Rob Blackhurst

Rob Blackhurst and Sunder Katwala

Sunday March 3, 2002

Observer.co.uk

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Burying the news is much more difficult than it looks. That was the true lesson of a highly entertaining week of vintage Whitehall farce - in which the court jesters at the Transport department once again brought much needed light relief to commuters stuck throughout Britain's no-go transport network. Martin Sixsmith came back from the dead but Stephen Byers refused to be buried, lie down and die and even Jo Moore's silence was regarded as menacing. As even our spin-savvy society was unable to work out just what catastrophic happenings elsewhere required quite such an elaborate smokescreen.

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We had all come to believe that Martin "Vampire" Sixsmith had fallen on his sword along with rival spinner Moore - the announcement of his resignation on television by the Secretary of State somehow adding to this misperception. It turned out that Sixsmith was merely judiciously waiting for the Sunday papers to wreak maximum revenge.

"If you resigned from your job it is probably something that you would remember doing", Sixsmith not unreasonably noted. But his insistence on assurances that he would not "be resigned" while at a hospital appointment, showed that Sixsmith was not unaware of New Labour's newspeak yen for making resigned an intransitive verb. The official line was that Sixsmith had agreed to resign although some of the details may have been, shall we say, slightly mishandled.

If the department's top mandarin Sir Richard Mottram, quickly cast as the fall guy, was to play Sir Humphrey then it seemed that Irvine Welsh was taking a turn at the Yes Minister scripts. Steve Bell came up with an even more concise formulation of Mottram's pithy summary of events. He was widely quoted as saying - "We're all f*****" he allegedly told another civil servant. "I'm f*****. You're f*****. The whole department's f*****. It's the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely f*****" - which at least showed a pronunciational mastery of the asterisk.

But one person looking distinctly un f***** was Martin Sixsmith, ostentatiously enjoying his gardening leave. Wearing threadbare jeans and a lumber-jack shirt, he staged a series of photo-calls drinking tea ("I'm no Mug"), strategically carrying a copy of the Sun's headline (Liar Byers, pants on fire) and brandishing - Neville Chamberlain-style - several pounds of bacon to cook for his mother.

Less happy was Mr Byers himself, who had told a porkie-pie or two on the Dimbleby programme, which he was "happy" to clarify in the House. The papers thought they could bury a minister at last and were virtually united in demanding Spinnochio's head, with only the Guardian attempting a lukewarm defence.

Yet the political casualty of the week seemed to be Tory shadow Theresa May, whose limp failure to kick a man when down was so bad that the Conservatives began putting it about that they had deliberately cocked it up in order to enable a damaged Byers to survive. The Labour backbenchers rallied around "red Steve" as he implied that all of the trouble was simply the capitalist classes' revenge for his "tough decision" putting Railtrack out of its misery. Clearly an impeccably-Blairite history is no barrier to the love of the left if you - however shambolically and accidentally - manage to nationalise something.

The Transport Secretary looked pretty green around the gills as he began his Commons statement, but even he wasn't as sick as Igwig the Iguana, the luckless lizard caught in another revenge saga this week. The three foot native of South America appeared at Isle of White Magistrate's Court as a witness in the case against his owner, Susan Wallace. After being asked to leave the Anchor Inn because "Igwig" was upsetting customers, Wallace had hurled her Bond villain pet of choice at a doorman. Later she attacked a policeman with the reptile when he tried to arrest her. The stricken Constable, left with Iggy clinging to his neck, could only mutter "This isn't on". But the proud owner claimed in court that she hadn't used him as an offensive weapon at all - he was merely coming to her aid: "The iguana probably jumped in defence of me - he's done that before," she dubiously ventured. The RSPCA seemed to believe her story, though, and gave Iggy back to his rightful owner. "I won't be taking him into pubs again" she sighed.

Revenge of a more divinely ordained kind was wreaked on God-fearing Glen Hoddle this week, confirming his "you reap what you sow" philosophy which once cost him his job as England manager. So it was no surprise that Andy Cole took his revenge for Hod's views on him as a striker who needs five chances to score a goal, netting the Worthington Cup final winner for Blackburn against Hoddle's Tottenham.

Good week for:

Foxes

After years of prevarication, Tony Blair offered MPs another chance to end fox hunting this week when he promised that Parliament would be able to vote on the issue shortly. However, wily government business managers are pinning their hopes on a compromise in which hunting is licensed and unnecessary cruelty punished.

Bad Week for

Political bores

The BBC is planning to axe live coverage of party conferences because they are no longer regarded as important in the decision-making process. One senior BBC executive told The Times: "The conferences are now stage-managed by the spin-doctors. There is no real debate, or real dissent, and all controversy is confined to the conference fringe long after the live coverage ends. Even the MPs avoid conferences if they can."

Hero of the week

The only possible hero this week was the late Spike Milligan , the last of the Goons and godfather of alternative comedy, who hated smoking, nuclear weapons, factory farming and noise. The papers were full of his finest moments - from calling Prince Charles a "grovelling little bastard" to writing his own epitaph: "here lies Spike Milligan. I told you I was ill"

Villain of the week

Kentucky Fried Chicken chief Roger Eaton after thirty senior managers were "flame-grilled" in a bonding exercise that involved walking on 500C hot coals. Eaton, who injured his left foot, implausibly told the Sun "The safety of our employees is the most important thing". He also promised an investigation to find out "what went wrong".

Discovery of the week

After the male menopause and the mid-life crisis in your twenties, the> Independent discovered the Kid-life crisis. "Alice is depressed. Her attractivelooks and girlish charm have won her many admirers. She lives in a big house in a nice part of town. But something is wrong. She has no interest in her work; she has stopped talking to her friends; she can not sleep. Sometimes she just sits and cries.Her world has become a bleak, joyless place. And the sad thing is, Alice is only three".

Non-scoop of the week

The Mirror followed up the Posh and Becks M & S scoop with an investigation, "It all ads up for superstars" finding that Beckham "is one of hundreds of stars who have lent their name to leading high-street brands, often endorsing goods in return for six-figure sums".

Did they really run that?

In an age where even oil companies beat their breasts about Global Warming and pretend that they sell wind-turbines instead, it was heartening to see Melanie Philips in the Daily Mail take on the full weight of evidence. "There is simply no scientific evidence to support this theory" she curiously claimed "Global warming is a scam. A doctrine which declares that industrialisation and globalisation are enemies of humanity is a wonderful stick with which weaker Western economies can beat up America and clothe anti-Western self hatred in ostensibly scientifc respectability"