the police search of his Commons office. He compares her - "clerical efficiency made flesh. Tilly the Typist, eat your heart out" - with the image that her job title conjures up:
"three-Shredded Wheat types. Hands like spades. Voices like Windsor Davies (or even Ruth Kelly)".
in the House of Lords watching the new leader of Ukip, Malcolm Everard MacLaren Pearson, Baron Pearson of Rannoch, and wondering how the former Tory would get on with Mr Cameron's party these days:
"M.E.M.P.B.P.O.R has a set of views - being anti-gay, anti-Muslim and pro almost any form of hunting - which would curl the neck hair of Tory frontbenchers such as Georgie Oz, Andy Lans, Frankie Maude and others, some of whose names have been conveniently pre-shortened, such as Tess May, Bill Hague and Eric Pickles."
a single remark in the Commons during Work and Pensions questions to ask why the Speaker's wife, Sally Bercow, said what she said in a recent interview when she talked about drinking excessively and sleeping with strangers in her 20s:
"If there's trouble for the Speaker, it's not what his wife did then, it's what she's doing now. Slagging off her husband's party, attacking the leader of the opposition, and to keep her political ambitions alive she has to give an insane interview to reveal things any normal person would draw a veil - or burka - or great racing sail - over."
Commenting on the prime minister's speech on public spending cuts, Gordon Brown was wrong to talk about "smarter government" when what she thought was that "it was all just dumber and dumber".
"For instance, in his Smart New World, Gordo is going to be 'putting frontline services first'. But where else would they be?"
Any other business? In an article which seems to be a sketch in all but name, the PM's speech on public spending has little in it to get excited about, with the exception of Martha Lane Fox who was there with him:
"He [Gordon Brown] sees 'two competing visions', in one of which the wonderful Miss Lane Fox saves his career, while in the other we are dragged back into the dark ages."
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